NEW YORK – Johnathon Banks and Gennadiy Golovkin spent more than double the amount of time together in preparation for their second fight as a team than they did for his fourth-round knockout of Steve Rolls.
Banks, who replaced longtime trainer Abel Sanchez as Golovkin’s chief second earlier this year, hopes that helps the 37-year-old Golovkin display what they’ve worked on more than he could do during his brief bout with Rolls on June 8 at Madison Square Garden. An optimistic Banks estimated that they spent “three or four” weeks in an actual training camp prior to the Rolls fight.
For Golovkin’s middleweight title fight against Sergiy Derevyanchenko on Saturday night at Madison Square Garden, Banks stated that they worked together for at least eight weeks in Big Bear Lake, California.
“I think in anything, as humans, whatever you consistently do becomes your habit,” Banks said before a press conference Wednesday at The Garden. “And the longer you’ve done it, the harder those habits are to break. So, trying to create not so much of just new habits, trying to just continue to create and bring out G’s talent. Because he’s got loads of talent that’s, to me, that’s like untapped talent. The goal is every day to do more, do more to bring out that talent. But it’s gotta be consistently doing the same thing, so it can adapt to him, and he can unconsciously do these things. And that’s the more important part about having a longer camp. That’s the only benefit of having a longer camp, compared to a shorter camp.”
Neither Banks nor Golovkin (39-1-1, 35 KOs) was specific about new things they want to apply versus Derevyanchenko (13-1, 10 KOs), a much more proven opponent than Toronto’s Rolls (19-1, 10 KOs).
“Indeed, we had more time for this camp than previously,” Golovkin said. “We have an understanding between each other, and we tried a lot of different things. Of course, we always need more time than we allowed. But the more time we have, the more we can try and the better we’ll be prepared.”
Derevyanchenko contends Golovkin looked similar in defeating Rolls to how the former middleweight champion competed when Sanchez manned his corner. Skeptics insist it’ll be difficult to change Golovkin’s style all that much because he has had 41 professional fights and roughly 350 amateur matches.
“I didn’t see any differences in him, but the fight went by very fast,” Derevyanchenko said. “Naturally, I would say there’s gotta be some differences in him because he has a different trainer, a different voice, in his corner. I just didn’t get a chance to see it.”
Derevyanchenko conceded, though, that more time together could prove to be all Golovkin and Banks needed to implement improvements in their 12-round, 160-pound title fight.
“You’ve gotta understand – they just started working together for that fight,” Derevyanchenko said. “They didn’t have that long of a camp. I don’t know. It might be different this time, but it’s hard to say that I noticed any changes in him in that last fight.”
Kazakhstan’s Golovkin is about a 5-1 favorite over Ukraine’s Derevyanchenko, 33. They’ll fight for the vacant IBF and IBO middleweight titles in the main event of an eight-fight card DAZN will stream live (7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT).
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.
