Rosado: Golovkin was trying to drain Andre Ward by asking for catch-weight

By Boxing News - 07/29/2015 - Comments

golovkin454By Allan Fox: Gabriel Rosado doesn’t buy the excuses that WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin has been making about not being able to get anyone to fight him.

Rosado thinks that Golovkin could easily have gone up to 168 to fight Andre Ward, the WBA super middleweight champion. If Golokvin wanted, he could have taken that fight by moving up, but instead he asked Ward to drain down to 164 in order to gain an advantage over him, Rosado said.

Rosado notes that Golovkin was willing to come down to 154 to fight Floyd Mayweather Jr. because he wanted the payday that came with the fight, but he wasn’t willing to move up eight pounds in weight to face Ward. Rosado thinks Golovkin was just not interested in fighting Ward.

“He [Golovkin] wants to go to 154 to fight Floyd, but he don’t want to go to 168 to fight Andre Ward,” Rosado said to Fighthype. “That sounds funny to me. You’re trying to make Ward drain himself out so you can have an advantage. Come on, Ward can’t make 164. If you’re talking about Floyd at 154, why wouldn’t you fight the champion at 68, which is Ward.”

It’s pretty easy to understand why Golovkin would be willing to drain down to 154, but not move up weight pounds to fight Andre Ward. For one, Golovkin would only be losing six pounds to go down to 154. If he moved up in weight to fight Ward, Golovkin would have to go up in weight eight pounds to fight a guy who is now fighting in the light heavyweight division.

Ward fought his last fight at 172, and he’s thinking about moving up to 175 to challenge IBF/WBAWBO light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev. The most important reason why Golovkin would prefer to move down in weight to fight Mayweather is because the money would be so much better fighting Mayweather than it would Ward, who has only fought once in the past two years. If Rosado doesn’t understand that then he’s not thinking things through clearly.

Golovkin would make millions more fighting Mayweather than he would Ward. There’s no comparison at all. Besides just the money aspect, Golovkin would likely become a pay-per-view fighter by just facing Mayweather. Golovkin would get a ton of exposure fighting Mayweather, and those fans would likely continue to pay to see Golovkin’s future fights on PPV, especially if he beat Mayweather.

If Golovkin fights Ward, it’s probably not a fight that would attract a lot of PPV buys. It would do fair numbers, but not huge numbers. It wouldn’t result in Golovkin becoming a huge star for beating Ward. Some fans would appreciate Golovkin, but a lot of them wouldn’t really care that he beat Ward.

“I wasn’t scared of him [Golovkin]. He couldn’t knock me out, even though I was fighting blind,” Rosado said. Ward would outmuscle him. Ward would win that fight because Ward is smart. He’s going to make adjustments because he knows what to do. Ward is more accomplished than Triple G.”

Golovkin stopped Rosado in the 7th round in their fight two years ago in 2013. Rosado used constant movement to survive to the 7th. The one round where he didn’t move was in the 5th, where he was able to land some hard shots on Golovkin. However, at the start of the 6th, Golovkin hurt Rosado with a big right uppercut that caused Rosado to start running again. The fight was then stopped in the next round. Rosado didn’t get knocked out in the clinical sense, but he was badly cut over his left eye. If Rosado didn’t move so much, he likely would have been knocked out in the first two or three rounds. He had no defense whatsoever against Golovkin’s shots, and wasn’t reacting well when getting hit solid.



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