By Sean McDaniel: If Chad Dawson (30-1, 17 KO’s) wants to improve his chances for success in beating WBC light heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins (5-5-2, 32 KO’s) on April 28th, then Dawson needs to make sure he fights a clean fight without bumping, throwing blows and especially not picking Hopkins up and depositing him on the canvas. It’s not that Dawson ever throws low blows or bumps his opponents, but he needs to be careful in this fight because Hopkins is an older fighter and Dawson need to mess things up for himself by roughing Hopkins up.

The fight will be held at the Boardwalk Hall, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. It’s debatable whether a lot of fans will show up for this fight but the ones that do show up will likely favor Hopkins. It probably won’t have any effect on Dawson, though, because he badly wants to beat Hopkins and would likely be energized even if he was fighting in front of a hostile crowd of 15,000 fans. For Dawson, it’s really personal, as he wants to badly beat Hopkins for the taunting he did of Dawson leading up to their fight last October, a bout that ended in a 2nd round TKO win for Dawson. The result was overturned on appeal by Hopkins with the World Boxing Council and California State Athletic Commission changing the result to a 2nd round no contest.

Dawson above all has to make sure he doesn’t bump Hopkins and hurt him by causing the aging warrior to hit the canvas where we could have a second straight no contest fight. That would be a real pity of that happened.