GOLOVKIN MUST LIVE IN PRESENT AND LOOK TO FUTURE, NOT BE COMPARED TO PAST LEGENDS JUST YET

Published

11 years ago

July 21, 2014

For someone with so relatively limited a professional resume, WBA/IBO middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin finds himself in a curious position.

The 32-year-old Golovkin (29-0, 26 KOs), who defends his alphabet titles against former IBF/WBA 160-pound champ Daniel Geale (30-2, 16 KOs) in the HBO-televised main event Saturday night in Madison Square Garden’s big arena, just might be, as a growing number of his devotees are claiming, the most pulverizing knockout artist in boxing today. His KO rate (a tick below 90 percent) is the highest ever for any middleweight champion. Pretty impressive stuff, right? But probably the most notable entry on “Triple G’s” list of victims is Curtis Stevens, whom the Kazakhstan-born, Germany-based fighter pounded so thoroughly that Stevens’ corner did not let their guy come out for the ninth round of a Nov. 2, 2013, title bout in Madison Square Garden Theater.

Stevens is a good fighter and a pretty tough customer, but is there anyone who would dare to compare him to, say, Sugar Ray Robinson? Bernard Hopkins? How about Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Sugar Ray Leonard?

The career of any fighter is gauged in large part by the quality of opponents he has faced and defeated. But some of the legendary names listed above already have been floated by Golovkin’s trainer, Abel Sanchez, as measuring sticks against whom Golovkin eventually will be compared, if he hasn’t reached that rarified level of accomplishment already. It is a giant leap of faith, but then again, there was a high school junior from Akron, Ohio – I believe his name is LeBron James – who was on the cover of Sports Illustrated – years ago. That kid – “The Chosen One,” SI proclaimed — was said to have the potential to become the best basketball player of all time. It seemed preposterous to lay that kind of burden on a 17–year-old, but, well, look at where King James is now.

Sanchez, in an interview with RingTV.com’s Lem Satterfield, had the temerity to suggest that Golovkin was currently behind Robinson and Hopkins in the highly exclusive pantheon of middleweight greats, but was moving up fast on the outside. Then, in a teleconference with the international media last Thursday, he added Hagler and Leonard to the star-studded items from Column A. Who knows? If Golovkin blows away Geale swiftly and emphatically, Sanchez might be inclined to expand Column A – that would be a lineup of historically revered middleweights that Golovkin could be paired against only in the realm of imagination – to include Harry Greb, Carlos Monzon and Jake LaMotta. Hey, it doesn’t cost anything to speculate.

“Ranking them behind those two people (Robinson and Hopkins), I was hoping that we could get the kind of fights that would showcase (Golovkin) in a way that would prove that statement that I made,” Sanchez explained of the more significant purpose of the matchup with Geale. “He definitely needs to fight Daniel in the manner that he’s fought some of his past opponents. Daniel has the ability to go 12 rounds. That is going to be the big issue for Gennady – to see if he can control and dominate a man who’s used to going 12 rounds and who throws as many punches as Daniel.”

No disrespect to Geale, whose only previous ring appearance in the United States saw him relinquish his IBF title to England’s Darren Barker on a mildly controversial split decision on Aug. 17, 2013, at the Revel Resort in Atlantic City, but the Aussie veteran doesn’t provide so stern a test that his conquest would serve to zoom Golovkin much further up the ladder to middleweight nirvana that Sanchez sees as his destiny. But there is a very real, and very intriguing, alternative for Golovkin to the dreamy mindscape of Column A. Let’s call it Column B, the names listed therein all belonging to active fighters who could offer “Triple G” the sort of matchups that actually would further advance his claim to indisputable greatness.

Tom Loeffler of K2 Promotions, notes that Golovkin is already well on the way to becoming a household name among even fringe fight fans. He will be appearing in his third bout at Madison Square Garden, but his first in the lower bowl of the big room, which is scaled for 11,000 seats or so with a near-capacity turnout expected. Should Golovkin extend his knockout streak to 17 against so credible an opponent as Geale, it could vault him to the fringes of real superstardom, a status which is partly based in boxing talent and partly in marketability. He’s not that far removed from such a designation already, having been a finalist for 2013 Fighter of the Year from the Boxing Writers Association of America (the winner was Floyd Mayweather Jr.) and being voted last year’s top fighter by readers of The Ring magazine.

Loeffler’s future wish list for Golovkin, whose power-punching has elevated his visibility in much the same way that heavyweight contender Deontay Wilder’s has (Wilder has won all 31 of his pro bouts inside the distance) and Mike Tyson’s did a generation earlier, is topped by newly crowned WBC middleweight titlist Miguel Cotto (39-4, 32 KOs), the future Hall of Famer who became the first Puerto Rican to win world championships in four weight classes when he forced Argentina’s Sergio Martinez to quit on his stool after 10 rounds on June 7 in Madison Square Garden. A unification showdown with Cotto, who has fought 11 times in all in New York City with nine of those bouts coming in the Garden, would be one of the most eagerly anticipated bouts that conceivably could be made at this time.

