Chad Dawson and his entire team are highly confident ahead of their October 15 date with light heavyweight world champion Bernard Hopkins in Los Angeles, and Dawson feels that reuniting with trainer John Scully has given him the spark he's going to need:
"I got bored," Dawson said. "I lost to Pascal, and that's a fight I should have never lost. I felt like if I had Scully in my corner for that fight, that wouldn't have happened. Just going back to recent fights, my performance, I feel like I started to slouch a little bit, get lazy. I think Scully is that trainer that has what it takes to bring the best out of me.
"That's why I'm back with Scully. I don't care what the critics say. People say that I use trainers; I switch trainers from here to there. But at the end of the day, I have to do what's best for my career."
It doesn't really take a critic to see that Dawson switches trainers too frequently to get the most out of himself or their guidance, to be honest, but this is his second go-around with Scully, one of the more underrated trainers in the game today, so while it seems a bit mad to switch trainers as close as he did to a fight this big, the initial "get comfortable" period probably wasn't a big deal for the two.
Still, this is Dawson's third trainer in three fights. When he lost to Pascal, Eddie Mustafa Muhammad, another fine trainer, was thrown under the bus. Dawson made the highly-publicized move to Emanuel Steward for one fight, looking like the same old fighter against Adrian Diaconu on May 21. And now he's back with Scully, who is being assisted by Winky Wright, a former Hopkins opponent.
Dawson (30-1, 17 KO) is actually a slight betting favorite right now, with odds of about -140 compared to +120 for Hopkins (52-5-2, 32 KO).