Kellerman: Andre Ward is the No.1 P4P; Golovkin is unproven

By Boxing News - 10/06/2015 - Comments

ward5By Dan Ambrose: HBO analyst Max Kellerman has moved WBA super middleweight champion Andre Ward (28-0, 15 KOs) No.1 in his personal pound-for-pound list now that Floyd Mayweather Jr. has retired from boxing.

If Mayweather comes back, then Kellerman believes that he should be No.1 still. Kellerman says he doesn’t have unbeaten knockout artist IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (33-0, 30 KOs) high on his pound-for-pound list because he’s still unproven because none of the top middleweights want to fight him aside from IBF 160lb champion David Lemieux.

Andre Ward wants to fight him, but Golovkin and his promoter Tom Loeffler aren’t ready to take that fight yet.

Picking Ward as the No.1 P4P fighter is controversial though, because he hasn’t fought a top level fighter in almost two years since his win over Edwin Rodriguez in November 2013. That was 23 months ago. You can’t count Ward’s win over Paul Smith last June, because Smith is more of a high level journeyman than a contender nowadays, and he really was never much of a contender even in his prime.

Smith wasn’t ranked in the top 15 by any of the top sanctioning bodies when Ward fought him. You can’t compare Smith with the cream of the 168lb division, even though he was recently given two gift world title shots by promoters at Sauerland Events against their WBO super middleweight champion Arthur Abraham.

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“Floyd is no.1. If you consider him retired, I move Andre [Ward] to No.1,” Kellerman said to Fighthype. “A lot of people will say he’s been inactive for a long time. If you want to go by resume and who will beat whom, Andre. Triple G has scared guys away. I don’t have him up high pound for pound because he hasn’t proven it yet because they don’t want to fight him. The only guy that wanted to fight him was favored to beat him was Andre [Ward]. He is the last American gold medalist. He’s undefeated, and he’s cleared out the super middleweight division. He hasn’t lost an amateur fight since he was 14-years-old. But if you’re inactive against top opposition long enough, people start to hold that against you. They did it to Floyd [Mayweather],” Kellerman said.

I don’t think Ward deserves to be No.1 pound-for-pound right now because he really hasn’t done anything for so long. Kellerman’s ranking of Ward at No1 would make sense if this was 2013, and time was frozen since that year. But boxing has changed a great deal in the last two years, and Ward hasn’t been part of that change. He’s been sitting inactive and you can’t count his win over the journeyman level Paul Smith.

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We don’t even know what Ward’s future is going to be like once he moves up to light heavyweight officially, which should be in his next fight on November 21st on the undercard of the Saul “Canelo” Alvarez vs. Miguel Cotto card.

Ward and his promoters at Roc Nation Sports are likely going to take their time before they eventually face IBF/WBA/WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev, so you won’t be able to give Ward credit for beating the likely contenders at 175 that he’ll be facing. Until he proves himself good enough to beat Kovalev and Adonis Stevenson, I don’t think Ward rates the No.1 pound-for-pound spot.

Kellerman is correct about Golovkin not deserving the No.1 P4P spot. He’s still unproven completely. But I don’t think Roman Gonzalez has proven himself either. He needs to beat better fighters than Brian Viloria, Rocky Fuentes and Edgar Sosa. Gonzalez needs to move up to super flyweight and beat the likes of Naoya Inoue, McJoe Arroyo, and then beat some of the bantamweights like Shinsuke Yamanaka, Jamie McDonnell and Randy Caballero. Until that happens, I can’t put him as the No.1 pound-for-pound fighter.

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I think the pound-for-pound No.1 fighter needs to remain vacant until Golovkin, Ward and Gonzalez all prove themselves in the near year or two so that boxing fans can see who the real No1 fighter is rather than just a subjective opinion made by one of the talking heads like Kellerman or by the staff at Ring Magazine. The No.1 fighter needs to be selected by the people rather than a small group making the decision. It doesn’t make sense unless the people vote the top P4P fighter into the No.1 spot.



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