By Dan Ambrose: In news that has to be seen as a major negative for Oscar De La Hoya and Golden Boy Promotions, IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (33-0, 30 KOs) has been voted in a poll at Fightnews.com as the most likely fighter to take over for Floyd Mayweather Jr. as the new pound-for-pound king of the sport of boxing.
Golovkin was voted as No.1 in the poll with 32% of the vote. De La Hoya’s flagship fighter Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, who De La Hoya believes will be the No.1 pay-per-view fighter for the next 10 years, came in only 6% of the vote, tied with Sergey Kovalev and Miguel Cotto.
WBA super middleweight champion Andre Ward came in second at 15%, and IBF/IBO/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko came in third at 10%. Manny Pacquiao is all the way down at 8%, which reflects his recent loss to Mayweather and his subsequent shoulder injury excuse. What this suggests is that Golovkin’s exciting knockouts has had the effect of winning him a great deal of respect and admiration from the boxing public.
Golovkin has knocked out every opponent he’s faced over seven year period since 2008. Those knockouts are causing Golovkin to take over at the top guy. Canelo, 25, has been hurt badly by his loss to Mayweather, as well as his poor performances in getting controversial wins over Erislandy Lara and Austin Trout.
Canelo failed to knock those fighters out, and he wound up winning close decisions that could have gone the other way. Canelo didn’t help his standings in the boxing community when he chose not to give rematches to Trout and Lara so that he could clear up the controversies surrounding their close fights.
Even if Mayweather was to stick around for another four or five years, I think he would soon be eclipsed by Golovkin anyway mainly due to Mayweather’s fights being increasingly more and more boring, and his opposition not being good enough to keep him at the No.1 spot.
If Mayweather continued fighting, he would be forced to fight the likes of Keith Thurman, Amir Khan, Shawn Porter, Danny Garcia, Tim Bradley and Golovkin for him to stay at the top and not slide from the top spot. The problem is getting Mayweather to fight those guys would likely prove to be impossible because he’s shown no interest in fighting any of those guys for some reason. Mayweather is picking a good time to get out of the sport because if he’d continued fighting, he would have had to prove his top spot against a bunch of very good fighters. I don’t know that Mayweather could have kept above Golovkin if he’d taken those fights. He certainly wouldn’t have kept the top #1 pound-for-pound spot by avoiding those fighters and continuing to fight guys like Berto, Roberto Guerrero and Marcos Maidana instead.
Golovkin has a fight coming up next month that will further help his rankings when he faces IBF middleweight champion David Lemieux (34-2, 31 KOs) in a fight on October 17th at Madison Square Garden in New York. A win over Golovkin will give him two of the four middleweight titles, and put him in position to fight the winner of the November 21st fight between Canelo and WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto.
If the winner of that fight chooses not to fight Golovkin, then they’ll be stripped of the WBC title and the belt will be given to Golovkin outside of the ring. That’ll mean that he’ll have three of the four titles in the middleweight division.
It won’t even matter if Canelo and Cotto avoid Golovkin because they’ll have shot themselves in the foot by avoiding the fight. Golovkin will then have more cache to go after WBO middleweight champion Andy Lee for the last piece of the middleweight puzzle. That’ll be the last title not in Golovkin’s possession.
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