By Dan Ambrose: WBC interim middleweight champion Marco Antonio Rubio (59-6-1, 51 KOs) believes he’s got a good chance of knocking out WBA Super World middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (30-0, 27 KOs) in their fight next month on October 18th at the StubHub Center in Carson, California.

Unfortunately for Rubio, few boxing fans and writers are giving him a shot at knocking Golovkin out or beating him by a decision. It’s not that Rubio doesn’t have the punching power to KO Golovkin in theory. It’s just that Rubio is going to have huge problems in taking the punishment that Golovkin will be dishing out.

Rubio has a good chin, as we saw in his 7th round stoppage win over the hard hitting David Lemieux in 2011. Rubio took terrible punishment in the first 5 rounds of that fight before taking over in the 6th round when Lemieux gassed out completely. But the reality is that if Lemieux hadn’t gassed out then it’s very likely that Rubio would have been finished by the 8th round.

He wouldn’t take another 3-4 rounds of the kind of punishment that Lemieux was dishing out in that fight, and it wasn’t competitive at all until Lemieux got tired. Before that, it was like Lemieux working on a heavy bag in nailing Rubio with punch after punch.

The thing with Golovkin is he’s not going to get tired. He’s going to do what Lemieux did in hitting Rubio with everything but the kitchen sink, but when the 6th and 7th rounds come around, Golovkin is going to be just as fresh as he was when he started the fight.

This means that if Rubio is still standing, which I doubt, his trainer Robert Garcia is going to need to make an important decision whether he should let Rubio take needless punishment in a fight that he has no chance of winning.

I’d like to think that Garcia will see the big picture and look to save Rubio from taking any unnecessary abuse from Golovkin, because Rubio has the talent to go after the IBF title held by Sam Soliman and the vacant WBO title, which will be decided soon after Demetrius Andrade faces Matt Korobov for the belt.