Golovkin Overwhelms With Both Physical and Mental Pressure

Published

9 years ago

February 20, 2015

His physicality really puts a lot of mental and physical pressure on his opponents. That, more than anything else, describes the uphill task that the top middleweights in the world are confronted with when they touch gloves with the “alpha” fighter in the division, WBA/IBO title holder Gennady Golovkin 31-0 (28).

This Saturday night, Golovkin will defend his title straps against Martin Murray 29-1-1 (12). Murray has never been down or stopped in 31 professional bouts. Murray has no discernible style, though he’s very tough minded, physically strong..but he’s not much of a puncher. He also tends to push his punches, and those are the type of shots that Golovkin usually walks through. Actually, Murray couldn’t be more wrong for Gennady stylistically.

Murray has reiterated during the past few weeks that he’s been studying Golovkin and he and his brain-trust have devised a plan which will lead to him being successful and ultimately beating Golovkin. The plan probably calls for him staying off the ropes and using the ring, while trying to clinch when Golovkin gets inside or close. All fighters need to believe in themselves if they are to have a chance to beat the best of the best. The problem is, they need the physical tools necessary to execute their strategy, and if they don’t possess them, the odds are overwhelmingly against them winning.

Everyone knows by now that Golovkin is going to carry the fight, regardless of who the opponent is in front of him. Gennady’s steady aggression and pressure force his opponents to address his strength and punching power above all else. He wants to crash them with big shots to the head and body with both hands, assuming that they’ll be hurt and a sitting duck for him to finish off with clean shots because they’re already too hurt to evade or escape.

So what are the choices if you’re facing him? Well, with him bearing down on you, which is very draining psychologically, one’s first instinct is to cut loose and let your hands go, looking to impede and disrupt him just enough so you can get to another spot where it’s a little safer – before he gets there. The problem with that is, if you’re rushing your shots just to stymie him, then you can’t really nail him that hard.

Once he senses that there really isn’t that much danger in him pushing the fight and not much of a price to pay for coming in, he’ll begin to come in harder. It’s easy when you’re an attacker like Golovkin to feed off of your opponents’ unwillingness to engage with you and grow even more confident with each passing round.

Once Golovkin has his opponent on the run and looking to survive more so than to fight him and/or hurt him, they’ve lost 90% of the battle. The goal for them switches to surviving the round, which in turn kills their chances to win any of the remaining rounds on the judges’ scorecards. Then they’ll be told in the corner, “you’ve gotta make a stand because he’s winning all the rounds.” And that’s when most fighters figure okay, I have to take some chances, maybe I can catch him with something he doesn’t see and isn’t ready for. Only Golovkin is not just a good puncher, he’s also physically strong. In 350 amateur fights and 31 pro fights, he’s never been down. So engaging with him is what he’s wanted you to do the entire fight. And the fact that he forces his opponents to do it out of desperation is huge, because he knows they’re really doing it to save face and are expecting to get knocked out or stopped.

To beat Golovkin it’ll take a fighter who either has an overload of physical strength and toughness, who can stand their ground with him and make him pay for coming after them, because he’s not afraid to get hit, and perhaps back him up. Or, it’ll take a fighter who is supremely athletic/fast and tough who is physically strong and owns a great pair of legs and a dependable chin.

Physicality is everything with Golovkin and that’s really the only thing he’s vulnerable against, but it can’t be manufactured physicality. To out-box him it’ll take a fighter who may not be a knockout artist himself, but is very strong, like a James Toney, and can put good combinations together, yet has a chin that won’t betray them during the fire because he’s going to get hit even when he picks his spots.

Golovkin usually jabs his way in while cutting off the ring. He doesn’t attack in spurts like Mike Tyson did; rather he applies steady pressure that intensifies as the fight progresses a la Joe Frazier. And when he has you on the run like Frazier used to force his opponents to do, the ending is inevitable. Golovkin has yet to face a fighter who has a weapon in their arsenal that he must address, such as great speed (Roy Jones) or off the chart physical strength with applicable power (Carlos Monzon). If his opponent cannot make him pay for trying to get inside, or out-score him and then get out of harm’s way before he can get going, how do they win?

There’s no active middleweights who can force him back and sidetrack what he wants to do, nor is there one in the top-10 who can successfully fight him on the move without running. So he either wins every round after the first, along with the decision, or he knocks you cold for standing your ground. And that’s the problem Martin Murray is going to be confronted with this coming Saturday night.

Murray is a very solid fighter. He is durable and strong, but he’s not a big enough puncher to make Golovkin think for one second on the way in, “I better be careful so I don’t walk into anything that could put me in peril.” And without having the capacity to plant that seed of slight doubt in Golovkin’s mind, he’ll really be fighting an uphill battle.

