When George Foreman knocked out Michael Moorer in 1994 to become the oldest man to ever win a major boxing world championship, it was a national event.

Virtually every major newspaper in the country staffed the fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, and news of Foreman's epic victory landed him on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Foreman's momentous knockout came squarely in the middle of football season, but 20 years ago, there were few better stories than Foreman's unlikely rise to the championship.

A boxer hasn't graced the cover of Sports Illustrated since 2007 when Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather made it before their match.

And that's unlikely to change next week no matter what Bernard Hopkins does against Sergey Kovalev on Saturday in Atlantic City, N.J.

Hopkins will be two months and seven days shy of his 50th birthday when he faces the hard-hitting Kovalev in a bout for the WBA/WBO/IBF belts at Boardwalk Hall and before a national television audience on HBO.

Hopkins is already the oldest man ever to win a boxing championship, surpassing Foreman's record on May 21, 2011, when he defeated Jean Pascal in Montreal.

Every subsequent fight has only increased his record.

View photos Bernard Hopkins works out in front of the media on Tuesday. (Getty) More

But rest assured, as remarkable as the feat may be, it's going to get scant attention nationwide. For those who wake up on Sunday morning and still read the newspaper, it will take some page-turning to find the story. Most papers will only dedicate a few paragraphs to it, if they cover it at all.

It won't make the Sports Illustrated cover – bet on a football player being on next week's cover – and it's not going to dominate the conversation on sports talk radio on Monday morning.

But it should.

Though boxing has plummeted in popularity in the 20 years since Foreman KO'd Moorer, the feat that Hopkins is attempting to accomplish is no less impressive.

The level of conditioning alone that is required to even compete for a world championship is amazing, and here is a 50-year-old man whom most agree will be the better-conditioned athlete when the bell rings.

There have been a few athletes who succeeded post-40, but most weren't elite by that point.

Martina Navratilova was 49 when she won the U.S. Open mixed doubles title in 2006. Jack Nicklaus won The Masters when he was 46 in 1986. George Blanda kicked a 41-yard field goal in the 1975 AFC championship game for the Oakland Raiders when he was 48.

The number of elite-level athletes after 45 in major sports is very few.

And few of them have finished at the very top of their games.

It's why we should be celebrating Hopkins' accomplishment more than will occur if he defeats Kovalev on Saturday.

In choosing Kovalev, Hopkins sought the best opponent he could have fought. Now, Hopkins is one of the shrewdest men ever to step into the ring, and don't think for a moment that he would have called out Kovalev if he didn't 100 percent believe that he could win the fight.

That said, at two months shy of 50 he is doing what some of his peers refuse to do, facing the unquestioned top fighter in his division. If Floyd Mayweather had Hopkins' attitude, he'd have faced Manny Pacquiao years ago and this ridiculous plea for them to fight wouldn't still be dragging on.

Promoter Oscar De La Hoya, who was knocked out by a body shot from Hopkins in 2004, understands full well the significance of what Hopkins is doing.

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