Bernard Hopkins should be worrying about his upcoming title defense against Beibut Shumenov but instead he’s decided to engage in a war of words with WBC light heavyweight Adonis Stevenson.
Both fighters have upcoming fights but if both are victorious it seems as though they’d be open to facing each other this fall.
Here is what Hopkins told David Greisman of BoxingScene.com:
“I was in LA, we was on the podium. He had come out to one of the Golden Boy fights. I said, let’s have fun. Come on up to the stage. He came up. I said, let’s do a staredown, get everybody riled up. You know, shits and giggles. He had his sunglasses on. I said, take your sunglasses off. He took them off. It gives you a blueprint on how far I can go. It’s up to him to say, whoa, that’s too far. I got a starting point that I never should have got.”
“With me, you supposed to kill that from the door. Somebody goes in your pocket, somebody assume something, you stop it right there because it can turn into a habit. And a habit becomes an every day scene — you go to school, he’s robbing you, he’s taking your money. Like a bully in the neighborhood.”
This is what Adonis Stevenson had to say about Hopkins’ statement:
“First of all, you are far from being intimidating. The reason I took off my sun glasses was simply by respect because you asked me to do a face to face. You can talk all the crap that you want and say how you can get in people head and all that B.S but if you step in the ring with me I would simply destroy you!!! I don’t care where you from and all the shit you talk because the only person who is impressed by that is yourself! I from Port -au-Prince Haiti and trust me where you from is a luxury compared at where I from. You call yourself an Alien but I can promise you that if I end up fighting you, you will come back on planet earth. There is nobody who s scare of you grandpa. I won’t need a sport therapist to bring you back on planet earth so you can play with your grandchildren.”
If I was Hopkins I wouldn’t want to be standing in the ring across from the hard punching Stevenson when father time finally caught up to me.