By Dan Ambrose: Former two time light heavyweight champion Chad Dawson (30-1, 17 KO’s) has reportedly ended his training with trainer Emanuel Steward due to the 29-year-old Dawson wanting to stick close to his family in Connecticut rather than traveling to Detroit to train with Steward for Dawson’s October 15th fight against WBC light heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins (52-5-2, 32 KO’s) at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California.

Steward told Tim Sparks at the Queensbury Rules that he only found out about it a couple of days ago by Dawson’s lawyer. Steward had been waiting patiently for Dawson to show up to training camp, as he was late and he wanted to get him started.

Steward said “I’ve been waiting on him to show up every week. His lawyer called and said he wants to be closer to home. I don’t know. I respect he wants to be close to his family, but I’m definitely not in agreement with him. Whoever it is, it’s not a good idea to be changing at the last moment. This is a very serious fight with Bernard. You can’t do that with Bernard. He’s got a solid team. You’ve got to respect him.”

I actually think this won’t hurt Dawson that much, because he didn’t seem to be jelling with Steward’s style that he was trying to teach him. If anything, Dawson looked worse in the one fight that Steward trained him for against Adrian Diaconu last May. Dawson fought in a straight up European style in that fight, throwing a lot of jabs and single shots. He looked stiff, uncomfortable and heavy-legged and not as fluid as before Steward took over. In the past, Dawson has been trained by Floyd Mayweather Sr., Dan Birmingham, John Scully and Eddie Mustafa Muhammad. The trainer that seems to have had the biggest influence on Dawson’s style was Mayweather Sr., who really did a good job of tightening up Dawson’s defense and having him throw punches from a lot of different angles. However, Dawson broke with him anyway, and things haven’t seemed quite the same since then.

I think Dawson will beat Hopkins no matter who trains him. This is a case where Dawson just has too many skills, boxing knowledge and youth for Hopkins to beat him. He’s a style nightmare for Hopkins and with his speed, size and tendency to avoid fighting on the inside, Dawson is going to give Hopkins a lot problems in this fight. It does beyond strategy when you have a fighter like Dawson with so many advantages.

What Dawson needs now is just someone to help with his conditioning so that he can be in top shape, and he’ll do the rest on his own. He doesn’t need to have a trainer like Steward tinkering with his style at this stage in Dawson’s game. He’s too advanced for the major changes that Steward was trying to make for his game. The only plus I saw from the brief period of time that Steward was working with Dawson was in making Dawson more aggressive, but anyone could see that Dawson needed to be more aggressive after watching him lose to Jean Pascal last year.

Dawson was too calculated in that fight, and didn’t really let his hands go until the 11th. The fight was stopped unfortunately due to a bad cut that Dawson experienced in that round after clashing heads with Pascal. At the time of the stoppage, Pascal was badly hurt and Dawson was flurrying on him.

I’d like to see Dawson back in with Mayweather Sr. or someone like that. He needs a trainer that can take advantage of his slickness and bring more of that out, because that’s what makes Dawson so good.