By Allan Fox: Much has been made about WBA World middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (25-0, 22 KO’s) facing a junior middleweight in Gabriel Rosado (21-6, 13 KO’s) last night in Madison Square Garden, New York.
Some fans mistakenly feel that because the 6’0” Rosado had been fighting at junior middleweight during his career that meant he was smaller than the 5’10” Golovkin in height and weight. However, it you looked at the fight last night you’ll see immediately that Rosado not only was the taller fighter but he also looked like the heavier fighter as well.
Boxing fans don’t realize that some fighters like to fight at weights smaller than their size so that they can gain an advantage from taking on the smaller fighters. These guys dehydrate to make weight and then put the water weight back on after the weigh-in.
Rosado appears to be one of those types of fighters considering he’s clearly a middleweight in size and a pretty big one at that, but he’s able to lose water weight to make 154. Last night, Rosado was definitely bigger than Golovkin.
As far as the fight goes, you can’t blame Golovkin for not being able to steamroll Rosado because he was moving constantly throughout the fight. There wasn’t a round where Rosado wasn’t moving. He wasn’t standing in one place for very long to give Golovkin a chance to pound him into submission.
So instead of Golovkin taking Rosado out with power shots, he had to be content with beating him with what Andre Ward refers to as his “power jab”, and that’s all that was needed. Golovkin’s jab was like a punch all to itself and you could see what it was doing to the bigger Rosado’s face by cutting him up and busting up his nose.
Rosado had the size to make a fight of it but he just didn’t seem willing to take any chances by fighting that way. He blame himself for that.
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