By Dan Ambrose: 46-year-old Bernard Hopkins will be turning 47 in three months in January 2012, and I’m afraid he’s going to run into a wall in the form of the young 29-year-old Chad Dawson (30-1, 17 KO’s) next week on October 15th at the Staples Center, Los Angeles, California.

Hopkins success is about to run out next week, as he’s too old now and fighting someone that can actually still fight instead of the limited guys he’s been matched up with lately. Dawson is back with his trainer John Scully, the trainer that Dawson has his most success with during his career, and Scully is already teaching Dawson new things that he’ll be using to beat Hopkins.

Getting rid of trainer Emanuel Steward was a good thing for Dawson, because the pairing was a bad one. You don’t take a combination puncher and expert boxer like Dawson and try to turn him into a one punch at a time jabber/clincher. That wasn’t going to work and you could that Dawson was highly uncomfortable with the style of fighting that Steward was trying to have him fight.

Hopkins doesn’t fight hard for a full three minutes anymore and he’s become more of an inside wrestler/clincher. That style worked perfectly against Jean Pascal and Roy Jones Jr., but it will fail miserably against Dawson because he’s a lot better than those fighters are at this point in his career. He’s a terrible style match-up for Hopkins, and all of Hopkins usual bag of tricks won’t work in this case. The only chance he has if he were somehow able to go back in time and fight Dawson as a 28-year-old instead of someone who is three months shy of his 47th birthday. It’s a great story that Hopkins has been able to find as much success late in his career the way he’s done, but his success will end against Dawson on October 15th.