I see Murray coming out and trying to send a message that I don’t fear you and I also have two hands that I’m not afraid to let go. Only he’ll find that Gennady is pretty effective from mid-range and not so easy to hit. Before he’s awed by Golovkin’s power, he’ll first sense that Gennady is no walk-in slugger who will take three or four to give one. And he’ll find throwing big stuff at him and missing, comes with a price to pay and it’ll hurt. Then he’ll become more judicious with his punch out-put. In other words with less incoming fire, it’ll be easier and safer for Gennady to step up the pressure and start releasing his power Murray’s way. Which in turn will provide Murray two choices, stand your ground and fight, or try to buy time and find a safer place in the ring to figure something out.

My suspicion, because Murray is tough and willing, is that he’ll attempt to stand his ground first. He’ll have some success in catching Golovkin, but he’ll also find that punching to occupy him isn’t doing the trick nor slowing him down. And by trying to fight Golovkin, he’s making it too easy for Gennady, and there are no dividends being paid back for the damage it’s doing in return. Once this happens he’ll try to use his legs and box/pot-shot him, with the intent of hoping to catch Golovkin with something big on the way in and hurting him. But that won’t work. The physical and mental pressure will build and eventually overwhelm Murray and he’ll start getting hit too hard and clean. Which will result in the fight being stopped, and Golovkin will move on to who’s next sporting a 32-0 (29) record.

The bottom line is, there isn’t a middleweight, junior middleweight or welterweight in the world that has the physicality needed to execute the fight plan they believe they have to in order to beat Golovkin. And there may only be one super-middleweight who has the strength, skill-set, boxing IQ, character and toughness to fight his fight against him and be successful, and that’s Andre Ward. He was blessed at birth with the needed tools to perhaps be Golovkin’s stumbling block.

Frank Lotierzo can be contacted at GlovedFist@Gmail.com

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Frank Lotierzo

Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

Published

1 day ago

July 25, 2024

David A. Avila

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Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

East Los Angeles has long been a haven for some of the best fighters around if you can keep them out of trouble. For every Oscar De La Hoya or Seniesa Estrada there are thousands derailed by crime, drugs or drinking.

Boxing has always been a favorite sport of East L.A. Every family has an uncle or two who boxes.

On Friday, 360 Promotions’ Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) fights Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1) in the main event at Commerce Casino, in Commerce, CA. UFC Fight Pass will stream the fight card.

The City of Commerce used to be part of East L.A. until 1960 when it incorporated. It’s still considered to be part of East Los Angeles, but informally.

Plenty of fighters come out of East L.A. but few make it all the way like De La Hoya and Estrada. Will Trinidad be the one?

The first world champion from East L.A. or “East Los” as some call it, was Solly Garcia Smith back in the late 1800s. Others were Richie Lemos, Art Frias and Joey Olivo. There is also 1984 Olympic gold medalist Paul Gonzalez.

Once again 360 Promotions brings its popular brand of fights to the area. On this fight card includes two female bouts. One features Roxy Verduzco (1-0) the former amateur star fighting Colleen Davis (3-1-1) in a featherweight fight.

All that action takes place on Friday.

Elite Boxing

The next day, also in East L.A., Elite Boxing stages another boxing card at Salesian High School located at 960 S. Soto Street in the Boyle Heights area of East Los Angeles.

Elite Boxing has promoted several successful boxing cards at the Catholic high school grounds. The area is saturated by many of the best eateries in Los Angeles. Don’t take my word for it. Check it out yourself and grab some of that delicious food.

Boxing has long been a favorite sport of anyone who lives in East L.A. It’s a fight town equal to Philadelphia, Brooklyn or Detroit. There’s something different about the area. For more than 100 years some of the best fighters continue to come out of its boxing gyms. Some will be performing on these club shows.

For tickets or information go to www.eliteboxingusa.com

Claressa Shields in Detroit

Speaking of fight towns, pound-for-pound best Claressa Shields who won two Olympic Gold Medals in boxing, moves up another weight division to tackle the WBC heavyweight world champion Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse on Saturday, July 27, at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, Michigan.

DAZN will stream the heavy-duty fight card.

Shields (14-0) cleaned out the super welterweight, middleweight and super middleweight divisions and now wants to add the big girls to her conquests. She will be facing Canada’s Lepage-Joanisse (7-1) who holds the WBC belt.

The last time Shields gloved up was more than a year ago when she fought Maricela Cornejo. Don’t blame Shields. She loves to fight. She loves to win. The last time Shields lost a fight was in the amateurs and that was three presidential administrations ago.

