By Keith Idec
NEW YORK – David Lemieux has knocked out 86 percent of his professional opponents, but Abel Sanchez doesn’t believe the hard-hitting Lemieux will be the biggest puncher Gennady Golovkin has faced.
Golovkin’s trainer thinks Brooklyn’s Curtis Stevens (27-5, 20 KOs), whom Kazakhstan’s Golovkin stopped after eight rounds in November 2013, is a more dangerous puncher than Montreal’s Lemieux (34-2, 31 KOs).
“In my opinion, Curtis is a harder puncher,” Sanchez said Tuesday before the Golovkin-Lemieux press conference at Madison Square Garden. “Curtis was a harder puncher because he’s a snappy puncher. David is more of a George Foreman, thudding kind of puncher. You have to be standing in front of him, with your hands down, for David to hurt you. But Curtis was very sharp and very quick. So, to me, Curtis was a bigger puncher.”
That doesn’t mean, though, that Lemieux can’t hurt the heavily favored Golovkin (33-0, 30 KOs) when they fight for Lemieux’s IBF middleweight championship and Golovkin’s interim WBC 160-pound crown Oct. 17 at Madison Square Garden (HBO Pay-Per-View; $59.95 in HD).
“Everybody that gets hit with a good shot from a good fighter at this level is going to get hurt,” Sanchez said. “It just depends on how you react to it – your conditioning, your history in fights, as far as what you’ve experienced. Anybody can get hurt – it doesn’t matter who you are.”
Keith Idec covers boxing for The Record and Herald News, of Woodland Park, N.J., and BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.