Hearn: Golovkin-Eubank Jr. fight has 7 days to get made after Doran

By Boxing News - 06/23/2016 - Comments

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By Dan Ambrose: Matchroom Sport promoter Eddie Hearn is only going to have a small amount of time to make the fight between his fight Chris Eubank Jr. (22-1, 17 KOs) and IBF/IBO/WBA/WBC middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (35-0, 32 KOs). According to Hearn, he has only seven days to make the Golovkin vs. Eubank Jr. after this Saturday’s fight between Eubank Jr. and Tom Doran (17-0, 7 KOs) at the O2 Arena in London, UK.

If Hearn hasn’t made the fight by the seven day time frame, then Golovkin will move on and be looking for another opponent. The problem is that Golovkin has wasted valuable time waiting on a fight against Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, and he just found out this week that the Mexican star won’t be fighting him this year.

Canelo and Golden Boy Promotions wants the fight between him and Golovkin to take place in the fall of 2017. It’s too bad they took this long in telling GGG this, because they could have saved him a lot of wasted time if they had told him months ago that they have no intentions of fighting him in 2016.

“Seven days [from Eubank Jr.-Doran] is the time period where that fight will have to get made, otherwise Golovkin’s team will move on,” said Hearn to Fighthype.com. “I’m up for making that fight. My job is to make the fights that my fighters and their team want. And if it happens to involve a huge amount of money, which that does, then fantastic.”

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Hearn had better move quickly after Eubank Jr. disposes of the over-matched Doran on Saturday night, because Golovkin isn’t going to wait around forever like he did with Canelo and wind up getting stood up. Golovkin needs to be the one that gives his opponents take it or leave offers, and if they don’t take the fight quickly, then they should move on and continue dominating the middleweight division.

This waiting around business makes GGG look too needy, and he should be made to look like that. He’s too talented to be the second fiddle to any fighter, including Canelo. Golovkin’s promoter Tom Loeffler needs to give Hearn a deadline, and if the fight isn’t made by that point, then they need to take off and go for the Plan-C option.

“At the end of the day, I can only provide the opportunities to the fighters that they wish to take,” said Hearn. “When we re-signed Chris Eubank Jr. the message was clear: make the Golovkin fight. I’m now in a position where I believe I can make that fight. So if you really want it, you can take that fight. Now it’s a huge gamble, huge gamble. It could be calculated, there’s a lot of money on the table for that fight, but it’s a very dangerous fight. They believe they can win that fight. I believe that it’ll be certainly Golovkin’s toughest fight yet. Can he win? It’s going to be a very tough fight.”

At this point, it’s debatable whether Eubank Jr. is actually serious about wanting to fight Triple G or not. Eubank Jr. has been talking about wanting to fight a lot of different guys, and instead of him fighting them, he’s fighting the likes of Nick Blackwell and Doran. At some point, you have to judge a fighter by what he’s done in the past rather than the words that come out of their mouths. With Eubank Jr, he’s been talking Golovkin but then turning around and fighting 2nd tier fighters like Blackwell and Tony Jeter. It’s no good for Golovkin to be stultified like this messing around waiting on someone who may not be any more serious about fighting him than the 25-year-old Canelo was.

Golovkin has other options if Eubank Jr. and Hearn drag their feet in the negotiations. Golovkin can face #4 WBA Tureano Johnson, Alfonso Blanco, and Jorge Sebatian Heiland. Those are good stay busy fights for Golovkin to take while Loeffler works on trying to get WBO middleweight champion Billy Joe Saunders to agree to a fight. That’s the last remaining piece of the middleweight puzzle for GGG. If he can’t get that fight, then he needs to move up to super middleweight in early 2017 to take WBO super middleweight champion Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez’s title off him.