Shields doesn’t lose.

I wonder if Las Vegas even takes bets on her fights?

The only fight she may have been an underdog was against Savannah Marshall who was the last opponent to defeat her. And that was in 2012 in China. When they met as pros two years ago, Shields avenged her loss with a blistering attack.

Don’t get Shields mad.

Perhaps her toughest foe as a pro was in her pro debut when she clashed with Franchon Crews-Dezurn in Las Vegas. It was four rounds of fists and fury as the two pounded each other on the undercard of Andre Ward and Sergey Kovalev in November 2016.

That was a ferocious debut for both female pugilists.

Assisting Shields on this fight card will be several intriguing male bouts. One guy you should pay special attention is Tito Mercado (15-0, 14 KOs) a super lightweight prospect from Pomona, California.

Many excellent fighters have come out of Pomona including Sugar Shane Mosley, Shane Mosley Jr., Alberto Davila and Richie Sandoval who just passed away this week.

Sandoval was best known for his 15-round war with Philadelphia’s Jeff Chandler for the bantamweight world title in 1984. Read the story by Arne K. Lang on this link: https://tss.ib.tv/boxing/featured-boxing-articles-boxing-news-videos-rankings-and-results/81467-former-world-bantamweight-champion-richie-sandoval-passes-away-at-age-63 .

Fights to Watch

Fri. UFC Fight Pass 7 p.m. Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) vs Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1).

Sat. ESPN+ 12:30 p.m. Joe Joyce (16-2) vs Derek Chisora (34-13).

Sat. DAZN 3 p.m. Claressa Shields (14-0) vs Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse (7-1), Michel Rivera (25-1) vs Hugo Roldan (22-2-1); Tito Mercado (15-0) vs Hector Sarmiento (21-2).

Omar Trinidad photo by Lina Baker

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Arne’s Almanac: Jake Paul and Women’s Boxing, a Curmudgeon’s Take

Published

3 days ago

July 24, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Jake Paul can fight more than a little. The view from here is that he would make it interesting against any fringe contender in the cruiserweight division. However, Jake’s boxing acumen pales when paired against his skill as a flim-flam artist.

Jake brought a 9-1 record into last weekend’s bout with Mike Perry. As noted by boxing writer Paul Magno, Jake’s previous opponents consisted of “a You Tuber, a retired NBA star, five retired MMA stars, a part-time boxer/reality TV star, and two undersized and inactive fall-guy boxers.”

Mike Perry, a 32-year-old Floridian, was undefeated (6-0, 3 KOs) as a bare-knuckle boxer after forging a 14-8 record in UFC bouts. In pre-fight blurbs, Perry was billed as the baddest bare knuckle boxer of all time, but against Jake Paul he proved to have very unrefined skills as a conventional boxer which Team Paul undoubtedly knew all along. Perry lasted into the eighth round in a one-sided fight that could have been stopped a lot sooner.

Jake Paul is both a boxer and a promoter. As a promoter, he handles Amanda Serrano, one of the greatest female boxers in history. That makes him the person most responsible (because the buck stops with him) for the wretched mismatch in last Saturday’s co-feature, the bout between Serrano and Stevie Morgan.

Morgan, who took up boxing two years ago at age 33, brought a 14-1 record. Nicknamed the Sledgehammer, she had won 13 of her 14 wins by knockout, eight in the opening round. However, although she resides in Florida, all but one of those 13 knockouts happened in Colombia.

“We found that in Colombia there were just more opportunities for women’s boxing than in the United States,” she told a prominent boxing writer whose name we won’t mention.

The truth is that, for some folks, Colombia is the boxing equivalent of a feeder lot for livestock, a place where a boxer can go to fatten their record. The opportunities there were no greater than in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1995. It was there that Peter McNeeley prepped for his match with Mike Tyson with a 6-second knockout of professional punching bag Frankie Hines. (Six seconds? So it would be written although no one seems to have been there to witness it.)

Serrano vs Morgan was understood to be a stay-busy fight for Amanda whose rematch with Katie Taylor was postponed until November. Stevie Morgan, to her credit, answered the bell for the second round whereas others in her situation would have remained on the stool and invented an injury to rationalize it. Thirty-eight seconds later it was all over and Ms. Morgan was free to go home and use her sledgehammer to do some light dusting.

The Paul-Perry and Serrano-Morgan fights played out in a sold-out arena in Tampa before an estimated 17,000. Those without a DAZN subscription paid $64.95 for the livestream. Paul’s next promotion, where he will touch gloves with 58-year-old Mike Tyson (unless Iron Mike pulls a Joe Biden and pulls out; a capital idea) with Serrano-Taylor II the semi-main, will almost certainly rake in more money than any other boxing promotion this year.