“My job as Gennady’s promoter is to look forward and to plan ahead,” Loeffler said. “Nobody on our team is underestimating what Daniel Geale brings to the table. He’s clearly the biggest challenge (to this point) for Gennady. With that being said, if everything goes the right way on July 26, it’s my job to strategize ahead for him. Certainly with Cotto and his big win against Sergio Martinez to win the WBC middleweight championship, he moves to the top of our list.

“But Gennady’s up for fighting anybody. If it’s a compelling fight, a pay-per-view fight, he would move up (to super middleweight) or he would move down (to junior middleweight). Right now he’s focused on Daniel Geale. The priority, if he beats Daniel, would be to start unifying the middleweight titles.”

At 32, Golovkin, a silver medalist at the 2004 Athens Olympics, does not have the luxury that higher schooler LeBron James had of a sun-kissed future that stretched to some far-off horizon. Golovkin is one of the fight game’s more delectable flavors of the moment, a solid foundation upon which to build, and he is in a deep weight class that offers lucrative options as well as those at 154 and 168 pounds. In addition to Cotto, mix ’n’ match possibilities include IBF middleweight champ Sam Solimon (44-11, 18 KOs), WBO champ Peter “Kid Chocolate” Quillin (31-0, 22 KOs), WBA super middleweight champ Andre Ward (27-0, 14 KOs), IBF super middle champ Carl Froch (33-2, 24 KOs), WBA junior middle champ Canelo Alvarez (44-1-1, 31 KOs) and maybe even WBC/WBA welterweight ruler Mayweather (46-0, 26 KOs), should he come up to meet Golovkin at some mutually acceptable catchweight. Even super middle contender Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (48-1, 32 KOs), who was in negotiations to fight Golovin until the deal fell apart, could work his way back into the mix.

Big fights, however, aren’t always that easy to put together, especially in today’s landscape of dueling promoters and pay-cable entities, which could have the effect of pushing some of the possibilities for Golovkin in Column B as far off to the side as those in Column A.

Still, it’s fun to daydream. Is Golovkin really as devastating a puncher as he appears to be? Or is this son of a Russian father and Korean mother mostly a product of manufactured hype, as is the case with doubting-Thomas types who are hesitant to climb aboard the Deontay Wilder bandwagon? Golovkin stands at a crossroads of sorts, where one path leads to certification as a fighter for the ages and another to possible exposure as something far less.

Asked about the source of his formidable power, Golovkin answered, “It is natural. My strength, my speed, my timing. It’s all that together.”

So we will all check in on Saturday, for any additional hints as to what makes Gennady Golovkin tick. If Geale’s trainer, Graham Shaw, is correct – he said that “if Daniel fights his absolute best, believe it beats Gennady’s best” – the legend of “Triple G” could be quashed in its relative infancy. Anything less than an exclamation-point victory also could have a deleterious effect, and maybe more so if the lead-in HBO bout, a WBC heavyweight eliminator between Bryant Jennings (18-0, 10 KOs) and Mike Perez (20-0-1, 12 KOs), proves to be a tough act to follow.

Sanchez thinks he knows how it all turns out.

“All those little attributes, all those pluses that Gennady has in my comparing him to Hagler and to Leonard and to Sugar Ray Robinson, those things will all be seen in time as he fights great fighters like he’s fighting on July 26,” he predicted with the confidence of someone who has looked into the future and been pleased by what he saw.

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Bernard Fernandez

Avila Perspective, Chap. 322: Super Welter Week in SoCal

Published

2 hours ago

April 18, 2025

David A. Avila

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Two below-the-radar super welterweight stars show off their skills this weekend from different parts of Southern California.

One in particular, Charles Conwell, co-headlines a show in Oceanside against a hard-hitting Mexican while another super welter star Sadriddin Akhmedov faces another Mexican hitter in Commerce.

Take your pick.

The super welterweight division is loaded with talent at the moment. If Terence Crawford remained in the division he would be at the top of the class, but he is moving up several weight divisions.

Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) faces Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs) a tall knockout puncher from Los Mochis at the Frontwave Arena in Oceanside, Calif. on Saturday April 19. DAZN will stream the Golden Boy Promotions card that also features undisputed flyweight champion Gabriela Fundora. We’ll get to her later.

Conwell might be the best super welterweight out there aside from the big dogs like Vergil Ortiz, Serhii Bohachuk and Sebastian Fundora.

If you are not familiar with Conwell he comes from Cleveland, Ohio and is one of those fighters that other fighters know about. He is good.

