By Scott Gilfoid: There seems to be a disagreement with fans of Kell Brook about how well he did in his 5th round knockout loss to middleweight world champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin and with some of the more knowledgeable boxing experts like promoter Bob Arum. While Brook’s fans think he was doing a swell job in the first four rounds against Triple G and leading by a three rounds to one scoring going into the 5th, Arum says Brook was little more than a punching bag for Golovkin once he realized that he couldn’t punch.
Arum says the fight wasn’t a real fight because of Brook not having the power to make Golovkin respect him. I have to agree with that. Brook looked like an arm puncher in the ring in that fight, and many of his shots were thrown with him leaping into the air, without him setting his feet like the talented fighters do. In other words, Brook undermined his own power by not setting his feet when throwing his shots.
One reason why Brook might have been doing that was because it was in distress from the 3rd round. Brook fought well in the 2nd, but from the 3rd round , we saw him in the full retreat mode. Golovkin increased the pressure on Brook in the 3rd round, and this led to him running around the ring to try and keep from getting knocked out. It was no longer a fight by round three. It was Brook in retreat and trying to save his hide.
Brook was just boxing and looking to survive from the 3rd round. Brook was hurt in the 1st, and running in the 3rd and 4th. He wasn’t winning the fight. Brook was running. It’s bad news when you get the kind of judges’ scores that we saw for the Golovkin-Brook fight, because the visiting fighters need to feel like they’re going to be given a fair shake when they come into a foreign country. When they see scoring that makes no sense at all, I think it may cause them to have second thoughts about wanting to go fight outside of their home country.
“We didn’t learn anything [from the Golovkin-Brook match]. It wasn’t a fight. When Triple G realized Brook couldn’t hurt him, he just forgot about boxing, forgot about everything and turned it into a street fight, because he was there with a punching bag, a punching bag whose eye socket was apparently broken in the 2nd round. All I’m saying is it wasn’t a real fight. I thought Triple G was going to knockout Brook in the 1st round. It looked like he had him out.”
The scoring of the Golovkin-Brook fight was abysmal by the three judges. One of them had Brook winning three rounds to one after four rounds, and the other two had it even at two rounds apiece. I don’t know how Brook could have been ahead at the time of the stoppage because he lost the 1st round after getting hurt, he ran in rounds three and four to try and escape the pressure from Golovkin. All the huge power shots that were thrown and landed in rounds three and four were from Golovkin. Brook was running, holding and throwing weak shots with his feet off the floor. Brook looked SO WEAK it wasn’t even funny.
Contrary to what has been said about Brook suffering his broken right eye socket in the 2nd round, I don’t think Brook’s eye injury happened in round two. In re-watching the fight, I noticed that Brook was fine after the 2nd round. His right eye looked good, and his trainer Dominic Ingle wasn’t paying any attention to the eye at that time. But during the early part of round three, Brook was nailed by some nice left hooks from Golovkin. It was at that time that we saw Brook dabbing at his right eye over and over again while RUNNING around the ring.
Golovkin was really going after Brook in the 3rd round. It looked almost like Golovkin was in fast motion in attacking Brook. Golovkin came out for the third round a completely different fighter than he’d been in the 2nd round. I guess it angered Golovkin that Brook had a decent 2nd round, and he wanted to put him in his place in the 3rd, which is exactly what he did.
It was rout in the 3rd. It looked like to me that Brook saw the pressure that Golovkin was putting on him, felt his huge punches, and decided he wanted no part of mixing it up with that angry monster. Arum was right. Brook was like a punching bag. Golovkin had NO respect for Brook’s punching power, and he wasn’t going to bother getting out of the way of his weak arm punches. All Golovkin wanted to do was make it a street fight to hit Brook as hard as he could with every shot.
Brook was literally breaking apart like a ship on ocean falling apart in rough seas. Golovkin landed a TREMENDOUS right hand to the head in the 3rd round that really got Brook’s attention. I was surprised that Brook stayed on his feet after taking that shot. Never the less, Brook increased his running speed and no longer showing interest in fighting. It was like a playground fight that had gotten out of hand. Brook’s trainer Dominic Ingle might as well have thrown the white towel of surrender into the ring during the 3rd round, because it was unofficially no longer a fight at that point.
It was only a fight during the 2nd round. Brook got worked over in rounds one, three, four and five. As I mentioned, the scoring for the fight was a joke in my opinion. Brook only won the 2nd round. He got worked over in all the other rounds of the fight. I wish the judges have given their scores for the 5th round, because I would have liked to have seen how they scored that round before Ingle threw in the white towel to save Brook.
We saw how two of the judges gave Brook the 1st round despite the fact that he was badly staggered by a left hook by Golovkin. Brook was almost knocked out in the 1st round, and yet two of the judges gave him the round. I don’t know what to even think about that. All I can say is that Golovkin made sure that the fight didn’t go to the scorecards by battering Brook so badly in the 5th that his trainer Dominic Ingle had to throw in the towel to save him.
Speaking about his unbeaten fighter World Boxing Organization super middleweight champion Gilberto “Zurdo” Ramirez, Arum said, “We’d like to have him back in the ring in January. If he’s successful, we’d love to have him fight Triple G.”
Golovkin vs. Gilberto Ramirez would be a good fight for the future. I don’t see it happening in 2017 though. Golovkin has too many other potentially interesting fights for him to go up to super middleweight to fight the unbeaten Gilberto Ramirez. That fight can happen in the future, but I suspect that we won’t see it until 2018 or 2019. In the meantime, Ramirez needs to keep winning and he needs to build his name in the boxing community. A fight between Golovkin and Ramirez wouldn’t make news right now due to Ramirez lacking the popularity in the U.S for a fight between them to mean much.