By Allan Fox: Floyd Mayweather Jr. thinks that WBC light heavyweight champion Chad Dawson (31-2, 17 KO’s) made a big mistake by agreeing to drain down from 175 pounds to fight WBA/WBC super middleweight champion Andre Ward (26-0, 14 KO’s) at 168 in their fight on September 8th in Oakland, California. Dawson looked weak and weight drained for that fight, and ended up getting stopped in the 10th round in a one-sided fight.
Mayweather said to fighthype.com “If I was Chad Dawson, me myself, I wouldn’t have lost that weight. And he went to Andre’s hometown. It should have been on neutral turf.”
A lot of boxing fans felt the same way that Mayweather Jr. did about this fight. They wondered what made Dawson give in and agree to fight Ward at 168 lbs without a catchweight and in Ward’s own hometown of Oakland, California. Dawson put himself in the position to get beaten by doing both of those things.
It could have been that Dawson was a little overconfident thinking he give into both of those items and still win the fight because he’d been winning for so long at light heavyweight. However, one got the sense that Dawson was making a mistake by seeing how thin he was when he drained down to make weight during the week of the fight.
Dawson’s face and upper body looked visibly thinner and reminded a lot of fans of how thin and weight drained Allan Green, a former Ward opponent, had looked when he drained himself down to fight Ward in the Super Six tournament in June of 2010. Green looked weak in losing a lopsided 12 round unanimous decision to Ward in that fight. Dawson was pretty much in the same boat, as he never looked good even for a moment in the Ward fight.
Dawson will be moving back up in weight to defend his WBC light heavyweight title against the contenders in that division, but he may have lost a lot of respect from boxing fans for the way he was so easily beaten by Ward. It’s not going to be easy for Dawson to make boxing fans forget that loss.
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