By Edward Chaykovsky
Former undisputed middleweight champion and unified light heavyweight champion, Bernard Hopkins, will be watching Saturday's anticipated contest with a lot of interest.
Gennady "GGG" Golovkin (36-0, 33 KOs) will defend the IBF, WBA, IBO, WBC middleweight titles against mandatory challenger Daniel Jacobs (32-1, 29 KOs) at New York's Madison Square Garden.
Golovkin with 17 title defenses at middleweight, is hot on the heels of reaching, and potentially breaking, Hopkins' middleweight record of 20 defenses.
Hopkins, 52 years old, had wanted to face Golovkin not that long ago and was willing to squeeze down to 168-pounds to get that match done.
The fight will never happen, as Hopkins retired last December after suffering a stoppage loss to Joe Smith.
If he was still in his prime, when he terrorized the entire middleweight division, Hopkins is pretty confident that he would handle someone like Golovkin.
“I know how I’d go about it,” Hopkins said to scribe Bernard Fernandez. “He’s a stalker, an intimidator, coming to seek-and-destroy with power and constant pressure. I had good success against guys like that because I had the mental discipline to take away what they did best."
Hopkins recently made a bold prediction, when he backed Jacobs to pull off a major upset on Saturday night. He warned all of the critics that the "biggest upset" is coming this weekend.
Golovkin is feared for his power, but Hopkins is more impressed with the punching ability of Jacobs.
“Danny Jacobs is the sharper, crisper, more accurate puncher,” Hopkins said. “`GGG’ is more of a thumper. He’s heavy-handed. He’s like a quicker, smaller George Foreman, who clubs you upside the head. I never had either kind of power, but I fought guys who were thumpers. Joe Lipsey was like that, and Robert Allen and Antwun Echols, too.
"Now, Roy Jones Jr. in his prime was not a thumper; he was a quick, sharp accurate puncher. When you get hit just right by a guy like that, which Danny Jacobs is, he can turn the lights off just like that, and not with a dimmer. Thumpers turn the lights off with a dimmer. It goes down slow. I saw Willie Monroe Jr. (a fifth-round TKO victim of Golovkin on May 16, 2015) and he talked about fighting `GGG.’ He told me he had more of a thumping kind of power, like getting hit with a log or a bat. He said you start getting numb, until your whole body shuts down.”
“What I see is Danny Jacobs boxing the hell out of `GGG’ in the first half of the fight, then the real fight begins. Wait and see.”
