By Frank Warren
So Chris Eubank snr has no doubt that his pugilistic progeny Chris jnr would wallop Gennady Golovkin. Right now.
“Christopher possesses all the attributes needed to beat Golovkin,” opines the born-again Johnny English. “It’s a tough fight but Junior beats him in my view.” And naturally, Chris-the-lad concurs.
”Golovkin has got weaknesses that I feel I can exploit… I think he’s easy to hit and I don’t think he’s fought anyone who’s really been there to try and win,” he says. Really? Well, David Lemieux certainly wasn’t there as a dance partner and look what happened to him!
As John McEnroe used to say “You cannot be serious!”
Of course, the Eubanks have a fight to sell against a so-so American on a depleted Sheffield bill this weekend but surely pater must be having a laugh.
But if he really does want to put his boy in with currently the most fearsome fighter in the world, perhaps they should reporting to the Child Protection Agency.
Golovkin is so good that you can be sure no-one (apparently apart from Eubank and Son) will be banging on his door demanding their appointment with fear.
There’s no doubt he is the best pound-for-pounder around at the moment and after his pulsating performance against Lemieux, a highly creditable fellow world champion, he is surely right up there in the mix of all-time great middleweight kingpins alongside Sugar Ray Robinson, Carlos Monzon, Marvin Hagler and Bernard Hopkins.
Triple G actually got back to a bit of boxing, which he is so good at. I have always said he had a great jab which sometimes he has disregarded to land his best shots, taking the odd one himself in the process. But this time he was punch perfect. He never put a fist wrong.
He can box, he can punch, and he’s certainly more exciting and now more popular with the fans than Floyd Mayweather, whom he has superseded as the world’s favourite fighter.
You could gauge this from the way the sell-out crowd at Madison Square Garden booed when Mayweather’s name was mentioned in the post-fight ring interviews.
While back-footer Mayweather was the master of negating his opponent’s moves, go-forward Golovkin is the proverbial merchant of menace.
Although born and raised in Kazakhstan he now lives in California and has a growing US fan base, even though the Kazakh population there is hardly huge. His appeal goes right across the board.
It helps that his English is good, if a little fractured, but he certainly has the gift of the jab!
BoxNation commentator John Rawling summed it up neatly. “He’s a middleweight who jabs like a cruiserweight.”
Moreover he is ruthlessly efficient. He hardly ever seems to break sweat as he hunts down his prey. What’s not to like about him?
He comes across as a really pleasant, decent guy, with a ready smile and a kind word afterwards for those he has brutally vanquished.
His record has now stretched to 34 fights without defeat, including 21 successive stoppages. To put that into context, his knock-out percentage is now better than Mike Tyson’s after the same amount of bouts.
In his eight rounds stoppage of Lemieux, Golovokin threw a massive total of 359 jabs, 170 of which connected, roughly 21 scoring jabs a round which, as Compubox stats revealed, was astonishingly four times the middleweight average.
This was Golovkin’s first pay-per-view appearance and for years HBO’s backing promoter Tom Loeffler has attempted to get the sport’s biggest names to share the ring with a warrior who collects belts like Imelda Marcos used to hoard shoes.150,000 bought the fight and Loeffler will be looking to build on that.
He may be 33, but he is clearly in his prime.
Golovkin is the mandatory challenger for the full WBC belt so the winner of the Miguel Cotto-Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez in Las Vegas in November 21 fight will have only 15 days to agree to a Golovkin bout or be stripped of a title that will go to Golovkin. Mexican Alvarez, characteristically, declares himself willing to face Golovkin but Puerto Rico’s Cotto seems to be prevaricating by insisting that Golvokin drops down to a catch-weight of around 156lbs, even though the official 160lbs middleweight title would be at stake.
Understandably Golovkin, now the holder of the IBF, IBO, WBA Super and WBC interim titles, is unlikely to agree so if Cotto wins and the WBC strip him for failing to comply with the regulations, GGG can further unify the division without throwing another punch.
There has been some chat about Andy Lee meeting Golovkin next year but this is highly premature as the Irishman first has to defend his WBO title against Billy Joe Saunders in Manchester on December 19 – a fight I believe Saunders will win.
Whether he would relish taking on Golovkin would be up to him of course, but he is aware just how tough an ask it would be so he’d need to be paid a hell of a stash of money!
At this moment Golovkin seems to be running out of foes, so perhaps they should update the old line first used when the great Cuban heavyweight Teofilo Stevenson was knocking them all over in the Olympics where some boxers competing in eliminating bouts seemed so reluctant to win they appeared not to be trying. “The winner meets Golovkin – and the loser meets him twice!”
And by the way, the official crowd of 20,548 at the Garden in New York for a contest between a Kazakh and a Canadian surely is testimony to the fact boxing is as alive and punching now as it was when Ali and Frazier first fought there before a similarly capacity audience in 1971