Asked his opinion of so-called crossover boxing by a reporter for a college newspaper, the venerable boxing promoter Bob Arum said, “It’s not my bag but folks who don’t like it shouldn’t get too worked up over it because no one is stealing from anybody.” True enough, but for some of us, the phenomenon is distressing.

—

The next big women’s fight happens Saturday in Detroit where Claressa Shields seeks a world title in a third weight class against WBC heavyweight belt-holder Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse.

A two-time Olympic gold medalist, undefeated in 14 fights as a pro, Shields is very good, arguably the best female boxer of her generation which makes her, arguably, the best female boxer of all time. But turning away Lepage-Joanisse (7-1, 2 KOs) won’t elevate her stature in our eyes.

Purportedly 17-4 as an amateur, the Canadian won her title in her second crack at it. Back in August of 2017, she challenged Cancun’s Alejandra Jimenez in Cancun and was stopped in the third round. Entering the bout, Lepage-Joanisse was 3-0 as a pro and had never fought a match slated for more than four rounds.

Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse

True, on the women’s side, the heavyweight bracket is a very small pod. A sanctioning body has to make concessions to harness a sanctioning fee. Nonetheless, how absurd that a woman who had answered the bell for only 11 rounds would be deemed qualified to compete for a world title. (FYI: Alejandra Jimenez was purportedly born a man. She left the sport with a 12-0-1 record after her win over Franchon Crews Dazurn was changed to a no-contest when she tested positive for the banned steroid stanozolol.)

Following her defeat to Jimenez, Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse, now 29 years old, was out of action for six-and-a-half years. When she returned, she was still a heavyweight, but a much slender heavyweight. She carried 231 pounds for Jimenez. In her most recent bout where she captured the vacant WBC title with a split decision over Argentina’s Abril Argentina Vidal, she clocked in at 173 ¼. (On the distaff side, there’s no uniformity among the various sanctioning bodies as to what constitutes a heavyweight.)

Claressa Shields doesn’t need Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse to reinforce her credentials as a future Hall of Famer. She made the cut a long time ago.

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Former World Bantamweight Champion Richie Sandoval Passes Away at Age 63

Published

4 days ago

July 22, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Richie Sandoval, who won the WBA and lineal bantamweight title in one of the biggest upsets of the 1980s and then, not quite two years later, suffered near-fatal injuries in a title defense, has passed away at the age of 63.

News circulated fast in the Las Vegas boxing community on Monday, July 22, the grapevine actuated by a tweet from Hall of Fame matchmaker Bruce Trampler: “Boxing and the Top Rank family lost one of our own last night in the passing of former WBA bantamweight champion Richie Sandoval. It hurts personally and professionally to know that Richie is gone at age 63. RIP campeon.”

Details are vague but the cause of death was apparently a sudden heart attack that Sandoval experienced while visiting the Southern California home of his son of the same name.

Richie Sandoval put the LA County community of Pomona, California, on the boxing map before Shane Mosley came along and gave the town a more frequently-cited mention in the sports section of the papers. He came from a fighting family. An older brother, Albert “Superfly” Sandoval, became a big draw at LA’s fabled Olympic Auditorium while building a 35-2-1 record that included a failed bid to capture Lupe Pintor’s world bantamweight title.

Richie was a member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic boxing team that was stranded when U.S. President Jimmy Carter (and many other world leaders) boycotted the event as a protest against Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan.

As a pro, Sandoval’s signature win was a 15^th-round stoppage of Jeff Chandler. They fought on April 7, 1984 in Atlantic City. Chandler was making the tenth defense of his world bantamweight title.

Despite being a heavy underdog, Sandoval dominated the fight, winning almost every round until the referee stepped in and waived it off. Chandler, who was 33-1-2 heading in and had avenged his lone defeat, never fought again.

Sandoval made two successful defenses before risking his title against Gaby Canizales on the undercard of Hagler-Mugabi in the outdoor stadium at Caesars Palace. In round seven, Sandoval, who had a hellish time making the weight, was knocked down three times and suffered a seizure as he collapsed from the third knockdown. Stretchered out of the ring, he was rushed to the hospital where doctors reduced the swelling in his brain and beat the odds to save his life. This would be Richie’s lone defeat. He finished his pro career with a record of 29-1 (17 KOs).

Bob Arum cushioned some of the pain by giving Richie a $25,000 bonus and offering him a lifetime job at Top Rank which Richie accepted. And let the record show that Arum was good to his word.

A more elaborate portrait of Richie Sandoval was published in these pages in 2017. You can check it out HERE. May he rest in peace.

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