When disaster touched a title bout: Hopkins and 9/11

So, what is it like when you can't truly celebrate the most fulfilling accomplishment of your life? Bernard Hopkins knows.

Like millions of others, Hopkins can remember specific personal details about the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, down to the condition of his clothing - "wet" - as he stood stunned after returning from a run in Central Park, watching the television in his midtown Manhattan hotel room, hearing sirens outside his window headed for the World Trade Center.

It was an extraordinary week in Hopkins' life. Then 36 years old, he was preparing to fight Felix "Tito" Trinidad four days later at Madison Square Garden to unify the world middleweight championship. Trinidad was the 3-1 favorite, looking to prove he deserved his reputation as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world.

The stakes were higher for Hopkins, truly make or break for his career. The North Philadelphia native remains convinced he would never have had another big fight if he had lost to Trinidad.

Suddenly, all that meant nothing.

"We were being attacked," Hopkins said the other day at Joe Hand Boxing Gym on North Third Street, just before a training session for his Oct. 15 WBC light-heavyweight title defense against Chad Dawson in Los Angeles.

"Nobody knew what was going to get bombed next. Was it over? Then the seconds turned to minutes and the minutes into hours, and next we thought, 'Let's get the hell out of here.' We were trying to get out that day. But they had shut everything, the bridges, the tunnels, planes, trains. It was done. I was locked in New York. But I had to train. The fight's not off, but it ain't on. The only thing I knew, we still had to be in fight mode."

On 9/11, Hopkins had a workout planned at a gym just a few blocks from the World Trade Center. He would have been there by 11:30 a.m. Some of his family coming in for the fight had reservations to stay at the Marriott in the World Trade Center complex. He had to come up with a place to train.

"Let's go up to the Bronx, Fort Apache," Hopkins remembers saying the next day. "They ain't going to bomb up there. They ain't going to bomb the 'hood."

He ended up training in Harlem the next day, when the fight was rescheduled to Sept. 29. As soon as traffic could leave New York City, Hopkins returned to Philadelphia to train.

"I was determined to win this fight under any means necessary, and that meant I had to block what happened to the point that it didn't happen," Hopkins said. "That was really, really a test. It was gutsy for them to do the event two weeks after 9/11, and it was sure enough ballsy to do it in Madison Square Garden."

It was the first major sporting event in Manhattan after 9/11 and an unforgettable scene, with heavy security. Fliers seeking help in finding the missing, with photographs and full of personal details, covered the walls of the Seventh Avenue entrance to the Garden and of Penn Station underneath.

"The singing policeman, remember him?" Hopkins said, referring to the New York City policeman who sang the national anthem.

Hopkins, of course, won the fight, dominating Trinidad in front of a full house, 19,075. The crowd was heavily pro-Trinidad until Hopkins took over the Garden, winning by a 12th-round technical knockout, well ahead on all the judges' cards.

Hopkins can still remember the reaction of promoter Don King. He had paid Trinidad $6 million and Hopkins $2.75 million. At 2 a.m., waiting to start the postfight news conference, King sat smoking his cigar and yawned, without an ounce of celebration showing.

"He aged about five years - extra years - right in front of my face," Hopkins said.

Hopkins still believes he wasn't awarded the Sugar Ray Robinson trophy for the winner of the unification tournament that night because King already had put Trinidad's name on it. Hopkins received the trophy several days later.

"It wasn't the same," Hopkins said. "A team wins the Super Bowl, they hold the ceremony right then."

But that was part of the accomplishment, he said.

"I used all the danger of not being part of the system to motivate me, to be at my best every given time," Hopkins said. "I think that will be part of my history, having that mentality, having the vision to know that there's no room, even today, that I'm somehow accepted, to get any favors or any breaks that say a champion should get."

That fight changed everything, though. Hopkins had a well-known name in his hometown, but he instantly became a household face and voice that will carry into retirement, if Hopkins ever retires. And his boxing legacy changed forever.

Given all the circumstances, Hopkins still considers Trinidad his greatest fight, although not his toughest. He said Trinidad, who had won belts in four weight classes and had been undefeated, turned out to be a "one-dimensional" fighter, which "made it a really, really easy fight for a guy of my abilities, to figure out styles and do more than one thing."

"Every time Tito Trinidad would square up in front of him, Bernard Hopkins would take him completely out of his game by just bopping him with a little left jab or a straight right hand," retired Hall of Fame boxing judge Harold Lederman said just before that 2 a.m. news conference. "Trinidad couldn't get that left hook off all night."

Lederman scored the fight for the pay-for-view telecast and gave Hopkins nine of the first 11 rounds. "I really think he made a place for himself in history," Lederman said that night. "He certainly does rank in the top 10 all-time among middleweights."

Ten years later, Hopkins is still going, of course. He had more victorious title defenses than any middleweight in history, and in May the 46-year-old beat Jean Pascal in a unanimous 12-round decision to win the WBC light-heavyweight title and become the oldest fighter to win a major world championship.

Asked how life would have played out if he hadn't won that night in New York, Hopkins said, "I wouldn't be in front of you. That [Trinidad] fight was to bury me. That fight was to take whatever little bit that I had away. . . . You'd be talking to me on a couch somewhere."

Hopkins still calls the whole Trinidad experience bittersweet.

"Because I'm an American and I'm proud to be one, and winning a fight I'm not supposed to win - I feel like I got cheated out of my biggest victory being an event, but lives were lost," Hopkins said. "Do I celebrate when others can't even find their husbands and their wives?"