By Dan Ambrose: IBF/IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (34-0, 31 KOs) vs. Dominic Wade (18-0, 12 KOs) is less than two months away for their April 23 fight on HBO Championship Boxing from the Forum in Inglewood, California.
Golovkin is trying to stay focused on his training and not get distracted by the fights going around him, as well as his hoped for clash later this year in September against WBC middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez.
It’s hard obviously because the fight against the 25-year-old Wade is such a minor one compared to the Canelo fight. Golovkin doesn’t even know if the Canelo fight will take place, which makes things even harder because there’s a lot of talk that Canelo will choose to sidestep Golovkin in order to continue to make easy money fighting opposition that his wise owl promoter Oscar De La Hoya is setting up for him.
It’s not that De La Hoya doesn’t like to make good fights for the fans. It’s more of a case of the fights that he tends to make are ones where he his fighters have a very good chance of winning.
It’s unclear if that’s De La Hoya’s criteria in making his fights, but it seems like he’s not making too many fights nowadays where his flagship fighter Canelo has a good chance of losing. We saw the one fight with Canelo matched against Floyd Mayweather Jr. in 2013, but that was a fight that gave Canelo such a big payday that it didn’t matter that he lost.
Training is going great. One day closer to getting in the ring #GolovkinWade #TeamGGG
— Gennady Golovkin (@GGGBoxing) February 28, 2016
Golovkin is finding out the hard way that collecting all these titles has a huge responsibility that comes with them. He’s finding himself stuck fighting the poor mandatory challengers that these sanctioning bodies select. It’s really bad because Golovkin has better options available to him than fighting an over-matched fighter like Wade.
Hopefully, Golovkin doesn’t get stuck facing too many other poor mandatories in the next year or two. It would be a good thing for Golovkin to get rid of all these useless titles once he’s finished collecting them all, because they’ll only drag down his career by forcing him to waste valuable fights beating up on guys that arguably have no business being a mandatory challenger.
In the case of Wade, he looked terrible in his last fight against 42-year-old Sam Soliman. Many fans still feel that Wade deserved to lose to Soliman. The thing is this wasn’t even a prime Soliman. This was the Soliman with a bad knee, and yet he still appeared to get the better of Wade in the majority of the rounds. I had Soliman winning that fight by a comfortable decision against the Al Haymon-managed Wade.
Golovkin will be watching the Canelo vs. Amir Khan fight on May 7 with keen interest to find out which of the two that he might be facing later this year. Khan has talked of potentially vacating the WBC title if he beats Canelo. He says he might move back down to 147 and look to get a mega-fight rather than holding onto the title and defending it against Golovkin, who he sees as a bigger fighter. Golovkin is actually lighter than Canelo, but he’s seen as the more dangerous guy obviously because of his punching power.
Comments are closed.