(Photo credit: Will Hart, K2 Promotions) By Dan Ambrose: WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (29-0, 26 KO’s) will be getting $750,000 for his purse for his title defense against Daniel Geale (30-2, 16 KOs) on Saturday night at Madison Square Garden in New York, according to Dan Rafael.
Geale, a popular fighter in Australia but not that well known in the U.S, will get slightly less at $600,000 for being the B-side of the equation at MSG.
In the co-feature, heavyweight Bryant Jennings (18-0, 10 KOs) will be getting $130,000 for his WBC heavyweight eliminator bout against Cuban fighter Mike Perez (20-0-1, 12 KOs). The winner of the Jennings-Perez fight becomes the second mandatory challenger to WBC heavyweight champion Bermane Stiverne. Perez will make $60,000 for the fight.
Golovkin is seen by many boxing fans to be superior to the likes of WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, and yet his purse for Saturday is clearly smaller than the ones those two fighters typically gets. It kind of shows you how upside down the boxing world is. It isn’t like that in sports like the NFL and the NBA. In those sports the player that is seen as the No.1 is given the bigger money.
Boxing is more like Professional Wrestling where the guy that has the bigger fan base is the one that gets the huge money.
Golovkin can eventually get the big money too, but he’s going to need some help by the likes of Cotto, Canelo and perhaps Floyd Mayweather Jr. Golovkin needs one good scalp to add to his resume for him to get to the level where he can branch over to pay-per-view.
We saw how Manny Pacquiao became a pay-per-view star after his win over an old weight drained Oscar De La Hoya in 2008. Mayweather became a PPV star after his win over De La Hoya in 2007. Golovkin needs someone like Cotto or Canelo for him to get to the next level. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like he’s going to get either of them in the ring unless one of them man’s up and decides they want to take on the best middleweight in the division.
There’s no excuse for Canelo not to fight Golovkin, because the two of them are the same size. Golovkin is actually lighter than Canelo despite the fact that he fights in the 160 pound division. Golovkin’s trainer Abel Sanchez says that Golovkin comes into training camp at 168-170 to get ready for his fights.
Canelo comes into his fights over 170 and can get as high as 175. There’s no reason why Canelo couldn’t fight Golovkin, because it’s not as if he’d be giving up 20 pounds of weight the way that Mayweather would if he fought Golovkin.
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