On this day: Bernard Hopkins takes apart Felix Trinidad

Twenty-three years ago today, Bernard Hopkins defeated Felix Trinidad to become undisputed middleweight champion and, at 36 years old, give new impetus to his professional boxing life. For Trinidad, who had swept all before him at welterweight and junior middleweight, it was the beginning of the end of what would be a Hall-of-Fame career. Hopkins’ victory was a major upset at the time, but perhaps the bigger surprise is that the fight went ahead after a build-up that saw Hopkins start a nearly deadly riot in Puerto Rico and the 9/11 attacks devastate New York just days before the bout was scheduled to take place at Madison Square Garden. Here we look back on one of the middleweight division’s greatest events.

The Prelude

The man who opened as favorite to win the tournament to crown an undisputed middleweight champion had to that point never fought at middleweight. But after moving his career ledger to 36-0 with a highly contentious victory over fellow welterweight beltholder Oscar De La Hoya, the Puerto Rican icon proved dominant in a brief but violent pitstop at 154 pounds, beating up David Reid, Mamadou Thiam, and Fernando Vargas in quick order. Now his promoter Don King had his sights on him being crowned as the top dog at 160 pounds as well. Two of the three main beltholders in the division – Keith Holmes and William Joppy – were King fighters and so matchups were easy to make. More of a challenge was getting the IBF titlist involved, who had held his title since 1995 and made a dozen defenses but had proven unable to become a mainstream attraction: Bernard Hopkins.

Eventually, however, a deal was done; Hopkins would meet Holmes and Trinidad would face Joppy, with the winners to square off in September 2001 for the specially made Sugar Ray Robinson Trophy and the right to call himself undisputed middleweight champion.

Hopkins and Holmes fought first, in April of that year, with Hopkins winning nine, ten, and eleven rounds on the three judges’ scorecards to add Holmes’ WBC bauble to his IBF belt. The following month, Trinidad annihilated Joppy, scoring a TKO victory in the fifth round. The stage was now set for the final showdown between Hopkins and Trinidad – if Hopkins didn’t blow the whole thing up first.

The “Executioner” had long established himself as a master of mind games. As he explained to me once, “I look for a weakness in a guy’s personality …  I feel that if I can just go ahead and establish to him the things that he has to look for and the things he remembers from the press conference and things like that, then you have a guy who’s thinking about other things than actually winning.”

Hopkins proceeded to do just that to Trinidad when, at a press conference on July 9, he grabbed a Puerto Rican flag and threw it to the ground. Two days later, he did it again – this time at the Roberto Clemente Coliseum in San Juan in front of 5,000 fans, who rushed forward baying for the American’s blood.

“When he threw that flag down, there was a surge,” Alan Hopper, then King’s PR chief, told me a few years later. “And the dais collapsed, the backdrop came down, and I came down just in time to see Bernard, and they were chasing him. And he literally floored a guy with his left hand who was chasing him. If they’d gotten their hands on him, they would have killed him. Outside the building, they burned his limousine. They were throwing rocks. It was terrifying.”

Through it all, said Hopper, Hopkins “was resolute. He kept saying, ‘I don’t care what anybody thinks. I’m not bowing to any person or flag.’ Maybe that’s what he needed to do to get ready to fight, or maybe to pysch out Tito, or maybe both.”

“It was all planned out in advance,” Hopkins told me. “It started from him, all the way to his whole country, who I knew was going to put pressure on him to basically kill me. Can you imagine: Everywhere Trinidad went, wherever he jogged, wherever he walked, wherever he ate at a restaurant, they were telling Trinidad to kill Bernard. That’s a lot of pressure, man. Think about it. That’s a lot of pressure. Get Bernard Hopkins. Get Bernard Hopkins. Get Bernard Hopkins. That’s a lot of pressure.”

Two months later, on the morning of September 11, just four days before the bout was scheduled to take place, those involved in the promotion were preparing to stage a public workout at the Trinity Gym in Tribeca, just a couple of blocks away from the World Trade Center. As he drove into the city, Hopkins’ then-promoter Lou DiBella would later tell BoxingScene contributor and my old podcast partner Eric Raskin for an oral history podcast on the fight, “the second plane hit the Towers. And I saw, like, an eruption and smoke and whatever, I pulled off the highway at the last possible exit before you go into the city, and I reversed course, back home. And I knew right there and then that the fight wasn’t going to happen that weekend.”

The Fight

Remarkably, the fight was rescheduled for just two weeks later. The smell of destruction and death still lingered in the Manhattan air as announcer Jimmy Lennon Jr took to the ring before the main event.

“Tonight, we are joined together as more than just boxing fans,” he began. “We are joined together as citizens of the world: united in grief and in sorrow, but with the resolve that we will not be intimidated by acts of terrorism against this great country of ours.” First responders and survivors, who had been given their own seating section in the Garden, linked arms as the timekeeper tolled the traditional 10-count on the bell. Then Hopkins walked to the ring to the tune of Ray Charles singing “America the Beautiful.” The crowd – tense, anxious, desperate for some kind of relief and reason to celebrate – cheered and applauded. Then Trinidad emerged, wearing an NYPD cap, his father alongside him donning an NYFD helmet, and an already pro-Tito Madison Square Garden roared its approval.

It would be the high point of Trinidad’s evening.

