ESPN Dan Rafael Blog

Your weekly random thoughts …

• There will be a lot of second-guessing in the wake of Bernard Hopkins' lopsided destruction of Kelly Pavlik last Saturday night and much of it will be Top Rank promoter Bob Arum and manager Cameron Dunkin second-guessing themselves. Do you remember in mid-July when the fight was finally made after a second go-round of negotiations? In case you don't, it's worth pointing out that Arum did not want the fight for Pavlik but felt forced into taking it. Dunkin also told me several times he didn't really want the fight. Top Rank matchmaker Brad Goodman was also adamantly against it.

When I wrote an article breaking the news that the fight was set after other potential fights with Joe Calzaghe, Marco Antonio Rubio, Randy Griffin, Sergio Mora, Paul Williams and Winky Wright all fell by the wayside, here is one of the quotes Arum gave me for that July 18 story: "This fight was not our first choice, but it was the only alternative we had to make a buck. We didn't have any place to go except a pay-per-view card. At least it will do halfway decent numbers. We turned it down once. It came back around and we accepted it. Kelly isn't thrilled with the fight."

Maybe next time there's a fight Arum and the people around him don't think is in the best interest of their fighter or Top Rank, he'll stick with his initial instinct.

Although Pavlik lost the lopsided decision, I do give him and his team credit for not making a single excuse. However, from what I hear Pavlik could have used his physical condition the week of the fight as an excuse. I was told by multiple people close to Pavlik that he was extremely ill before the fight, so ill that he needed to take fluids intravenously in the days leading to the fight. But that is not why he lost. Had Pavlik been 100 percent, maybe he would have only lost seven or eight rounds instead of all 12.

• To all the folks who raised hell because I continued to rank Hopkins high on the pound-for-pound list after his split decision loss to Calzaghe in April, a fight I thought Hopkins eked out, what do you think about that decision now after watching Hopkins crush Pavlik?

• One of the highlights of attending Pavlik-Hopkins was having a chance to visit with Angelo Dundee and Joe Frazier, both of whom came to the show and mingled in the press room before the pay-per-view started. It's been awhile since I've seen Frazier at a fight and even though he was using a wheelchair, he was awfully animated and in the mood to talk boxing. And seeing Dundee is always pure joy. He's just a wonderful, wonderful guy for whom I have personal affection for. I will never forget that within a few weeks of starting my job as the boxing beat writer at USA Today in early 2000, Dundee, who had read some of my early articles and saw my monthly rankings in the paper, wrote me a very nice, handwritten letter to introduce himself, to tell me how much he enjoyed the rankings and to give me his contact information in case I ever needed to talk to him for a story. He wasn't pushing a fighter or a project either. He was just being a nice guy and it meant a lot to me. I still have that letter.

• Billy Dib and Yuri Foreman both fought on the Pavlik-Hopkins undercard, Foreman winning a shutout decision against Vinroy Barrett and Dib losing a featherweight title bout to Steven Luevano. Dib and Foreman are two of the most unexciting fighters I have ever seen in my life. But as agonizing as it was to watch each of them fight, I was thankful for one thing: they weren't fighting each other.

• Hopkins is amazing. Just look at the names he's faced over the past few years. He's fought everyone of consequence from Jermain Taylor (twice) to Antonio Tarver to Wright, Calzaghe and Pavlik. That's an incredible list just in the past four years, not to mention all of the other top fighters he faced before that. Hopkins has never ducked anyone and is the true definition of what a pound-for-pound great is. Now, compare that to somebody such as Floyd Mayweather. He's an extraordinary talent, but because he was so afraid to lose, Mayweather left a lot of unfinished business when he retired, never having faced Shane Mosley, Antonio Margarito, Miguel Cotto or Williams.

• Here is one reason why boxing is so great: Hopkins can lose twice to Taylor and Taylor can lose twice to Pavlik, yet Hopkins can destroy Pavlik. It's cliché, but styles do indeed make fights.

• So I'm in a cab two weeks ago in Las Vegas heading to the airport for my flight home to Washington (yes, I got the upgrade at the airport) following the Chad Dawson-Tarver fight at the Palms. The cab driver and I get to talking and it turns out he's a big boxing fan. Anyway, he told me that he makes regular pickups at one particular strip club and that he sees Mike Tyson "almost every day at the place." I asked him what time of night. His response: "Not really night anymore. Usually around 5:30 in the morning, I guess after a long night." Some things never change. That's our Mike.

• Now that Wladimir Klitschko and older brother Vitali Klitschko own three of the four alphabet heavyweight titles between them, a lot of people would like to see them fight. However, understandably the brothers, who are very close, have said over and over for many years that they will never fight each other. However, if they ever did, I would pick Vitali to win that battle. He's bigger than Wladimir, has a better chin than Wladimir and I think he also has the mental edge because he's the big brother. Big brothers usually dominate their kid brothers starting in childhood. It's just the way it is. My pick aside, Wladimir still deserves to be ranked as the No. 1 heavyweight in the world because he's been far more active and faced a number of quality opponents, including handing Samuel Peter his first loss before Vitali gave him his second.

• Speaking of Vitali, did you catch the story after his title victory against Peter in which he said that the way he keeps his fists from swelling is by wrapping them in his son Max Klitschko's urine-soaked diapers? "Baby wee is good because it's pure, doesn't contain toxins and doesn't smell. I wrap nappies filled with my 3-year-old son Max's wee around my fists. The nappies hold the liquid and the swelling stays down," Klitschko was quoted as telling German newspaper Bild. I'm not sure quite what to think about that, but you can rest assured that next time I see Vitali, I have no plans to shake his hand.

• By the way, after seeing Peter smashed to bits by Klitschko and seeing him come into the fight in such poor condition, doesn't it make you wonder what the hell did he do during the six weeks he was supposedly training in Germany for the fight? It looked like Peter did absolutely nothing.

• Vic Darchinyan is trash-talking about Cristian Mijares in the lead up to their Nov. 1 junior bantamweight unification fight more than I have heard any fighter do in a long time. Darchinyan better hope he can back it up, but I have a feeling that Mijares is going to toy with him and embarrass him the way he did when he dominated Jorge Arce.

• I'm not sure who exciting junior featherweight titleholder Juan Manuel Lopez is going to defend against Dec. 6 on the Oscar De La Hoya-Manny Pacquiao undercard, but how about Jhonny Gonzalez? That would be an exciting fight and Gonzalez, a former bantamweight titleholder now at 122 pounds, is a sensible matchup because he's with Golden Boy and Lopez is with Top Rank, the co-promoters of the card who often try to match their fighters in co-promotions.

• DVD pick of the week: Watching Hopkins' age-defying performance against Pavlik got me to thinking about other great over-40 fighters, which led me to dig out the DVD of perhaps the single-greatest achievement by an older fighter in history. It was Nov. 5, 1994, at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, where George Foreman pulled off a stunning triumph against Michael Moorer to win the heavyweight championship in a huge upset. Moorer, who was just a few days shy of his 27th birthday, was crushing Foreman and busting him up with ease when Foreman landed a jab followed by a short right hand on the point of the chin in the 10th round. The blow knocked Moorer out and Foreman, at age 45, regained the title almost 20 years to the day after losing it in Zaire to Muhammad Ali.