By Scott Gilfoid: Last Saturday, former light heavyweight and middleweight champion Bernard Hopkins gave perhaps one of his worst fighting displays in his career when he lost a dull 12-round split decision to Joe Calzaghe at the Tomas & Mack Center, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Hopkins looked nothing like his old self, as his once high work rate was reduced to a crawl, as he struggled to land a measily 10 punches per round against Calzaghe. I don’t buy into the idea that Hopkins was fighting that way out of a strategy he was using in order to slow the fight down.

On the contrary, I don’t think Hopkins had the stamina, legs or youth to fight all out for three minutes of every round. That was never more apparent until late in the fight when Hopkins began to clinch even more as he began to look positively exhausted in the ring. When Hopkins went down from a seemingly harmless low blow, and needed several minutes to recuperate from the shots, it seemed painfully obvious that he was trying to stall so that he could get his depleted energy back.

It worked somewhat but it didn’t have a lasting effect because Calzaghe simply turned around and promptly won the 11th and 12th rounds with ease, beating Hopkins with blinding combinations before the 43 year-old fighter could wrap him up in a clinch. It was sad to see how Hopkins could no longer fight the way he used to earlier in his career. Back then, Hopkins was all action, coming forward with aggressive energy and a nonstop punching attack.

Unfortunately, Hopkins has seemed to morph into a one punch then grab type fighter in recent years. It’s been effective for him, I’ll give him that but it’s not likely to continue to do in the future. Hopkins, if he wants to continue as a light heavyweight, is going to need to consider fighting the top fighters in the light heavyweight division like Chad Dawson and that’s not someone that I feel that Hopkins no longer has the skills to beat. Indeed, I see Dawson beating Hopkins even worse than Jermain Taylor did in his second fight with Hopkins.

Though their first fight was close, it wasn’t in the early rounds when Taylor’s speed was too much for the slower Hopkins. Dawson, though, is even better than Taylor, much more so, and he doesn’t have a problem with tiring out like Taylor typically does throughout his career. Because of that, if Hopkins does decide to fight on, he needs to take on Dawson as soon as possible for Hopkins ages even more.

Minus a fight with Dawson, then I feel that Hopkins should hang up the gloves for good. There are no other popular light heavyweights worth fighting, and Hopkins would be wasting his time by fighting someone like Glen Johnson or Antonio Tarver once again, since he’s already beaten both of them soundly. Whatever the case, Hopkins no longer appears to have the stamina to fight hard for 12-rounds over every fight and his punch output has dropped off to a trickle in his last three fights.

He certainly can’t count on wrestling his way to victory every time out because that kind of thing isn’t crowd pleasing. At the same time, he’ll eventually fight an opponent that is a better wrestler than himself and then he’ll end up losing. As such, he’s better off probably just retiring rather than fighting on an only embarrassing himself further by losing again.