If anyone is to beat Gennady Golovkin before he eventually retires, he needs to meet the Kazak on his own best night and hope the finest all-round fighter in boxing turns up with a black eye and the idiot grin of someone who has just been mugged.
“I am the future,” Golovkin said before destroying the unbeaten American Dominic Wade in two rounds at the Inglewood Forum in Los Angeles on Saturday. He is also the recent past and the present of his sport, a genuine draw-card in what everyone knew was going to be a flat period after the alleged retirement of Floyd Mayweather, one win short of a half-century.
Carl Froch, who declined an offer to come out of retirement and meet Golovkin at super-middleweight, is one of the few doubters. “I see him getting hit with shots,” he says. “He walks through them to land his, but he’s wide open coming forward. I’m not on the GGG bandwagon.”
With all due respect to one of our finest champions in recent years, from this keyboard there is nobody to touch Golovkin at or either side of 11st 7lb. Indeed, if noises about a Mayweather comeback pan out, that is still the fight boxing needs, even at some ridiculous catchweight.
For now GGG, garlanded with endorsements and cheered raucously wherever he goes in his adopted country, is officially an America hero. He got his biggest purse, $2m, on Saturday; he should soon be nudging that way higher – especially if he fights an opponent more credible and marketable than Wade.
Golovkin toyed with Wade, whose pre-fight assertion that the four-belt champion was “basic and up and down” was cruelly turned back on him. The one who went down, up, down, up and down again was the game, bewildered kid from Largo, Maryland.
Golovkin decked the challenger for practice in the first round, put him down with a right to the shoulder to finish off earlier cuffs to his confused head, and finally kept him on the canvas for the full count at the end of the second.
His main threats from these islands, probably in this order, bring the added value of British TV money: James DeGale, who should have minimum trouble defending his IBF title against the nondescript Rogelio Medina in Washington on Saturday; the undefeated WBO champion Billy Joe Saunders, forced to pull out of his title fight against Max Bursak in London on the same night because of a hand injury; and, so his dad keeps telling us, the British champion Chris Eubank Jr.
There is also, of course, Amir Khan. Having campaigned most of his professional career at light-welter and welter, he steps up to middleweight to fight the WBC champion Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvárez in Las Vegas two Saturdays from now, knowing an upset would place him in pole position for a shot Golovkin.
However, win or lose, Khan has his sights set on revenge against Danny García – perhaps because the man who took his welterweight title off him has been mentioned as a potential comeback opponent for Mayweather, who twice reneged on fights with Khan.
And, curiously, Alvárez doesn’t sound as keen as he did a few months ago.
He told reporters last week: “I want to have that fight. I want to give that to the fans. I’m just not sure when.” That’s fighting talk – if you’re wearing a pinstripe suit and have a damp stogie sticking out the side of your mouth.
It is risky to call a fighter ageless, because they all get old. But Golovkin, now 34, is aging gracefully and with increasing menace, his innate talent, boxing IQ and natural strength the foundation of his ringcraft. He is on a par with Mayweather, Bernard Hopkins, Winky Wright, Kostya Tszyu and Crisanto Espana – the wise guys of this and recent eras – for sheer ring intelligence.
It is his power that fans remember, though. Americans (fans and suits) love Golovkin because he knocks people out; he has 14 clean count-outs among his 32 stoppages in 35 fights. So a round of applause for Mehdi Bouadla, Ian Gardner and Amar Amari, the only opponents to go the distance with him, all in the space of 12 months about nine years ago.
There was another treat on the BoxNation undercard – apart from the ever excellent and out-there, back-here-in-the-studio asides of the Steves, Bunce and Lillis – the very clever Román González. The Nicaraguan flyweight, probably No2 to Golovkin as pound-for-pound best in the world, had a tougher assignment in his fifth defence of his WBC title, taken 12 rounds for only the seventh time in 45 fights, by the 30-year-old Puerto Rican McWilliams Aroyo.
González moves, thinks and hits with purpose, wasting nothing, cashing in on every mistake of his opponent. Aroyo’s task was made no easier when the sole of his right shoe came off in the fourth round, meaning he had to box with tape around his foot, which reduced traction when throwing a right.
Competing with González with two good shoes is hard enough without the handicap of such an unusual wardrobe malfunction. But he tried all the way.
It brought to mind the wet, wild night in Bangkok 62 years ago when the world bantamweight champion Jimmy Carruthers and his Thai challenger, Chamroen Songkitrat, went 12 rounds barefoot, to better get a grip on the soaked canvas in the outdoor National Stadium. That wasn’t their only problem. Twice during the downpour the ring lights exploded, showering them in glass.
Songkitrat had the worst of it. After soaking up the rain and Jimmy’s left hooks for several rounds, he got back to near level terms near the end, only to lose by two clear rounds on the lone judgment of the referee Fred Henneberry – who, like Carruthers, was Australian.
The 24-year-old champion announced his retirement the following day – and, inevitably, made an unsuccessful comeback 10 years later – but was lured back to fisticuffs in later life, stripping to his underpants to quieten an ambitious troublemaker in his fabled Bells Hotel in Woolloomooloo, near Sydney’s red-light district. A no-nonsense wharf labourer in his younger days (and a tireless campaigner for unions and world peace), the Sydney-born son of English migrants did not lose many, in or out of the ring.
González says he would like to move up in weight. Carruthers would have given him a good argument at bantamweight, with or without shoes.
