Bernard Hopkins Bio - Biography

Name Bernard Hopkins
Height 6 ft 1 in
Naionality American
Date of Birth 15-January-1965
Place of Birth Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Famous for Boxer
Bernard Hopkins is an American boxer and former Ring Magazine and WBC light heavyweight champion. He became the oldest boxer to ever win a world title, when at age 46, he defeated Jean Pascal on May 21, 2011 by a unanimous decision, surpassing the record previously held by George Foreman.

Hopkins is also the former undisputed world middleweight champion, and the first fighter to retain all 4 world titles of each major boxing sanctioning body, plus The Ring belt, in the same fight. Having defended a world middleweight title a record 20 times, he is considered one of the greatest middleweight champions of all time. The Ring ranked him #3 on their list of the "10 best middleweight title holders of the last 50 years." In addition to being an active boxer, Hopkins is also a minority partner with Golden Boy Promotions. He immediately joined the professional boxing ranks as a light heavyweight, losing his debut on October 11, 1988, in Atlantic City, New Jersey to Clinton Mitchell. After a sixteen-month layoff, he resumed his career as a middleweight, winning a unanimous decision over Greg Paige at the Blue Horizon on February 22, 1990. Between February 1990 and December 1992, Hopkins scored 21 wins without a loss. He won 16 of those fights by knockout, 12 coming in the first round. The IBF came again knocking at Hopkins's door on December 17 of that year, matching him with Segundo Mercado in Mercado's hometown of Quito, Ecuador. Mercado knocked Hopkins down twice before Hopkins rallied late and earned a draw. It has been argued that Hopkins was also not properly acclimated to the altitude of nearly 10,000 feet.

The IBF called for an immediate rematch, and on April 29, 1995, Hopkins became a world champion with a seventh-round technical knockout victory in Landover, Maryland. In his first title defense he defeated Steve Frank, whom he stopped in twenty-four seconds. By the end of 2000, he had defended the IBF title 12 times without a loss, while beating such standouts as John David Jackson, Glen Johnson (undefeated at the time and later went on to knock out an aging Roy Jones Jr), Simon Brown, and Antwun Echols.