By Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy Promotions CEO Richard Schaefer says he’s looking to put a fight together between IBF light heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins (54-6-2, 32 KO’s) and WBA Super World light heavyweight champion Beibut Shumenov (14-1, 9 KO’s) in a unification bout for March or April in a fight that he may stage in Texas.
The idea that Schaefer is looking at is having a kind of mini-175 lb. tournament where Hopkins faces Shumenov while WBC champ Adonis Stevenson fights WBO belt holder Sergey Kovalev. The winner of those two sets of fights would then square off in a finals type of fight.
“The one fight I will be working on immediately is the light heavyweight world title unification between Hopkins and Shumenov,” Schaefer said to RingTV. “Bernard thinks that it should be like a little tournament where he fights Shumenov and you have Kovalev and Stevenson fight each other, and the winners of those two fights fight for the unified light heavyweight title.”
The criticism with Schaefer’s idea is it gives the soon to be 49-year-old Hopkins a free ride because many boxing fans see Shumenov as a paper champion who has never fought anyone good before during his career, and who picked up the WBA title by a very controversial decision over Gabriel Campillo in 2010. Beating Shumenov is a lot easier for Hopkins than Stevenson and Kovalev facing each other. What we’re talking about here is really the two best fighters in the division in Kovalev and Stevenson facing each other, and then the winner of that fight taking a considerable step down to face the winner of the Hopkins vs. Shumenov fight. That’s not how the tournament should be done. You can’t have the best facing the weakest in the finals because it makes a mockery of the whole idea of the best fighting in the finals.
You can make a strong argument that the loser of the Kovalev-Stevenson fight would make easy work of the Hopkins-Shumenov winner. Hopkins didn’t look good in losing to Dawson in 2011, and he didn’t show that he has a lot left in beating Karo Murat and Tavoris Cloud. If you compare what Hopkins did to Cloud to what Stevenson did to him, you can conclude that Hopkins would stand no chance against Stevenson.
If Stevenson or Kovalev, I wouldn’t go for the idea of fighting each other to get to the winner of the Hopkins-Shumenov fight. That’s a joke. I know Hopkins is pretty old, but I don’t think he should be given a free ride, and I don’t see how Shumenov should be a part of any tournament. If they want to have an actual tournament than they need to include Lucian Bute and Jean Pascal in the tournament because those would make it interesting.
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