The public face of Bernard "The Executioner" Hopkins is about as well-known to Philadelphia-area sports fans as Charlie Manuel's folksy drawl or Andy Reid's measured reticence. The public Hopkins always is vocal, always opinionated and frequently controversial. (Remember his pointed criticism of Donovan McNabb? His pronouncement that he'd "never let a white boy beat me" before his matchup with Joe Calzaghe?) He has no qualms when it comes to speaking about his days as a teenaged tough, involuntary guest of the Pennsylvania penal system or of his many accomplishments in the ring once he determined his true calling. He figures it's all part of what went into making him who he is today.
Asked if he's ever encountered a microphone or television camera he wouldn't speak into at length, Hopkins, the WBC light-heavyweight champion at the improbable age of 46, smiles and says, "Only the ones that aren't turned on."
But the private face of Bernard Hopkins, the one not wearing boxing gloves or offering his thoughts about an upcoming opponent or his own place in boxing history, is another matter. At his palatial estate in Hockessin, Del., the North Philadelphia native is quite a different person. He's a husband (of 18 years to wife Jeanette), father (of daughters Latrece, 12, and Sanaa, 4 months) and cost-conscious handyman who clips coupons, performs household chores, likes to cook and otherwise marvels at the changes between the much-younger version of himself, the one seemingly destined for nothing that would ever come to anything good, and the rich, famous and intensely grateful person that emerged from those dark times.
"You ask me how I feel at home," he tells a reporter who has known him for more than 20 years. "This is how I feel: Every day I walk around that property, I say to myself, 'It's a long way from Graterford.' "
Home from 1984 to '88, when he was incarcerated as prisoner Y4145 following a strong-arm robbery conviction, was an 8-by-10-foot cell. Home now is the 17,000-square-foot house that sits on 6 1/2 wooded acres, replete with a stocked pond, a spacious bath house, a swimming pool and a movie theater. When there he is not "The Executioner," but Mr. Hopkins to his neighbors, just plain Bernard to his wife and Daddy to the daughters he dotes on.
"It's a lot different," he said of the persona he easily slips into whenever he enters the safety of the comfortable world he has made for himself and his family. "Even though I'm not going say I leave 100 percent of my business behind when I walk through that door, because business always follows me around to a certain degree. My home is my sacred place. It's where I don't have to watch my back or be too careful of what I say.
"I'm not the world champion there. I take out the trash, I clean up after the dog. I cut my own grass, and there's a lot of grass, man. Home is where I can detox, where I can chill. At home, I'm a pretty boring guy. Latrece tells me I fall asleep before the end of every movie we put on."
Malik Scott, Hopkins' aide de camp, agrees that his boss and friend probably is happiest when he takes refuge within that private space.
"He's very much at ease when he's at home, and really happy," Scott said.
Hopkins (52-5-2, 32 KOs), who defends his WBC 175-pound title against top-rated challenger and former champion "Bad" Chad Dawson (30-1, 17 KOs) Oct. 15 in Los Angeles' Staples Center, hasn't been at his Delaware home for several weeks. His focus on any upcoming fight is absolute, so much so that he secludes himself, as much as anyone in his position ever can, when in training camp. Sometimes he has set up shop in Miami Beach, where he owns a condo in a high-rise building, or in Big Bear, Calif., in the mountains north of Los Angeles. For his past several bouts, he has stayed much closer to home, putting in most of his preparatory work at the Joe Hand Boxing Gym in Northern Liberties while taking up temporary living arrangements either at another of his condos, near the Art Museum, or in South Jersey.
Always, though, he remains eager to return to the peace and domesticated bliss of his life in Delaware once his professional duties are attended to.
"Really, it's not that bad," he said of the attention he draws whenever he's in Philadelphia, especially the neighborhoods where people regard him as something other than a celebrity. "Where I go in Philly, people are used to seeing me. I'm in Northern Liberties, I'm in Brewerytown, I'm on Market Street. I feel like a local guy and I'm treated that way. The reaction I mostly get from people is, 'Oh, there's Bernard. He's one of us.' I like that.
"If I'm out of town, say New York or Los Angeles, it is a little different. You don't get approached the same way. But I've never been one to hide behind bodyguards, in Philly or anywhere else. My team is a pretty close-knit group of guys who have been with me a long time and they're always around, but they're not bodyguards. Most of the time, it's no problem when we're out and about. People come up to shake my hand or to ask for an autograph or just to talk boxing.
"The only time it ever bothers me is when we're in a restaurant, eating dinner, and somebody comes up and says, 'Can you sign an autograph for my daughter?' What am I going to say, no? He's got the 8-year-old girl standing right next to him. She don't know who the hell I am. The autograph is for him. But, OK, I sign anyway. I just think it would be more considerate to ask after we're finished eating."
