It's been a long, long time since a Canadian boxer entered a world title fight that the world thought he had a chance to win.
With the exception of that man of many countries, Lennox Lewis, you probably have to go back to Matthew Hilton in the mid-1980s, when he successfully challenged Buster Drayton for the junior middleweight title, defended it once against a non-entity and then lost it to Robert Hines.
That began his long decline, but at least for those fleeting moments, Hilton played the favourite's role.
Ever since, though, Canadians have been cast as no-hope underdogs, in the grand tradition of George Chuvalo against Muhammad Ali. Most recently, both Eric Lucas and Otis Grant were the longest of long shots when they fought Roy Jones Jr., Lucas was in tough again against Fabrice Tiozzo and cruiserweight Dale Brown found himself in the same spot against Vassiliy Jirov.
They did all right and enhanced their market value -- though, of course, they didn't win.
Tomorrow night, Syd Vanderpool of Kitchener, Ont., is in a similar situation when he takes on middleweight champion Bernard Hopkins in Indianapolis, a fight that will be televised in the United States by boxing's reigning superpower, HBO. (The fight will be shown live in Canada on TSN before the main event, featuring Jones against Richard Hall).
Hopkins is widely regarded as the best 160-pounder in the world -- at least now that Jones has abandoned that weight class -- a terrifically talented boxer and puncher. Vanderpool, with a professional record of 28-1, is in fact far more comfortable at the 168-pound super middleweight limit, where one of the sanctioning bodies has him rated third in the world. But he's willing to bleed off that weight, and to take the short money, in order to have this chance.
"When they said Bernard Hopkins, HBO, it doesn't get much bigger than that," he said. "To be able to fight the best middleweight on HBO, that's what you dream about."
Part of a boxing family from an unlikely pugilistic hot bed (Kitchener also produced Lewis; the Johnson brothers, Olympic bronze medalist Chris and Greg; and Vanderpool's brother Fitz, the former Canadian welterweight champion), 27-year-old Vanderpool, a bright, charming guy, has had a bumpy road to the top.
After narrowly failing to make the Canadian team for the 1992 Olympics, he turned pro in Massachusetts under the guidance of Marvin Hagler's former trainer, Goody Petronelli. From there, he moved on to a management group in Pennsylvania, fighting almost exclusively in the United States. Those backers eventually ran out of money. "I felt like I was just standing in place," he said. "I wanted to fight better fighters, but they didn't want to fight me because it wasn't marketable. It didn't make sense for them."
Vanderpool's big break finally came last year, when he was matched against hot Cuban prospect Mario Iribarren. "A lot of people were saying you shouldn't take that fight," Vanderpool said. "It's his promoter promoting the show. You're not getting paid very much." He took the gamble, stopped Iribarren in the seventh round and suddenly became a bit of a commodity himself.
Still, fighting Hopkins wasn't Vanderpool's likely route to the top. The fight came on four weeks of notice, the money wasn't great (through some last-minute finagling, Vanderpool's gross purse was bumped up to $100,000, by far the biggest of his career -- though given the ways of boxing accounting and the various people who have to be paid out of his share, he'll wind up with just a fraction of that.) And, of course, there was the fact that he'd been building a body to compete in a different weight class.
"A lot of my effort went into getting bigger, getting stronger," he said. Now, the challenge is to shed eight pounds from a rock-hard muscular frame and still have enough left to fight aggressively and effectively at the lower weight.
"The only thing he's really got on me is experience," Vanderpool said. "I'll use my strength, use my speed. Put pressure on him. If I give him time, then that's when he'll be more effective. . . .
"I trained physically three hours a day [with John Davenport, Lewis's first professional trainer]and I trained mentally three hours a day [with the help of a sports psychologist] I've visualized different scenarios in my head 40 or 50 times. Everything from what might happen before the fight, walking into the ring, round-by-round scenarios."
Some of which will undoubtedly go out the window when the reality of the moment sets in, when the spotlight shines and when the television cameras go on. To be human is to feel the pressure of the occasion, to understand what's on the line and to look across the ring and see a fighter who most everyone believes is going to beat you.
"I know I have nothing to lose and everything to gain," Vanderpool said. "I can come out with the guns blazing."