Tim Bradley can beat Golovkin, says Arum

By Boxing News - 06/26/2015 - Comments

golovkin883By Allan Fox: If Top Rank promoter Bob Arum gets his way, we could be seeing welterweight Tim Bradley (31-1-1, 12 KOs) facing IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (33-0, 30 KOs) this year in a pay-per-view bout in what Arum describes as a “super fight.”

It would of course be televised on HBO, and Arum believes the fight would be big enough to sell on PPV, as long as he stacked the undercard with a lot of interesting fights that the boxing public would be interested in seeing. Arum actually believes that Bradley could beat Golovkin if given the chance.

Arum admits that Bradley couldn’t score a knockout over the bigger Golovkin, but he could beat him by a decision by out-boxing him, and avoiding his huge punches. Arum likes Bradley’s movement and defensive skills, and he thinks it would give Golovkin major problems. Golovkin hasn’t fought any elusive 5’6” fighters during his career, so he would have to try and figure how to cut off the ring against the much smaller Bradley.

“I can see it in a lot of ways, Bradley beating Golovkin,” Arum said to Fighthub. “He can’t knock him out, he can’t stop him, but he’s going to be very tough to hit, and Golovkin is going to take a lot of punches from Bradley. So, I really think this could be a super, super fight. I don’t see why not [the fight being on pay-per-view]. Now what you have to do is make it sell is to load it up it up with Hispanics.”

In response to a question about whether he would put the Golovkin-Bradley fight on pay-per-view, Arum said “Absolutely!”

A fight between Bradley and Golovkin would have to be on pay-per-view for them both to get over $1 million. Bradley gets paid well for his fights on HBO, but he’s been fighting either lesser guys or big stars like Manny Pacquiao lately.

For both Golovkin and Bradley to get what they normally receive for their fights, it would probably need to be on PPV. It would be an interesting experiment to see how many fans would be willing to pay for a fight like this.

Bradley has a fight this Saturday night against the unbeaten Jessie Vargas (26-0, 9 KOs) that he needs to win before he can start talking about mixing it up with Golovkin later this year. If Bradley loses this fight, or if he goes life and death with this guy like he did with Ruslan Provodnikov, then it’s unlikely that we’ll see a Bradley-Golovkin fight.

The fans would obviously see a fight between Golovkin and Bradley as being too much of a mismatch to want to bother watching it on PPV. On regular HBO, fans would tune in to see it just to see if Bradley would be knocked out or not.

After all, Golovkin has knocked out everyone he’s faced for the past seven years since 2008. You put a small 5’6” welterweight in there with him, it’s going to be like throwing a small snack in the water or a shark tank. Golovkin will likely tear Bradley apart in a quick feeding frenzy.



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