The yin to B-Hop's yang is Jeanette, whom he affectionately refers to as Netie. They've basically been together since they met 20 years ago, and have been married since Aug. 28, 1993. Where Bernard is loquacious and extroverted, Netie, 5 years younger, is reserved and introverted. She would rather walk barefoot on hot coals than call attention to herself.
Maybe that's why Hopkins says the only time he's ever been terrified was on his wedding day. He was getting the woman of his dreams, true, but he knew he was going to have to rein in parts of himself that wouldn't meet with the approval of a wife with such a strict code of personal behavior. Sometimes it's easier for a fighter to punch another bad dude in the mouth than to plant a kiss on his beloved's lips. You're held to a much higher standard in the latter circumstance than the former.
"I first saw Netie in 1991," Hopkins recalled. "It was not too long before I fought Roy [Jones] for the first time. I knew her grandfather, Frank Montgomery, who used to come to my fights. He's dead now. One day she was in his car. Frank said, 'When are you going to fight again, Bernard?' I said, 'You want to come? I got some tickets.' I was living in Germantown then, on Sharpneck Street.
"I guess I didn't see her again for 3 or 4 months. When I saw Frank again, I asked him about the girl who was with him a few months earlier. He said it was his granddaughter. He told me about this breakfast club she liked to go to. I went there, saw her again, and we've been together ever since.
"We went out, I guess, for 2 1/2 years before we got married. I was scared. I admit it. I had had a girlfriend or two before her, but this was different. She was a good girl; nobody could say anything against her. She didn't come up the hard way like me. I knew she was who I wanted to be with, but, you know, I was still a ways from becoming someone I thought was good enough for her."
Netie - who declined to be interviewed for this article - is outspoken only about her desire that Bernard retire while he has his health. She sees him more as the man she loves and less as the multimillionaire, Hall of Fame-bound boxer. Accordingly, she is the voice of caution forever whispering in his ear, reminding him that true happiness is more than adding to his collection of bejeweled championship belts and getting lots of face time on pay-per-view.
"She's scared, too," Hopkins said. "That's why she doesn't like to be photographed or interviewed. She doesn't like our daughters to be photographed either. She knows all the bad stuff that's going on in the world. Heck, somebody might still be mad at me for something I did when I was ignorant.
"Netie wants me to retire. She's wanted that for a couple of years now. The [second] Roy Jones fight was especially hard for her because that's the night he illegally kept punching me to the back of the head, to my brain stem, and it messed up my vision. Even after it was over and I had won, I was seeing black spots.
"Look, my wife supports me in whatever I do. I'm not through with boxing yet, and she knows that. There's so many things I still want to accomplish in the sport. How many times does a 46-year-old in my line of work have the opportunity to do what I've done, and still can? She doesn't always like it, but she understands why I do what I do."
It takes a strong and confident woman to be married to a highly compensated professional athlete these days. Netie is as certain of how Bernard will respond when the inevitable "distractions" come around as he is of what he will do when the guy in the other corner throws a punch that Team Hopkins has prepared to counter through weeks in the gym.
"Something is a distraction only if you allow it to be," Hopkins said. "I take pride in being a good husband, a good father, a good family man. If you're not careful about what you do, how you do it and why you do it, you can be in trouble. You mess up, even when you think nobody will find out, sooner or later it'll come back and bite you on the ass. But nothing can entice me. I've seen it all. I can't be pulled into no B.S.
"Once, this real pretty woman came up to me and said I looked like Denzel [Washington]. I don't think I'm that hard on the eyes, but come on. I said, 'Uh, you do know I'm married, right?' She said, 'Yeah, but are you happily married?' I said, 'I am very happily married.' "
So the Hopkinses lead their idyllic existence at their bargain mansion (valued at nearly $5 million but purchased in 2009 for only $1.5 million following a foreclosure on the property) between fights, the lord and lady of the manor wait for whatever the future brings because they know they will never want for anything.
"Do we need a house that big? No. Do we plan to keep it forever? No," Hopkins said. "I'm not going to need anything on that scale when Latrece is grown up and I'm in my 50s and 60s. We're going to downsize, like everybody else eventually does. But when we're ready to sell, the market probably is going to be up from where it is now.
"Eighty percent of my money is in U.S. Treasury bonds. I get tax-free interest off that. There's not a big return on government bonds, something like 3.5 percent, but it's protected. It's like free money. Well, not exactly free, but I don't get double-taxed on it. It's money I can put into more bonds, or another property.
"This is one athlete you won't hear of going broke because he spent crazy or made a lot of bad decisions."