Last weekend, this era's most spectacular fighter retired. Don't mistake "spectacular" for "elite." Arturo Gatti was never an all-time "great" boxer. He was something more special: a fighter of great fights, a great prize fighter, a filler of seats. Four times he participated in a Ring magazine fight of the year. This weekend, this era's best boxer displayed why, even at 42 years of age, he is still one of the best pound-for-pound boxers in the world. Consider the level of competition that Bernard Hopkins has bested: Felix Trinidad, Glenn Johnson, Oscar De la Hoya, Antonio Tarver, Winky Wright. I did not catch his pay-per-view victory over Wright because Hopkins has been more the technician than the prize fighter--the anti-Gatti if you will--in recent years. (Winky, too, is a boring, no power/all defense type of fighter). Hopkins' power is gone, but his boxing skills have gotten better with age. Mentally, he is one of the most put-together fighters to enter a ring. Whatever his career's place in boxing history, Hopkins's career after the age of 35 is perhaps the best ever. Perhaps it is his prison record, his executioner's mask, his un-PC remarks about his opponents' ethnicity or his predictions of their deaths. For whatever reason, Bernard Hopkins hasn't been given the respect due him. With defeats of Antonio Tarver and Winky Wright after the age of 40, Hopkins has taken that respect.

Gatti would kick ass in any street fight.