Hopkins was more than a master of manipulation and intimidation. On this night, he showed he was also a cerebral boxer, one who had studied the difficulties De La Hoya had posed by boxing and moving against Trinidad and who set about repeating and improving his future business partner’s gameplan.

For the first several rounds, Hopkins circled as Trinidad sought to cut off the ring, the Philadelphian sticking out a jab, sometimes mixing in a lead left hook, and landing an occasional overhand right to keep the Puerto Rican honest and wary. Not until the end of the fifth did Trinidad begin to score consistently, but when he hit Hopkins after the bell, Hopkins hit him back twice as hard. The sixth was unequivocally Trinidad’s as he closed the distance and limited Hopkins’ movement, banging left hooks and right hands; but even then, Hopkins continued to answer strongly, appearing entirely unflustered and unconcerned. The ninth was a decent round for Trinidad, too, but Hopkins was conserving his energy, not loading up on his punches, firing short, quick right hands then sliding out of the way or tying up. 

On Raskin’s podcast, Hopkins explained the smarts and also the simplicity of his strategy.

“The left hook was the key,” he said. “The right hand barely left my right cheek …Every time Trinidad need to get off that power left hand, he gets into a left-right-left-go. So it’s 1-2-3. It’s a rhythm. You have to get in between, half of three is one and a half, and you have to get in at the right time … and if you can time that, when he rocks, and you get him coming in a half of that last rock, which is the third one, you can catch him and make him start all over … Every time he rocked, I touched him softly, I touched him hard sometimes, just on the shoulders, threw it out there, where I can offset his 1-2-boom, I catch him right in the middle of the last one. And guess what? He had to start all over. He had to pick it up and start. He didn’t start from where left off. He started back. … every time he reset, I threw combinations, I beat him to the punch, I start confusing him.”

The tenth saw Hopkins beginning to open up more, firing short, straight counters between Trinidad’s wider, looping blows, almost inviting him onward. By the eleventh, Trinidad looked confused and hesitant and was visibly tiring as Hopkins steadily moved through the gears. Right hands, left hooks, and uppercuts were landing at will now from the old master, although Trinidad gamely held his gloved hand aloft in defiance as the bell rang to end the frame.

On commentary for HBO, George Foreman speculated that Trinidad’s corner would not let him out for the twelfth and final round. They did, but Tito would not finish it. A right hand from Hopkins dropped Trinidad hard to the canvas; he struggled to beat referee Steve Smoger’s count, Hopkins collapsing on the canvas with emotion as Trinidad Sr. stepped into the ring to save his son from further punishment. 

The Aftermath

Hopkins did not receive the Sugar Ray Robinson Trophy as expected at the post-fight press conference. He maintains that that was because King had already had Trinidad’s name engraved on it, so confident was he of his man ending up victorious. About a week later, he was finally presented with his prize at a ceremony at Gallagher’s Steakhouse, but he had already secured what he really wanted: recognition as one of the greatest fighters in the world.

For King, who along with Bob Arum had bestridden boxing promotion for the best part of 30 years, Trinidad’s loss to Hopkins would mark a slide – slow and almost imperceptible at first but then more obviously noticeable – from dominance and ultimately even relevance. Although he would continue to promote some significant cards, mostly involving the likes of Ricardo Mayorga, Cory Spinks, Evander Holyfield, and John Ruiz, he would never again promote a megastar at the peak of his powers. 

For Trinidad, too, it was the beginning of the end. He stayed at middleweight for his next fight, thumping Hacine Cherifi in San Juan in May 2002, but didn’t appear in the ring again until October 2004, when he returned to the Garden to destroy Ricardo Mayorga. In May 2005 he took on Winky Wright, but was thoroughly outboxed again as he dropped a unanimous decision. The following day, he announced his retirement, but he returned for one more outing, once more at the Garden, but was dropped and dominated by Roy Jones Jr. in January 2008. He retired again afterward, and this time it stuck, and he was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2014. His career ledger stands at 42-3 with 35 KOs.

For Hopkins, amazingly, the end remained very far away. He would make seven more defenses of the middleweight crown until he was controversially outpointed by Jermain Taylor in 2005. He was by then 40 years old, but he showed no signs of stopping. He moved up to light heavyweight, outclassing Antonio Tarver in 2006 and Kelly Pavlik in 2008. He couldn’t quite cope with the speed of Joe Calzaghe or the skills of Chad Dawson, but he picked up wins against Wright, Jones, and Jean Pascal, and scored his final victory, against Beibut Shumenov, in 2014 at age 49 before ending his career with losses to Sergey Kovalev and Joe Smith Jr.

Hopkins took his place alongside Trinidad in the Hall of Fame in 2020, having compiled a record of 55-8-2 with two no-contests and 32 KOs. By the end of an astonishing 32 years as a professional prizefighter, he was recognized as not just the greatest middleweight of his generation but as one of the very best boxers, at any weight, of all time.

But the highlight of his lengthy and illustrious career will always be that night in Madison Square Garden, when he painted a pugilistic masterpiece and gave a wounded and grieving city something to cheer for again.

Kieran Mulvaney has written, broadcast and podcasted about boxing for HBO, Showtime, ESPN and Reuters, among other outlets. He also writes regularly for National Geographic, has written several books on the Arctic and Antarctic, and is at his happiest hanging out with wild polar bears. His website is www.kieranmulvaney.com.