He has the James “Lights Out” Toney kind of in-your-face-style where he anchors down and slowly deciphers the opponent’s tools and then takes them away piece by piece. Usually it’s systematic destruction. The kind you see when a skyscraper goes down floor by floor until it’s smoking rubble.

During the Covid days Conwell fought two highly touted undefeated super welters in Wendy Toussaint and Madiyar Ashkeyev. He stopped them both and suddenly was the boogie man of the super welterweight division.

Conwell will be facing Mexico’s taller Garcia who likes to trade blows as most Mexican fighters prefer, especially those from Sinaloa. These guys will be firing H bombs early.

Fundora

Co-headlining the Golden Boy card is Gabriela Fundora (15-0, 7 KOs) the undisputed flyweight champion of the world. She has all the belts and Mexico’s Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1, 3 KOs) wants them.

Gabriela Fundora is the sister of Sebastian Fundora who holds the men’s WBC and WBO super welterweight world titles. Both are tall southpaws with power in each hand to protect the belts they accumulated.

Six months ago, Fundora met Argentina’s Gabriela Alaniz in Las Vegas to determine the undisputed flyweight champion. The much shorter Alaniz tried valiantly to scrap with Fundora and ran into a couple of rocket left hands.

Mexico’s Badillo is an undefeated flyweight from Mexico City who has battled against fellow Mexicans for years. She has fought one world champion in Asley Gonzalez the current super flyweight world titlist. They met years ago with Badillo coming out on top.

Does Badillo have the skill to deal with the taller and hard-hitting Fundora?

When a fighter has a six-inch height advantage like Fundora, it is almost impossible to out-maneuver especially in two-minute rounds. Ask Alaniz who was nearly decapitated when she tried.

This will be Badillo’s first pro fight outside of Mexico.

Commerce Casino

Kazakhstan’s Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0, 13 KOs) is another dangerous punching super welterweight headlining a 360 Promotions card against Mexico’s Elias Espadas (23-6, 16 KOs) on Saturday at the Commerce Casino.

UFC Fight Pass will stream the 360 Promotions card of about eight bouts.

Akhmedov is another Kazakh puncher similar to the great Gennady “GGG” Golovkin who terrorized the middleweight division for a decade. He doesn’t have the same polish or dexterity but doesn’t lack pure punching power.

It’s another test for the super welterweight who is looking to move up the ladder in the very crowded 154-pound weight division. 360 Promotions already has a top contender in Ukraine’s Serhii Bohachuk who nearly defeated Vergil Ortiz a year ago.

Could Bohachuk and Akhmedov fight each other if nothing else materializes?

That’s a question for another day.

Fights to Watch

Sat. DAZN 5 p.m. Charles Conwell (21-0, 16 KOs) vs. Jorge Garcia Perez (32-4, 26 KOs); Gabriela Fundora (15-0) vs Marilyn Badillo (19-0-1).

Sat. UFC Fight Pass 6 p.m. Sadriddin Akhmedov (15-0) vs Elias Espadas (23-6).

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TSS Salutes Thomas Hauser and his Bernie Award Cohorts

Published

2 days ago

April 16, 2025

TSS Press

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The Boxing Writers Association of America has announced the winners of its annual Bernie Awards competition. The awards, named in honor of former five-time BWAA president and frequent TSS contributor Bernard Fernandez, recognize outstanding writing in six categories as represented by stories published the previous year.

Over the years, this venerable website has produced a host of Bernie Award winners. In 2024, Thomas Hauser kept the tradition alive. A story by Hauser that appeared in these pages finished first in the category “Boxing News Story.” Titled “Ryan Garcia and the New York State Athletic Commission,” the story was published on June 23. You can read it HERE.

Hauser also finished first in the category of “Investigative Reporting” for “The Death of Ardi Ndembo,” a story that ran in the (London) Guardian. (Note: Hauser has owned this category. This is his 11^th first place finish for “Investigative Reporting”.)

Thomas Hauser, who entered the International Boxing Hall of Fame with the class of 2019, was honored at last year’s BWAA awards dinner with the A.J. Leibling Award for Outstanding Boxing Writing. The list of previous winners includes such noted authors as W.C. Heinz, Budd Schulberg, Pete Hamill, and George Plimpton, to name just a few.

The Leibling Award is now issued intermittently. The most recent honorees prior to Hauser were Joyce Carol Oates (2015) and Randy Roberts (2019).

Roberts, a Distinguished Professor of History at Purdue University, was tabbed to write the Hauser/Leibling Award story for the glossy magazine for BWAA members published in conjunction with the organization’s annual banquet. Regarding Hauser’s most well-known book, his Muhammad Ali biography, Roberts wrote, “It is nearly impossible to overestimate the importance of the book to our understanding of Ali and his times.” An earlier book by Hauser, “The Black Lights: Inside the World of Professional Boxing,” garnered this accolade: “Anyone who wants to understand boxing today should begin by reading ‘The Black Lights’.”

