Winning in mind, Hopkins aims for the head

LAS VEGAS -- When Bernard Hopkins takes on opponents, one thing is certain: He will try to mess with their heads.

The reigning light-heavyweight champion and former state prisoner once routinely wore an executioner’s mask into the ring to intimidate.

He creates commotion. He provokes. And always, the plan is to win. Yet, when it was suggested to Hopkins recently that he may have mastered the mind game, he was outraged.

“I don’t manipulate someone with mind games -- mind games don’t win fights against real fighters,” Hopkins said. “To say I play mind games and do things to manipulate my opponents is an insult to my abilities. I’m just damn good. . . . To say everything I’ve accomplished in the ring is secondary to mind games is unfair and disrespectful.”

Certainly, Hopkins has earned respect in the ring, gaining the nickname “Executioner,” with nine first-round knockouts in his first 14 fights, holding a world middleweight title for 12 straight years and defending the belt 20 times, including a 2004 knockout of Oscar De La Hoya.

Before that bout, Hopkins launched into an oratory about how he learned to box in prison, even producing a pocketed Polaroid of himself from that time. He pounded the lectern, pointed at De La Hoya and exclaimed, “Dead man walking!”

“Bernard is a smart fighter, he’s taken street smarts and made it work very well,” said assistant trainer John David Jackson. “He wears people down physically, and psychologically.”

Hopkins defends his light-heavyweight title here tonight against unbeaten super-middleweight champion Joe Calzaghe of Wales. Already, Calzaghe has had a taste of Hopkins’ mind games.

At Friday’s weigh-in, at which both fighters came in at 173 pounds, Hopkins pressed his forehead hard against Calzaghe’s. Calzaghe smiled. Perhaps it was because he had seen the pre-fight Hopkins at work.

The first salvo came when both attended an event ahead of the Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Ricky Hatton bout last year. Hopkins said he would “never lose to a white man.” Calzaghe said he would destroy Hopkins, who is “barking up the wrong tree” with these mind games.

That has never stopped Hopkins, of course. His publicist, Kelly Swanson, remembers a backroom confrontation between Hopkins and former challenger Keith Holmes.

“Bernard, knowing Holmes was a vegetarian, served him his ‘last meal’ -- a vegan burger,” Swanson said. “This stuff is so real to Bernard, it’s not funny. I’ll ask him before press conferences, ‘What are you going to do?’ He says, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll think of something.’ ”

There were mental games with Felix Trinidad when Hopkins, on a 2001 publicity tour through Trinidad’s homeland of Puerto Rico, threw the Puerto Rico flag to the ground, igniting a near riot. And last year, he shoved Winky Wright at their weigh-in.

But Hopkins said he learned in prison that “you have to be a lamb or a wolf.” Hopkins served 56 months for strong-armed burglary.

“He goes into that prison as an 18-year-old kid, looked around, and asked, ‘Who’s the biggest, toughest, baddest person in here?’ ” said Bernard Fernandez, the Philadelphia Daily News’ veteran boxing writer. “He went over to the guy and knocked out three of his teeth. He’s learned how to survive, and he’s transferred that thinking from prison to life.”

It’s why, Fernandez said, you’ll see Hopkins follow a scoring blow with a hurtful elbow that the referee misses, or land a punch while coyly standing on an opponent’s foot.

Hopkins, 43, said he isn’t fearful of Calzaghe’s style of constant punching. And Hopkins’ trainer, Freddie Roach, said to expect steady counter-punches and body blows to slow the Welshman.

Besides, Roach said, Hopkins “knows how to get under people’s skin. It’s all about whatever it takes. He lulls people into his fight plan.”

Yet Hopkins’ consecutive losses to Jermain Taylor in 2005 are worth noting, said Lou DiBella, Hopkins’ former promoter who now promotes Taylor.

“Bernard’s good with mind games, but sometimes it is mind games and other times it’s just that his mind works in weird ways,” DiBella said. The key for Taylor “was not budging an inch” during Hopkins’ weigh-in antics.

Hopkins has learned discipline -- he has boasted of going more than 15 years without a doughnut or cookie. Knowing how to rattle an opponent, however, is a gift, said co-trainer Nazim Richardson.

“What he does is spontaneous, he doesn’t sit down and plan it but it does always seem to work,” Richardson said.

Calzaghe, 36, is favored and isn’t worried about mind games. “I’m not going in there for a wrestling match or MMA fight,” he said recently. “I just have to worry about what I do.”

Hopkins said prison still gives him the advantage.

“When I go through any adversity, I go back . . . I learned, not how to read people’s minds, but to smell fear,” he said. “I already overcame the biggest test I believe anyone can go through. That’s my ace in the hole, that’s what Joe doesn’t have.”

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lance.pugmire@latimes.com

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JOE CALZAGHE VS.

BERNARD HOPKINS

Today at Las Vegas, HBO

12 rounds, light-heavyweights