Boxing News Boxing News
So, Curtis Stevens is the next victim for Gennady Golovkin then…sorry, I meant opponent. The pair clash tonight at New York’s famed Madison Square Garden Theater.
In a conversation about this upcoming fight on Sky Sports, Darren Barker, the IBF middleweight champion, recently said ‘Let’s not get carried away here, as good as Golovkin is, he is just a man, he is beatable’.
Yes, he is just a man, yes he is beatable, but then isn’t every boxer? We quantify the man’s skill set as a boxer, we look at his attributes and we say how good we think he is or might be.
I can understand Darren’s position here, he is also a champion in this weight division and the other alternative was to say ‘Yeah he’s pretty awesome, unstoppable in fact, I can’t see anyone beating him at the moment, not me nor any of the division’s other champions’.
That is the truth, though.
Barker, Sergio Martinez, Peter Quillin, those are the other champions, and they won’t beat Golovkin. Quillin would stand the best chance in my opinion.
Curtis Stevens is a tough cookie, don’t get me wrong and it will be interesting to see what he can do against a man whose record at the moment stands 27-0-0 with 24 KO’s. That’s a 89% KO ratio.
Golovkin hasn’t gone the distance in a fight since mid-2008 and his level of recent opposition have not been push overs. The last four fights have been Grzegorz Proksa, Gabriel Rosado, Nobuhiro Ishida and Matthew Macklin. They are decent fighters, maybe with the exception of Ishida, but he is durable and Golovkin is the only man to have stopped him.
He dropped Macklin, Ishida and Proksa hard, and he busted up Rosado pretty badly, so badly in fact Rosado’s corner threw in the towel in the seventh round.
Golovkin has been around for a while now, he had a huge amateur career, winning silver in the 2004 Athens Olympics, gold in the 2002 Asian games, gold in the 2003 World championships and gold in the 2004 Asian championships.
His amateur record was something like 345-5. And in that amateur process, he faced people like Matvey Korobov, Andy Lee, Andre Dirrell and Lucian Bute, who he stopped.
So with all of that amateur pedigree, Golovkin knows his way around the ring and technically he is outstanding. What makes him an even bigger challenge is the fact that he has naturally heavy hands, he is a born puncher, nearly every opponent faced or trainer that has had him on the pads has said how incredibly hard he hits.
So there you have it, a wrecking machine of a puncher with an outstanding boxing skill set, who has made everyone who has faced him in the pro game look several classes below him.
Curtis Stevens, will be game, no doubt. Similarly, he can punch a bit too with his record standing at 25-3-0 and 18 KO’s. Those losses on his record are to Andre Dirrell, who is a silky smooth boxer, the same Dirrell that Golovkin beat in the amateurs. Marcos Primera and Jesse Brinkley are the other losses, and if the man is losing to the Primeras and the Brinkleys of this world, then what chance does he have against Golovkin?
He has earned his title shot; it’s just a shame for him that he couldn’t have had a crack at one of the other champions. Golovkin, or 3G as he is known, will stop Stevens in the middle rounds.
Golovkin is great for the sport, he is really exciting to watch and I believe he will truly be a huge star, enjoy him, this…beatable man.
