Former light heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins signed a contract Thursday to finalize his Dec. 18 fight against reigning champ Jean Pascal.
Pascal, the Montreal-based Haiti native, and his promoter, Yvon Michel, had already signed their paperwork, Golden Boy CEO Richard Schaefer, Hopkins' promoter, told ESPN.com.
Hopkins arrived in Los Angeles on Thursday and met with Schaefer following a press conference for the undercard of the HBO PPV card that Golden Boy is promoting at the Staples Center on Saturday night. Schaefer brought the paperwork with him to the press conference for Hopkins to sign.
Pascal-Hopkins, which had been agreed to earlier this month, will take place in Quebec City and mark Hopkins' return to Showtime. Schaefer said he has finalized a deal for the network to produce and distribute the fight as a Showtime pay-per-view.
"Showtime will be using their announcers and doing it like a first-class Showtime broadcast. Showtime is excited about it and so are we," Schaefer said.
Hopkins fought on Showtime several times earlier in his career. He won his first middleweight belt on the network when he knocked out Segundo Mercado in the seventh round in 1995 and made several early defenses on Showtime during a reign that lasted a division-record 20 defenses. But Hopkins hasn't fought on Showtime since stopping Robert Allen in their second fight in a 1999 middleweight title defense. Not long after that, Hopkins began fighting regularly on HBO, his television home for the past decade.
But with HBO not interested in the fight, Schaefer made the deal with its rival, which embraced a bout where the winner would be an obvious future opponent for the winner of the Super Six World Boxing Classic, the tournament Showtime is bankrolling in the super middleweight division just south of light heavyweight.
Hopkins said he weighed 182 pounds on Thursday and was anxious to begin training for the 175-pound fight. He usually prepares for fights in Miami, but said he would instead train in either Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains or New York's Catskill Mountains.
"I'm doing that because of the climate and the conditions," Hopkins told ESPN.com just before signing on the dotted line. "I'm not going to train in 80-degree Miami and then go to Canada, where it will be five below."
Pascal (26-1, 16 KOs) is coming off a major upset when he won an 11th-round technical decision against Chad Dawson on Aug. 14 on in Montreal (and on HBO) to retain his alphabet light heavyweight title and claim the division's lineal title. Although he owes Dawson a contractual rematch, their deal allows him to take an interim bout.
Hopkins (51-5-1, 32 KOs), who lost the light heavyweight title on a split decision to Joe Calzaghe in 2008, will turn 46 less than a month after he faces the 27-year-old Pascal. But Hopkins said he is motivated to become one of the rare fighters in boxing history to win a major title fight in his 40s.
"This is the fight where I see if I can go forward or does it end for me," said Hopkins, who routed nemesis Roy Jones in a lopsided decision in April in a rematch of Jones' middleweight title win 17 years ago.
Hopkins sounded supremely confident that he could pull another surprise win like he has done before by beating Felix Trinidad, Antonio Tarver and Kelly Pavlik.
"I know what I gotta do to pull out another surprise," Hopkins said.
Schaefer said one of the possible bouts on the pay-per-view telecast could be Golden Boy super middleweight contender Librado Andrade, who has a fan following in Canada, challenging titlist Dimitri Sartison, who is promoted by Germany's Universum. Schaefer has close ties to Universum and said he has spoken with company representatives and they are interested in the fight.
http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/boxing/news/story?id=5581708
Home Page 
