By Scott Gilfoid: WBO light heavyweight champion Nathan Cleverly (25-0, 12 KO’s) for some reason can’t let go of his dream of facing 48-year-old Bernard Hopkins one of these days. I don’t know why but Cleverly just can’t forget about this fight, even though it’s painfully obvious that’ll never ever happen aside from in his dreams.
Cleverly said to the BBC “It is great to read that Hopkins wants to fight me as I’ve been calling him out for a while now and he’s the name that I want on my record more than any other…and the name that will take my career to the next level…if he fought me it would be his last fight.”
Oh, this is so, so sad that Cleverly is still yapping endlessly about this fight. He reminds me of the character Lennie in the story Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. Lennie dreams endlessly of having his own place one day where he can tend the rabbits and live off the fat of the land.
Of course, it never happens and the story has a terrible ending. Cleverly’s dream of fighting Hopkins is about as attainable as Lennie’s dream of having his own place with a rabbit hut out in the back yard.
I have no clue what Cleverly thinks he’s going to gain from fighting the soon to be 49-year-old Hopkins. Cleverly says a win over Hopkins will take his career to the next level, but that’s just a sad pipe dream. If that was the case then Chad Dawson would be a star around the world because he beat Hopkins recently, and he didn’t get any kind of bounce in popularity as far as I can tell. Dawson is still someone that is rarely talked about, and he clearly beat Hopkins.
Cleverly will get nothing from a win over Hopkins because the guy is closing in on 50, and the boxing public is aware of that. That’s not how you become popular. The way for Cleverly to become popular is to talk WBA/WBC super middleweight champion Andre Ward into fighting him, and then beat him soundly. That would be the way to become popular, but certainly not in beating Hopkins. Heck, Hopkins hasn’t won a fight in over two years, so what’s to be gained from beating him.
Cleverly faces #1 WBO challenger Robin Krasniqi (39-2, 15 KO’s) on March 16th at the Wembley Arena in London, UK. This is going to be a tough fight for Cleverly, if it actually takes place. That should be Cleverly’s main focus instead of dreaming of fighting Hopkins.
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