A panel of six judges determined the Bernie Award winners for stories published in 2024. The stories they evaluated were stripped of their bylines and other identifying marks including the publication or website for which the story was written.

Other winners:

Boxing Event Coverage: Tris Dixon

Boxing Column: Kieran Mulvaney

Boxing Feature (Over 1,500 Words): Lance Pugmire

Boxing Feature (Under 1,500 Words): Chris Mannix

The Dixon, Mulvaney, and Pugmire stories appeared in Boxing Scene; the Mannix story in Sports Illustrated.

The Bernie Award recipients will be honored at the forthcoming BWAA dinner on April 30 at the Edison Ballroom in the heart of Times Square. (For more information, visit the BWAA website). Two days after the dinner, an historic boxing tripleheader will be held in Times Square, the logistics of which should be quite interesting. Ryan Garcia, Devin Haney, and Teofimo Lopez share top billing.

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Mekhrubon Sanginov, whose Heroism Nearly Proved Fatal, Returns on Saturday

Published

3 days ago

April 15, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Mekhrubon-Sanginov-whose-Heroism-Nearly-Proved-Fatal-Returns-on-Saturday

To say that Mekhrubon Sanginov is excited to resume his boxing career would be a great understatement. Sanginov, ranked #9 by the WBA at 154 pounds before his hiatus, last fought on July 8, 2022.

He was in great form before his extended leave, having scored four straight fast knockouts, advancing his record to 13-0-1. Had he remained in Las Vegas, where he had settled after his fifth pro fight, his career may have continued on an upward trajectory, but a trip to his hometown of Dushanbe, Tajikistan, turned everything haywire. A run-in with a knife-wielding bully nearly cost him his life, stalling his career for nearly three full years.

Sanginov was exiting a restaurant in Dushanbe when he saw a man, plainly intoxicated, harassing another man, an innocent bystander. Mekhrubon intervened and was stabbed several times with a long knife. One of the puncture wounds came perilously close to puncturing his heart.

“After he stabbed me, I ran after him and hit him and caught him to hold for the police,” recollects Sanginov. “There was a lot of confusion when the police arrived. At first, the police were not certain what had happened.

“By the time I got to the hospital, I had lost two liters of blood, or so I was told. After I was patched up, one of the surgeons said to me, ‘Give thanks to God because he gave you a second life.’ It is like I was born a second time.”

“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have happened in any city,” he adds. (A story about the incident on another boxing site elicited this comment from a reader: “Good man right there. World would be a better place if more folk were willing to step up when it counts.”)

Sanginov first laced on a pair of gloves at age 10 and was purportedly 105-14 as an amateur. Growing up, the boxer he most admired was Roberto Duran. “Muhammad Ali will always be the greatest and [Marvin] Hagler was great too, but Duran was always my favorite,” he says.

During his absence from the ring, Sanginov married a girl from Tajikistan and became a father. His son Makhmud was born in Las Vegas and has dual citizenship. “Ideally,” he says, “I would like to have three more children. Two more boys and the last one a daughter.”

He also put on a great deal of weight. When he returned to the gym, his trainer Bones Adams was looking at a cruiserweight. But gradually the weight came off – “I had to give up one of my hobbies; I love to eat,” he says – and he will be resuming his career at 154. “Although I am the same weight as before, I feel stronger now. Before I was more of a boy, now I am a full-grown man,” says Sanginov who turned 29 in February.

He has a lot of rust to shed. Because of all those early knockouts, he has answered the bell for only eight rounds in the last four years. Concordantly, his comeback fight on Saturday could be described as a soft re-awakening. Sanginov’s opponent Mahonri Montes, an 18-year pro from Mexico, has a decent record (36-10-2, 25 KOs) but has been relatively inactive and is only 1-3-1 in his last five. Their match at Thunder Studios in Long Beach, California, is slated for eight rounds.

On May 10, Ardreal Holmes (17-0) faces Erickson Lubin (26-2) on a ProBox card in Kissimmee, Florida. It’s an IBF super welterweight title eliminator, meaning that the winner (in theory) will proceed directly to a world title fight.

Sanginov will be watching closely. He and Holmes were scheduled to meet in March of 2022 in the main event of a ShoBox card on Showtime. That match fell out when Sanginov suffered an ankle injury in sparring.

If not for a twist of fate, that may have been Mekhrubon Sanginov in that IBF eliminator, rather than Ardreal Holmes. We will never know, but one thing we do know is that Mekhrubon’s world title aspirations were too strong to be ruined by a knife-wielding bully.

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