Champs Page #6

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First big fight

I went to was a Tyson fight,

and there was nothing

more exciting than that.

He put on a show.

When the lights came on, Mike

just knew, this is my moment.

Everybody's watching

me right now.

It was crazy in there.

Just great energy.

Unbelievable energy.

Every time we'd get

home, Mike said, well who came?

How did they look like?

He just wanted to know,

what was the crowd like.

And it's hard to

explain it to him.

You see Eddie Murphy,

you see Donald Trump.

You see so many big

people in the audience.

Like, if you was in that

front three or four rows,

you were somebody.

Tyson was superhuman.

He represented our culture.

He represented who we were.

Mike Tyson was a phenom.

Everybody heard about him.

Mike Tyson represents in the

community the American dream,

that anybody can make it if

they have the determination.

Cus put me in the mindset

that there's no

room for everybody.

I need to suck all the air.

I need to reign with gods.

Do you ever

stop to think about money?

The stage

of thinking about money

is far gone.

I don't have to worry

about that no more.

I'm just having fun.

They were able to sell

Mike Tyson very effectively.

He delivered, of course, because

he scored all these knock outs,

and you got this

feeling of caged fury.

In our era, what would boxing

have been without Mike Tyson?

Could you say it would've

been this exciting?

After Ali, people

stopped liking boxing.

It don't bother me to say

that I was in the right time,

with Tyson.

That's when the fire came

back in the game of boxing.

When Tyson came in the game,

boxing became one

of the most popular,

if not the popular sport

outside the walls of Graterford.

We used to watch fights on ABC.

We used to watch fights on ESPN.

Alexis Arguello and the

fighters that was hot.

And I'm like, yo.

I can beat these guys.

For myself to come out and be

paroled to a halfway house,

I said to myself, I

gotta make boxing work.

I knew that this is the only

thing that I had to gamble.

Most guys go back when

you're in that situation.

When they lock you up

when you're like 17,

and you get out when

you're like 23, 24,

now you're thrown

into the adult world

with no job skills, nothing

but a record on your back.

Plus, little guy you

seen on your block,

he comes past you in a brand

new car with a gold chain

big enough for you to

see your reflection in.

That's hard to deal with.

When you go away, if you come

back into the same environment,

around the same circumstances,

around the same people

that you're comfortable

making these decisions around,

and you have influences that

make things easy for you to be

in a bad situation,

temptation is great.

It's the same if you're trying

not to be involved with drugs.

Because of its low price,

crack permeates the country,

especially the inner cities.

When the crack came into

and flooded the streets,

it was just hard to say no.

The crack era

affected everybody.

If you lived in that

area where they sold it,

you were going to be involved.

You're looking at

your environment

and no one's helping you.

No one's doing anything.

Just feeding you the drugs,

feeding you the alcohol,

feeding you the

negative comments.

They're doing exactly what

was done to you as a child,

so you have to shift and

change your environment.

Do something.

Change something.

For

Bernard to not violate parole

during that era, during that

time, was the most impressive

to me.

He dealt with it, he came home,

he was able to move forward.

He realized it wasn't

the life for him.

He was gonna make sure it

wouldn't happen to him.

How can I beat the system?

I fought.

I worked.

I worked in a kitchen.

I worked on landscaping.

I did roofing.

I found some new people.

Those new people

got me into boxing

as far as on the business side.

I was the only fighter

to my knowledge

to take a team of trainers

and go to Graterford,

and train and use that

environment to remind me

where I came from.

I think it

speaks volumes about Bernard

and how he looks at life

that he went back to prison

with his team, looked at

the situation, and know,

this is what I do not

want to fall back into.

There were athletes

who came along

who had better

talent than Bernard.

There were athletes

who came along

who had better positions,

better situations.

His discipline

has set him apart.

And the new IBF middleweight

champion of the world,

Barnard Hopkins!

I won my first title in 1994.

From there, I went on to defend

the middleweight championship

for 11 years.

Oscar de la Hoya is knocked out

by a left hook to the

liver by Bernard Hopkins.

Bernard Hopkins

is our Ray Robinson of this era.

Those guys were cut

from a different cloth.

The ones who could sustain.

Tonight you

have witnessed history.

Boxing's ageless warrior.

Bernard Hopkins!

He became the oldest fighter to

win a world title, at an age 48

when it's almost impossible to

imagine a fighter doing this.

Bernard walked and kept

that middleweight weight

for 20 title defenses.

20 title defenses.

That's gonna be a

hard record to break.

He's just always represented

a hungry fighter that's

dedicated and put

in a lot of work.

You can just tell he didn't

get anything handed to him.

Bernard Hopkins, to me,

is a testament to the fact

that anyone can

reshape their thinking,

can reshape their

life, and continue

to live that reshaped life.

The Bernard Hopkins that

I've known all these years

and the man who

resurrected his life

is an absolute pillar

of self discipline.

What saved me was knowing

that I can do this, and to be

able to do this

in a penitentiary.

Those stages are

critical, for me.

To be able to come

through that era

and come through that

time with the scars,

but I used it to motivate

me in a different way.

It took time to get there.

Bernard Hopkins is very

lucky to have boxing

and to capitalize on it.

He had it, and then he

took advantage of it.

People who don't have those

options, it gets very bleak.

We've cut back on a lot of

the educational options,

we've cut back on a

lot of the facilities,

we've cut back on

time out in the yard.

We've cut back on spots.

Energized inmates

use their energy in

the right direction

by going to the boxing circle.

It releases energy

that won't be released

on authority or

on other inmates.

Those kinds of

programs are no longer

available in today's prisons.

Today's prisons are

more about punishment

rather than recognizing the

mistakes individuals may have

made and helping

them grow from them.

Sometimes we

completely perverse things.

In New York state, at least,

the single most popular training

program in prison

is barber school.

So you have thousands

of men training

to be barbers in prison.

It's actually giving them a job

to do while they're in prison,

providing actually

a useful skill

they can use on

the outside, only

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