Hopkins says he’ll fight Dawson after he cleans up the light heavyweight division

By Jim Dower: 45-year-old Bernard Hopkins (50-5-1, 32 KO’s) said to ESPN analyst Brian Kenny on Friday night that he plans on cleaning up the light heavyweight division after Bernard gets through with his fight on April 3rd against 41-year-old Roy Jones Jr. Hopkins, who has only fought once in the past two years, said “I’m just going to clean up the light heavyweight division after Roy Jones Jr. And then I’m going to go after all the other champions who have a title, and then I’m going to unify the titles. The Chad Dawson fight will be even bigger, if he still has title. When the time comes, it [Hopkins-Dawson] will be bigger money. People will know who Chad Dawson is by them. That will be a good way to exit out of the light heavyweight division and go on with Golden Boy Promotions.”

That certainly sounds very ambitious of Hopkins. However, by the time that Hopkins beats the current light heavyweight champions – Beibut Shumenov, Jurgen Brahmer, Jean Pascal and Tavoris Cloud – Hopkins will be pushing 47 if he fights three times this year and twice next year. I can certainly see Hopkins beating Shumenov and Brahmer, but I’m less sure about whether he could beat Cloud and Pascal. But even if Hopkins does, he’s going to have to speed up the pace that he fights his opponents.

Since 2006, Hopkins has mostly fought only once a year, and to unify all the titles before he retires, Hopkins is going to have to pick up the pace if he doesn’t want to be still fighting at 48. I somehow don’t see that as realistically happening. Hopkins just hasn’t been lighting a fire with getting in the ring all that often in the past four years. A fight against Chad Dawson after Hopkins takes on all those guys, if he ever does, would likely be a horribly one-sided fight with the young Dawson beating up on a near 50-year-old Hopkins.

It wouldn’t even be fair at that point. If Hopkins fought Dawson now, Bernard would likely be in way over his head and would end up losing a lopsided decision. Hopkins didn’t look good in his last fight against middleweight contender Enrique Ornelas in December. Hopkins won the fight by a 12 round decision, but looked as if he had lost a step from his last fight before that against Kelly Pavlik a year earlier in October 2008.

Even that version of Hopkins would have huge problems against the lightning quick Dawson. I hate to imagine what Hopkins will look like by the time he clean up the light heavyweight division as he says and beats all the current light heavyweight title holders. I’m not very impressed with any of them, but Hopkins may have problems against Pascal and Cloud.

Pascal likely won’t be the WBC champion for very much longer, because he has a fight against Dawson coming up this summer. But I think Hopkins would have problems against Pascal. The real problem for Hopkins is that it’s going to take a lot of time to fight all the guys, and who’s to say that Hopkins will be able to successfully negotiate a fight with all of them.

Those fighters probably won’t like the idea of taking a smaller percentage of the revenue in a fight against Hopkins. So Hopkins might be better off being a little more realistic about his ambitions and taking on Dawson now, and forgetting about wasting time talking about cleaning up the division. It sounds like a pipe dream to me.

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