On Monday, Ryan Garcia gave his opinion. He was asked for it, so he gave us it.
The subject was Gennadiy Golovkin, the former world middleweight champion from Kazakhstan, and the question put to Garcia had to do with whether Golovkin belonged in the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
Speaking as a guest on Inside The Ring, Garcia, a man whose best “win” is a tainted one later annulled, then said with a straight face and no hint of irony: “Triple G [Golovkin] has no really great victories. Who did he beat? He was one of the superstars in boxing at a certain time for a long time. I will give him that. But it’s just a little hard for me to put [someone like that] in the Hall of Fame. We’re talking about the Hall of Fame. We’re not talking about eras. We’re talking overall – all of boxing. I just don’t see him as a Hall of Famer. I can’t give him that nod.”
Fair enough. That’s his opinion. It’s like Max Kellerman, sitting alongside him, said: “That’s a legitimate point of view.”
Max Kellerman, of course, or the Artist Formerly Known as Max Kellerman, was once paid handsomely to give his erudite opinions on HBO when boxing broadcasters still valued opinions which carried insight and weight. Now he just tees up others to say the things he either cannot or is unwilling to say in 2025.
Anyway, later that same day, once clips of this “discussion” hit social media, fans started to give their opinions, too. Some supported Garcia’s view of Golovkin, but not many. Most were instead quick to call him a “moron” or a “f****** idiot” and suggest Garcia himself will never come close to matching Golovkin’s credentials, much less do enough to one day reach the Hall of Fame.
But still, what do they know? Many of them are just fans, trolls, haters. Chances are Garcia wouldn’t even acknowledge their opinion if he saw it, never mind consider them experts. They know nothing about boxing, he would say. Ask me about boxing. I am the boxer.
But the thing is, where there is a platform, there is an opinion, and Garcia on Golovkin generated plenty of opinions this week. It even became part of the week’s news cycle, with more than one reporter transcribing the quotes verbatim and then asking ChatGPT to make their article bland but legible in lieu of offering their own opinion on the matter and potentially jeopardising their relationship with either Garcia or those at The Ring. For them, the comment was suitably controversial to make any article work as clickbait. All they needed was someone else’s opinion and have it be a dumb one. In Ryan Garcia, they had their man. Their source. Their spokesman. The voice of a generation.
From those tweets and news stories came a few opinion pieces, or columns, like this one. They, unlike the news stories, were for obvious reasons harder to find and most of them just stated the obvious: Ryan Garcia was talking rubbish. And yet, is it not true that just as Garcia is not qualified to judge Gennadiy Golovkin’s credentials as a Hall-of-Fame fighter, those who write opinion pieces, such as this one, have no right to judge the opinions of someone like Garcia having not stepped into the ring and boxed professionally themselves? That would be Garcia’s argument, I’m sure, even if his own opinions on politics, conspiracies and other races were hardly backed by a wealth of experience or indeed knowledge at the time they were forced upon us. In fact, throughout his career Garcia has, thanks to social media, shown a propensity to tell the world everything that is going on in his head, regardless of the lack of knowledge in that head, and regardless of whether it might hurt – his career, other people.
Still, it’s just opinions, right? Those opinions are no different than his opinion on Golovkin, or the opinions of fans who then criticised Garcia’s opinion on Golovkin. Everybody’s entitled to an opinion in 2025 and, even better, everybody now has the opportunity to offer you one these days. Below, for example, right there in the comment section, one might find some opinions. One or two, if lucky, will pertain to the opinion column itself and, if so, will likely express confusion and exasperation with the approach taken. They will demand brevity and more clarity and they might call the author of the opinion column names, like “moron” or “f****** idiot”. They might tell him that his opinion, if he has the balls to finally offer one, is actually wrong, wide of the mark, dumb. It won’t matter that the person commenting writes only social media posts, and reads only autobiographies pumped out by the Furys, because they are entitled to their opinion, always. Others, the ones with TikTok brain and no desire to even read this meandering nonsense, will instead take the headline, focus solely on the name included (Ryan Garcia), and proceed to explain in the comment section what they think of said person or said issue. Their opinion, after all, is the only one that really matters. So what if they neglected to read the piece itself. So what if their opinion is cruel, unfair or, heaven forbid, wrong. It’s just an opinion, remember. It can never be wrong.
In fact, everybody mentioned so far should be allowed their opinion, in my opinion. The fighter should be allowed his opinion, as should the The Ring employees who encouraged it, and the fans who tweeted their dismay, and the reporters who avoided having to state their opinion by consulting ChatGPT for clickbait, and the opinion columnists, and the forum posters, and you – yes, you.
The only person in all this who doesn’t deserve an opinion on the topic of whether Gennadiy Golovkin has warranted a place in the Hall of Fame is perhaps the drug cheat; the fighter who saw the one standout win he has managed as a pro (against Devin Haney in 2024) tarnished by two failed performance-enhancing drug tests. If it wasn’t enough to watch him still land big fights, which he did against Rolando Romero in May, now it seems as though we must endure the continued platforming of Ryan Garcia and the rebranding of him as some kind of flawed genius. In this role, which he has embraced, people can pretend his opinion still counts and that it means something. The suggestion then is that nothing he did previously – two failed tests for ostarine – should come in the way of him offering this opinion and enjoying the privileges his sport extends to its most viral/vital stars.
Boxing, after all, needs him. It needs him in the ring, where Garcia still commands attention, and it needs him online, where his opinions have historically gestated and spread. It needs them, too: his opinions. It needs his opinions because his opinions tend to create discourse and division. It needs his opinions because they have a way of harvesting even more opinions.
Fine. Whatever. That is the world. But at what point does a fighter lose the right to voice their opinion, especially when discussing superior boxers who, as far as we know, never succumbed to the same temptation as the one who cut corners in pursuit of greatness? Surely, in a case like Garcia’s, the mere fact he was once caught with PEDs in his system voids anything he has to say about the merits of a Hall-of-Fame fighter.
At least if he is to offer an opinion on a Hall-of-Fame fighter, he should have picked one of the Hall-of-Fame fighters with whom he shares something in common. Then his opinion might have carried weight. Then we might all have called him an expert.
