By Bart Barry-
Saturday at Madison Square Garden in a prizefight broadcast on the aficionado’s network, DAZN, Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (no new ‘i’ needed; we go with birth names, round here) narrowly decisioned Ukrainian Sergiy “The Technician” Derevyanchenko to retain his HBO Middleweight Championship and collect an assortment of other belts Canelo Alvarez doesn’t care for. The match was bloody, rough and suspenseful.
And when it was over and the scorecards were read the selfstyled Mecca of Boxing booed Golovkin loudly enough to elicit a “c’mon guys” from boxing’s once-charming malaprop machine. Then the postfight interview devolved into the same scattering of the same Google Translate phrases into which every Golovkin interview devolves, though it wasn’t nearly so amusing this time, was it, guys?
For this time Golovkin had faced a man his own size and looked it. This time Golovkin, who somehow became The People’s Champion by being unable to stop in 24 rounds a smaller man who is between 10 and 15 times more popular than he, countered interesting and relevant questions with his usual dumb phrases, and nobody was enchanted as before. All this and more, in a turn ironic as it was predictable, oversparkled a Golovkin performance that was more compelling and confirming than its predecessors.
All the booing and dissent served to make and subvert what was the first underrated performance in Golovkin’s canon.
From the third round to the closing bell Saturday the look on Golovkin’s face was exhausted betrayal. One doubts Golovkin’s American assimilation comprises cultural awareness enough to ring an internal alarm like: By jettisoning the handlers who hoodwinked late-HBO programmers, Comrade Pyotr et al., I put myself in an unprotected status with a network interested in feeding me to Canelo Alvarez the way my previous network’s braintrust wanted Canelo fed to me.
Why, that’s madness, you’re now thinking, what sort of braintrust would wish to see boxing’s one ticketseller from boxing’s one reliable ticketbuying public mauled by a man from Kazakhstan?
You had to be there. GGG was a mania. In 15 years of doing this, the craziest things I ever heard said by the sanest boxing minds were things uttered about Golovkin’s prowess.
In this sense, what happened Saturday, what has happened in four of Golovkin’s last six fights, was a betrayal of sorts to those men who invested so ferally in the Golovkin legend. Because each time Golovkin has confronted a fellow titlist or a proper middleweight recently – notice the ‘or’ there – Golovkin has looked like much, much less than the most-feared man on the planet.
Daniel Jacobs, middleweight permacontender, rose from the canvas 2 1/2 years ago and showed Golovkin’s hypemen how poorly chopping down a welterweight prepared the middleweight champion for a defense with an actual middleweight. Canelo then went 36 minutes with GGG. Then, as DAZN’s otherwise annoying broadcast crew reminded us Saturday, Golovkin first got offered a match with Derevyanchenko but turned it down for a chance to poleax yet another career super welter. Canelo then went 36 minutes with GGG. Someone named Steve Rolls got excavated to launch GGG’s new-network debut. And then Saturday happened. Another career middleweight.
There was a particularly disingenuous game GGG fanatics used to play with the rest of us – a game they learned from The Money Team. When you mentioned the HBOGGG tagline about Golovkin’s readiness, willingness and ability to make war with any champion between 154 pounds and 168, at those weights, and mentioned your own annoyance with Golovkin’s only making war on 147- and 154-pound men forcefed to 160 pounds, GGG Nation would start listing titlists at 160 and 168 pounds and ask you if you didn’t think he could beat them.
Your hypothetical assumption of a hypothetical Golovkin triumph in a hypothetical fight was proof Golovkin had already beaten these men, shouldn’t be required to fight them and – this is the richest part – frightened all these larger men such that Golovkin should only don gloves for those smaller men brave enough to face him. You would try to argue it didn’t matter, really, Golovkin’s ultimate record against men his own size; you just wanted to see him fight men his own size before you partook in any GGG Nation naturalization ceremony.
Which is a torturous way of writing this: Golovkin is not today diminished. What is happening to him now is what always would have happened to him.
He hits quite hard but certainly not that much harder than any other middleweight champion and not nearly hard as the best super middleweights. His footwork is plodding, his punches are often telegraphed, his defense is porous, and his ring IQ ain’t that high either. His vaunted ability to cut-off the ring never was a product of more than his ability to walk through smaller men’s punches (you should see me cut-off the ring on my 110-pound wife!).
Saturday Golovkin cut-off Derevyanchenko’s escape routes often and just as often learned they were traps Derevyanchenko set for him. Imagine that. A prizefighter with a 30-percent lower knockout ratio than GGG’s, a prizefighter felled in round 1, a prizefighter bleeding constantly into his right eye, opined so little of GGG’s power he made strategic retreats to walk Golovkin into counters. He made Golovkin miss quite a bit too and bent The People’s Champion in two, too, with a midrounds left hook to the button.
And Golovkin responded with true heart and chin. Two things soft matchmaking and hard overpromoting deprived us of seeing during Golovkin’s reign of terror as HBO Middleweight Champion. That’s the good news for GGG Nation.
Here’s the bad: Y’all are out of your collective gourd if you think Canelo “A Side” Alvarez is going to come down from 175 pounds to 160 to redeem Golovkin’s legacy. Canelo may well give GGG his badly needed rubber match, but it won’t be at middleweight. Eight years and 20 lucrative prizefights later Canelo is going to run a check on that “fight any man from 154 to 168” credit and see what’s actually in the account. It says here: Canelo KO-10 is what.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
