By Steve Kim
There was a bit of controversy when trainer Dominic Ingle decided to call off the fight in the fifth round of Kell Brook showdown with middleweight king Gennady Golovkin from this past weekend at the O2 Arena in London, England.
It turns out that Brook suffered a broken right eye socket in the second round from the heavy hands of Golovkin. When he saw his boxer was in trouble in the fifth, Ingle threw in towel to have the contest stopped.
Brook, who is the IBF's welterweight champion, moved up by thirteen pounds to challenge Golovkin at 160.
"In the second round if you recall, over in the corner to our right, their left, (Brook) motioned or touched his face like something was wrong with it,"said Golovkin's trainer, Abel Sanchez, to BoxingScene.com.
"I noticed that because I'm paying attention to Brook just as much as I'm paying attention to Golovkin. If you remember the Mike Perez-Magomed(Abdulsalamov) fight, Magomed was complaining about his face hurting on the right side and once that happens your mind is not on the fight.
"So it was just a matter of time before Gennady made him pay. But in the corner I'm sure Dominic Ingle noticed that because we're supposed to pay attention as coaches, the reaction from round-to-round and I'm sure he noticed something was wrong and the did the right thing."
After some success in the second and third rounds, Golovkin had begun to firmly re-establish physical control of the fight and was having a huge fifth frame.
"There was no reason for it to continue," opined Sanchez, "as defenseless as he was in the fifth round."
Steve Kim is the news editor for BoxingScene.com.
