Will Wheels Fall Off Boxing’s Over-40 Bandwagon? at LinesMaker

It may seem like a trend, though it’s not. It may seem like the wave of the future, but any­one who loves box­ing had bet­ter hope it’s not the case.

Watch­ing men 40 years old and more fight for world cham­pi­onships isn’t some­thing that is good for the long-term health of box­ing. Just a few weeks after 46-year-old Bernard Hop­kins made box­ing his­tory by becom­ing the old­est fighter even to win a major world title, 42-year-old Glen John­son will attempt to move into the finals of Showtime’s Super Six tour­na­ment Sat­ur­day when he meets Carl Froch at Board­walk Hall in Atlantic City, N.J.

Hop­kins’ May 21 vic­tory over Jean Pas­cal for the World Box­ing Coun­cil light heavy­weight belt was clearly a sig­na­ture night for the sport. Hop­kins was in mar­velous phys­i­cal con­di­tion and fought like a man half his age in out­point­ing Pas­cal and sur­pass­ing the then-45-year-old George Fore­man as the old­est man ever to win a world championship.

John­son will no doubt pres­sure Froch and bring the fight to the reign­ing WBC super mid­dleweight cham­pion in a way that few oth­ers in the world could do.

It’s great for Hop­kins and John­son that they are so in shape and still so remark­ably com­pet­i­tive at their advanced box­ing ages. The dan­ger, though, is that they may spawn copy­cats and there are few out there with their genetic gifts.

Box­ing has always been a haven for a hard-luck story and there is noth­ing more hard-luck than a once-great cham­pion still fight­ing long past his prime because he needs the money. It’s report­edly why Roy Jones Jr. keeps going and why, even after he was knocked out in the 10th round on May 21 by Denis Lebe­dev, that he didn’t def­i­nitely say he’d quit.

Pro­mot­ers anx­ious to build a star far too often have no hes­i­ta­tion using the name of some­one like Jones to do it.

Guys like Hop­kins and John­son are the very rare excep­tions to the rule. For every­one like those two, there are dozens like Jones and Evan­der Holy­field, who fight on in spite of the dan­ger that faces them with their diminishing skill.

Froch, 33, said he can’t imag­ine fight­ing any­where close to his 40th birth­day, let alone past it.

“I won’t be hang­ing around until I’m 42, I can guar­an­tee you that,” he said. “I’ll be hang­ing up the gloves long before I’m 40. Bernard Hop­kins is a one in 10 mil­lion case. He’s genet­i­cally gifted, but he’s a one-off. Guys like Roy Jones and Evan­der Holy­field, it’s sad to see what is hap­pen­ing. That’s some­thing to worry about.”

John­son, who knocked out 31-year-old Allan Green in the eighth round in Novem­ber to advance to the Super Six semi­fi­nals, is in a sim­i­lar posi­tion as Hop­kins. He doesn’t look much dif­fer­ent at 42 than he did at 32.

He eats right, takes care of his body and is con­stantly in the gym. But he’s as much a prod­uct of good genes as he is hard work. There just aren’t many with his genetic makeup, which John­son him­self concedes.

He doesn’t want to be an inspi­ra­tion to other aging fight­ers, because what is right for one isn’t nec­es­sar­ily right for all.

“Bernard Hop­kins is tremen­dous, he’s great,” said John­son, who lost to Hop­kins in 1997 in a bid for the mid­dleweight title when Hop­kins was 32 and he was 28. “He’s the dif­fi­cult pro­to­type. He shows you that you can def­i­nitely do things way past when peo­ple expect, if you go about your busi­ness the right way. I fail to believe the human body just breaks down at 35.

“But I would hate to see any­body do what they do based on age. The impor­tant thing for every fighter is to be hon­est with him­self and do an hon­est eval­u­a­tion. There are guys like Hop­kins and I, who can still fight at a very high level past our 40th birth­day, but there are other guys who can’t do it past 30. No one should say, ‘Well, if Glen John­son can do it’ or ‘If Bernard Hop­kins can do it, so can I.’ Each per­son has to under­stand his own body and what he brings to the table.”

John­son is a pres­sure fighter, who gives and receives a lot of blows. Typ­i­cally, that’s the type of fighter who doesn’t have a long shelf life, but John­son still has the reflexes and still has the pop that he had at the time he faced Hopkins.

John­son was 35 when he was named the Fighter of the Year in 2004 by the Box­ing Writ­ers Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­ica when he deci­sioned Clin­ton Woods and Anto­nio Tarver sand­wiched around a ninth-round knock­out of Jones. Since turn­ing 40, he’s 3–2, but the two losses came in title fights to Chad Daw­son and Tavoris Cloud.

Froch is about a 4–1 favorite, but that hasn’t deterred John­son or his team one bit. They’re con­vinced John­son will hand Froch only his sec­ond career loss and advance to the finals, where 2004 Olympic gold medal­ist Andre Ward awaits.

Even Ward, who at 27 is 15 years and one month younger than John­son, calls the bout with Froch a tossup. John­son trainer Orlando Cuel­lar won’t even go that far.

“Glen has been there and done that and seen every style,” Cuel­lar said. “He has beaten every style. No man has ever beaten up Glen John­son and it won’t be hap­pen­ing in this next fight, either. We know Carl’s strengths, and we’ll get around those. We know his weak­nesses, and we’ll expose those. Carl has been in with good fight­ers, but now he’s in with one of the most suc­cess­ful fight­ers of the last 10 years.”

Guys like John­son and Hop­kins should be role mod­els to other fight­ers for their ded­i­ca­tion to their craft and for their will­ing­ness to test their limits.

Hope­fully, though, they won’t be used as inspi­ra­tions by the likes of Jones and Holy­field, who have hung around far too long for their own good. Very lit­tle good comes of get­ting your brain rat­tled for one extra payday.

Guys like John­son and Hop­kins are great sto­ries only if other aging box­ers view them as genetic mutants, like Froch does, instead of as exam­ples to try to emulate.