(Photo credit: Naoki Fakuda) By Jim Dower: Things aren’t going well right now for the 34-year-old Marco Antonio Rubio (59-6-1, 51 KOs). He lost his interim World Boxing Council middleweight title yesterday when he failed to make weight for his fight against WBA Super World middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (30-0, 27 KOs) for their fight at the StubHub Center in Carson, California.
Coming in overweight by nearly 2 pounds cost Rubio a big percentage of his $450,000 earnings for the fight. That wouldn’t be so bad if he had a reasonable chance of winning the fight, but he’s an underdog and likely to wind up as Golovkin’s 18th consecutive knockout victim.
Rubio does have a chance of winning if he brings his A-game tonight, and fights the perfect fight. Golovkin will need to make a huge mistake by sticking his chin out there for Rubio to hit him, but it’s possible we could see that happen. With Rubio’s kind of power, he can definitely score a knockout if he connects just right with one of his big shots.
Golovkin hasn’t faced an opponent before with the kind of punching power that Rubio has, so it’s impossible to know for sure how Golovkin will do under those circumstances.
“I expect Triple-G to come through with yet another knockout and make it very exciting while it happens,” said Dan Rafael to ESPN.com. “This guy is a phenomena and he’s moving over to the West Coast where fans haven’t had the chance to see him live. So regardless of the caliber of opponent he’s facing there’s going to be excitement in the air. Marco Antonio Rubio may not be an A-plus opponent, but we all know that. But he’s a guy with a lot of experience, and he was the guy that was willing to get in the ring with Golovkin.”
Rubio does have experience and that counts for something. It means that he won’t go to pieces mentally like many of Golovkin’s past opponents have. It also means that Rubio won’t run from Golovkin at the first bell in the opening round, and give away any chance he ever had to win the fight. You can’t beat Golovkin by running from him. That only delays the inevitable.
Curtis Stevens seemed to get Golovkin’s attention with some of the big shots that he landed in their fight last year in November, but Stevens didn’t have the size to compete with Golovkin. The 5’10” Rubio is bigger than the 5’7″ Stevens, and he’ll be able to match-up with Golovkin in terms of size if not boxing skills. Rubio is a big enough puncher to make this fight interesting if he fights aggressively.
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