By Dan Ambrose: Few boxing fans believe that 47-year-old WBC light heavyweight champion Bernard Hopkins will emerge on top against the younger 29-year-old challenger Chad Dawson on Saturday night. But Hopkins believes he’s going to beat Dawson and make it look easy in doing so.

Hopkins told RingTV “I’ve given you the evidence that I’m special. I’ve shown you that I’m a throwback…at age 47, I will spank this guy.”

This is pretty amusing. I wish I could say it ended there, because it didn’t. Hopkins went onto say that Jermain Taylor and Kelly Pavlik were messed up after Hopkins’ fights with them. I can agree with Hopkins in talking about Pavlik, but not Taylor. He briefly kept winning after beating Hopkins in back to back fights in 2005. Taylor’s downfall came two years later when he met up with Pavlik and tried to slug with him. That wasn’t Hopkins’ doing that messed Taylor up; it was Pavlik. And Pavlik fell apart after the Hopkins fight, but it seemed more because he started coasting and seemed to loss his ambition for the sport, perhaps because of the big money he had made. If Pavlik hadn’t met up with Sergio Martinez, he’d still likely be the WBC/WBO middleweight champ if he didn’t have the titles stripped from him for failing to make weight.

Hopkins is going to have problems against Dawson on Saturday night because he’s not as young, fast or powerful as him. Besides that, Hopkins always would have had problems with a fighter like Dawson even if he were in his 20s or 30s. Dawson is simply an outstanding boxer and he’s very hard to beat unless you’ve got blazing hand speed like Jean Pascal and an all out attack mode like him. Hopkins is too slow and isn’t as explosive as Pascal. As such, Dawson won’t be troubled in the last by Hopkins on Saturday night.

The only way I see Hopkins winning is if the judges give him the decision for old times sake rather than for what he’s actually doing in the ring. Some people naturally want to side with an older fighter out of sentimental reasons. I thought I saw some of that with Max Kellerman of HBO, who thought Hopkins did the better work against Dawson last October. I saw the same fight, and I still can’t see what Kellerman was looking at to get excited about what Hopkins was doing. He just looked like was running and holding to me. I saw nothing in his performance that suggested that he was getting the better of Dawson.