(Photo credit: Naoki Fakuda) By Dan Ambrose: Tonight, WBA Super World middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (30-0, 27 KOs) will be in the ring to face former WBC interim 160 pound champion Marco Antonio Rubio (59-6-1, 51 KOs) at the StubHub Center in Carson, California. Rubio lost his interim title last Friday when he failed to make weight at the weigh-in. Golovkin can still win the WBC interim title, but Rubio can’t. He can’t win Golovkin’s WBA title either.
Golovkin is expected to get through this fight with flying colors to move forward to what he hopes are bigger and better fights in the future. Top Rank promoter Bob Arum believes Golovkin has a chance to fight the winner of the proposed fight between WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto and challenger Saul “Canelo” Alvarez. Arum also thinks the winner of the December 13th fight between Matt Korobov and Andy Lee is a possibility for Golovkin.
Cotto will need to beat Canelo, and then he’d have to decide it was worthwhile for him to face Golovkin. Arum seems to think that Cotto’s trainer Freddie Roach has the kind of influence on him to possibly get him to agree to a Golovkin fight if it’s one that Roach wants him to take.
Roach has said in the past that he would never recommend for his fighters to face an opponent that he didn’t feel that they could beat. Thus far, Roach has been kind of cool to the idea Cotto facing Golovkin. Roach says Golovkin doesn’t bring anything to the table because he’s not a pay-per-view fighter yet, and because he personally never sees his fights televised on HBO.
“Freddie [Roach] has a tremendous influence on Cotto, who has the utmost respect for Freddie,” Arum said via esnewsreporting.com. “If Cotto is successful against Canelo, and if he wants Golovkin, I’m sure it can be arranged. He [Golovkin] has a lot of guys he can fight. Matt Korobov is fighting against Andy Lee. The winner of that fight is a possibility. Of course, if Canelo and Cotto fight, he can fight the winner of that fight,” Arum said.
If it comes down to Roach being the deciding factor to whether Cotto fights Golovkin or not, he might not agree to fight him. If Roach makes his decision based on Golovkin not being a pay-per-view star then he’ll probably tell Cotto not to fight him.
Roach obviously didn’t put up too much of a fight when Cotto fought Sergio Martinez and Devlin Rodriguez, neither of which were pay-per-view fighters. Cotto still fought them despite them not being PPV guys.
Comments are closed.