Hopkins leaning towards continuing his career, possibly against Lucian Bute next

By Boxing News - 04/29/2012 - Comments

Image: Hopkins leaning towards continuing his career, possibly against Lucian Bute nextBy Jim Dower: Bernard Hopkins isn’t saying whether he’ll retire or not, but it looks like he’ll continue his career after losing his WBC 175 pound title to Chad Dawson last by a 12 round majority decision.

Hopkins said this as quoted by RingTV “If you think tonight is the night that my swan song was sung, no, because I believe that there are a lot of people out there who won’t fight me…If the motivation is [Lucian] Bute, then it’s something significant where I can prove against that I’m worthy of not only being the kind of a division.”

I don’t think Hopkins has been paying attention to the news around the boxing world, because there are a lot of fighter that want to take him on now that’s suddenly showing vulnerability. WBO light heavyweight champion Nathan Cleverly has already said he wants to face Hopkins, and he’d likely take the fight even now after Hopkins has been beaten. Mikkel Kessler also said he wants to face him.

You can imagine that Tavoris Cloud and Beibut Shumenov would both jump at the chance to fight Hopkins. Shumenov would be the better option for Hopkins, because he doesn’t quite throw as many shots as the high volume punching Cloud. However, there’s not much of an upside in Hopkins facing either of those guys.

I can’t see a fight between Hopkins and Cloud or Shumenov drawing many fans in the U.S. Hopkins would be better off facing Cleverly in Wales in what would likely be in front of a huge audience. The same goes for Bute if he can get past Carl Froch next month in their fight on May 26th.

Hopkins messed up his chances for winning last night by not throwing enough punches against Dawson. Had Hopkins been a tad bit busier in the ring, he would have won a lot of the close rounds and walked away with the decision. Of course, there’s no telling whether Dawson would have responded by upping his own work rate to stay ahead of Hopkins. Dawson seemed to fight down to Hopkins’ level in terms of punch volume. That’s the way Dawson has always been. If he’s with a busy fighter like Tomasz Adamek, he’ll throw a lot of punches, but against fighters that doesn’t throw many punches, he mimics their output to where he’s just barely landing more.



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