By Joseph Hirsch – There’s something painful about watching a boxer fight long past their prime, but it’s also many times inevitable. Money doesn’t grow on trees and fighters fight until they can’t anymore. Sometimes they go out on their shield figuratively, and sometimes, like Bernard Hopkins, they literally go out on their head.
Seeing a great fighter get worked over by someone he would have beat in his prime recalls Rose Louis’s comments about watching her husband Joe wrestling. “It was like seeing President Eisenhower washing dishes.”
In his memoir, The Bronze Bomber notes that he didn’t see anything wrong with wrestling, but he also added that “when you’re broke, who can see straight?”
The most painful of all these last-ditch efforts by former greats must be Muhammad Ali’s match (if it can even be called that) against Jamaica’s Trevor Berbick.
