OK, I’m operating through an imperfect prism here – a few snatches of video highlights and some trusted fight reports – but one thing seems as clear on Monday morning as it did on Saturday night: Gennady Golovkin deserves to be rated at or near the top of boxing’s pound-for-pound list.
In putting away the outrageously muscled Willie Monroe Jr inside six rounds, he delivered the result and performance his backers expected of him: a 20th-straight stoppage win, securing his dominance at middleweight, whatever other claimants say.
What is more significant, though, is the Kazakh’s determination to fight twice more in 2015 – against anyone willing to step into the ring with him, from Miguel Cotto to Saúl Álvarez, to Andre Ward to Floyd Mayweather.
Now a couple of those bouts – Ward and Mayweather – almost certainly will not happen. Ward, who operates at a higher weight, is yet to rehabilitate himself fully after health and legal entanglements, and Mayweather, the welterweight king, wouldn’t share a ring with Triple G if he were armed with a nuclear bomb. Even at catchweight.
Monroe – more famous for being the great nephew of the eponymous “Worm” Monroe, who beat an early-career Marvin Hagler, than his boxing talent – echoed what nearly every Golovkin opponent has said: “I was getting hit in the kidneys and the hips and I couldn’t feel my legs.”
Golovkin hurts people even when he doesn’t mean to knock them out. Ask Matthew Macklin and Martin Murray, who will testify that Gennady’s setup shots, the ones that manoeuvre an opponent into the best hitting zone, are as solid as his full-strength blows.
The man is a freak, pure and simple.
He is also a superb technical boxer and an entertainer. He says that, when he chose to stand and trade with Monroe in the fourth round and took a few shots, it was for the benefit of the fans who’d paid to see a fight and not a one-sided beating.
I believe him, because he’s good enough to pull that off. Technically he is head and shoulders above any middleweight in the world.
Golovkin’s determination to please fans who spend a lot of money to watch him is admirable – and a throwback. He wants to knock guys out. It couldn’t be more simple.
I remember a conversation I had in a coffee shop in Las Vegas years ago with the then editor of Boxing News, Claude Abrams, and Kevin Kelley, who famously warred with Naseem Hamed at Madison Square Garden.
“What,” asked Kelley, “do boxing fans want: your fancy-Dan European boxing or a fight?” A few American fans sitting nearby chorused as one: “Knock the guy out! Knock the guy out!”
End of conversation.
No fans are as bloodthirsty as the Americans. While we tend to appreciate the finer points of the art on this side of the Atlantic, there they love to see a guy flat on his back with blood dribbling through his teeth.
Golovkin is 33 and not really a convincing trash talker. But he seems to have steadily won over the Americans, especially on the west coast, to where he has moved his family.
He has a window of maybe three or four years to establish himself as one of the very best fighters of this era.
I think he’ll do it – but I’m not sure who he’ll do it against.
