Frank Lotierzo, a former boxer from Philadelphia who is one of the fight press’s best analysts of ring style, broke down some of Hopkins’s defensive habits for me: “You’ll notice he’s looking down a lot, watching the other guy’s front foot to see when it comes up, which it does when you step into a punch, and that’s when he makes his move. He ties up opponents’ elbows on the inside; you control the elbows, you control the arms. He never backs straight up; he’ll give you an angle every time. He will pick a side and go away from your power, isolate one side of your body, step over and fight you on your blind side.” Drawing from that repertory, Hopkins went around and around with Bear in a state of tautly maintained détente, discouraging wand-blows but not throwing any punches himself.

Naazim Richardson, Hopkins’s trainer (and Bear’s father), took over for a while, wearing a glove on one hand and a pad on the other to catch punches. A steady skullcapped presence in Hopkins’s corner, Brother Naazim, as he’s known, is more co-conspirator than mentor. At this point, Hopkins, who received advanced instruction in his craft from English (Bouie) Fisher, George Benton and other wise men of Philadelphia’s deep ring tradition, knows more about boxing than most trainers. Hopkins and the much larger Brother Naazim shoved and hauled in a series of messy tussles from which Hopkins would emerge to bang the pad with a clean shot or two. Hitting the pads, intended to ingrain accuracy and speed and precise punching form, has become for most boxers in training a largely empty exercise in self-affirmation. The trainer holds up the pads, and the fighter pop-pop-pops them with blisteringly impressive combinations in predictable rhythm, combinations that he’s unlikely to throw in the give and take of a real fight. But Hopkins was rehearsing a more realistic struggle in which he would spend a lot of time shifting and mauling to denature an opponent’s leverage, looking to create an opening in which to score with a sneaky inside shot.

Figuring out what the other guy wants to do and not letting him do it is a matter of policy for Hopkins. But it’s also an expression of his inmost character and worldview. He’s not so much a contrarian as a serial agonist who regards life as an unending train of struggles for the upper hand, and over the years he has come around to the premise that such a life is best lived through a relentlessly calculated managing of self rather than the self-destructive fury of all-out aggression. One key to his longevity at the top of the fight world is that he has come to consider it “barbaric” to exchange blows with an opponent. Hopkins, who listens to Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” while he does roadwork, will employ any tactic at his disposal, fair or foul, to frustrate an adversary — fighter, manager, promoter, TV executive, conversational foil — while he applies his strategic acumen to the problem of divining that adversary’s deepest intention and coming up with a scheme to nullify it while absorbing the absolute minimum of punishment.

After Hopkins’s record-setting reign as middleweight champion from 1995 to 2005, it was widely assumed that he would retire and duly enter the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Instead, he retooled his body to move up two weight classes, straight to 175 pounds from 160 without pausing at 168 (super middleweight), an unheard-of leap in the modern era, and thrashed the light-heavyweight champion, Antonio Tarver, who was heavily favored to beat him. In middle age, Hopkins has made a specialty of flummoxing and defeating younger men who were supposed to have too much power for him: Tarver, Felix Trinidad, Kelly Pavlik, Tavoris Cloud, Jean Pascal.

Hopkins, who used to be known as the Executioner but now styles himself as the Alien, has a record of 55-6 with 2 draws; he will turn 50 in January. Imagine, if you’re looking for parallels in other sports, that the linebacker Ray Lewis did not retire at 36 last year and was still playing in the Pro Bowl and Super Bowl in 2026; or that Derek Jeter, who was 14 when Hopkins had his first professional fight, decided to play on past 40 and was still making the All-Star game and the playoffs in 2023. But getting old in the ring is a far more brutal and unforgiving process than getting old on any playing field. Winning title fights is the highly visible part of a much larger spectrum of effort that includes giving and taking countless blows, weathering the grind of making weight, training more consistently and shrewdly than anyone else, guiding his own boxing and other business affairs, preserving the integrity of his fortune and brain function and priming his seemingly inexhaustible motivational engine. Even great boxers tend over the long haul to lose the desire to do what it takes to win fights, but Hopkins’s sense of purpose, like his fighting mind, shows no signs of flagging. If anything, it’s getting sharper and stronger.