By Scott Gilfoid: Chris Eubank Jr. disappointed a lot of his boxing fans when he failed to agree to a fight against middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin last September. The fight was offered to Eubank Jr. by his promoter Eddie Hearn. When Eubank Jr. failed to agree to the terms of the fight quickly enough to Hearn’s liking, he offered it to welterweight Kell Brook, who readily agreed to the same deal.
Eubank Jr. has now moved up to super middleweight. However, the 27-year-old Eubank Jr. believes that the Golovkin fight is still there for him, and that he’ll be fighting him in 2017, believe it or not.
Eubank Jr. said this to IFL TV about his thoughts on the Golovkin fight taking place in 2017:
“That fight is still there to be made,” said Eubank Jr. about the Golovkin fight. “It will still happen, and I believe it will happen in 2017.”
So there it is. Eubank Jr. thinks he’ll be fighting Triple G in 2017. I can’t say I believe what Eubank Jr. is saying, but he might surprise the boxing world by proving us wrong and taking the fight. At this point though, Eubank Jr. would likely need to make a FAST deal with Golovkin and his promoter Tom Loeffler for them to invest much time in the negotiations with him. If Eubank Jr. and his father Chris Eubank start negotiating and drag out the negotiations for any length of time, I do not see Loeffler and GGG sticking around to humor them. They’ll move on QUICKLY, because they’re already dealt with the Eubank’s in the past and seen what it’s like to negotiate with them.
Getting stuck in patch of career-stalling quicksand in negotiations with Eubank Jr. is something that Golovkin and his management will probably want to avoid at all costs. It might take too much time to negotiate with the Eubank’s, and there’s no guarantee the fight can even get made. Eubank Jr. seems to have no problems negotiating fights against domestic level fighters like Nick Blackwell, Tom Doran and Renold Quinlan, but when it comes to GGG, it’s just not happening.
Eubak Jr. explains why the Golovkin fight didn’t get made in saying that promoter Eddie Hearn offered the deal to Kell Brook when he didn’t accept the terms.
“Eddie [Hearn] saw an easy way out. He saw a way to make things easier for himself by giving the fight away to Kell [Brook],” said Eubank Jr. “We we in negotiations, we were negotiating everything for the fight and we were close to getting it completely done but we’re not rollovers, we’re not just going to accept everything you tell us. We’re not yes-men. We’re fighters and we’re gonna take what we deserve, whereas obviously Kell was like ‘listen, yes’ to everything that Eddie wanted.”
Speaking of Quinlan (11-1, 7 KOs), EubankJr. will be fighting him on February 4 for his International Boxing Organization super middleweight title in London, UK. Quinlan recently beat Daniel Geale by a 2nd round knockout win on October 14 to win the vacant IBO 168lb title in Australia. It was a good win for the 27-year-old Quinlan, but he was facing an old timer in 35-year-old Geale. It’s not as if Quinlan beat a YOUNG Geale or beat a relevant fighter in the 168lb division.
As for why Eubank Jr. is moving up to super middleweight, he says he saw the opportunity to win the IBO title, and he wanted to go for it. Eubank Jr. values the IBO super middleweight title for some reason. Unfortunately, Eubank Jr. doesn’t quite understand the difference between picking up belts off of well-known fighters and picking up paper titles off of little known guys, which is what he’s going to be doing in facing Quinlan. Eubank Jr. will end up with the IBO belt, but the boxing world likely won’t care too much about it, because he’s not facing someone with a high degree of talent and notoriety.
In theory, Golovkin might have time to fight Eubank Jr. in 2017 after he gets done with his WBA ordered fight against Danny Jacobs on March 18. It’s possible that Golovkin could squeeze a fight in against Eubank Jr. in the summer if the negotiations with him can be started and completed at a fast pace. Do I see that happening? No, I don’t. I think Eubank Jr. is one of those types of fighters where it would take Golovkin’s management many months of negotiations to try and make that fight happen. In light of the three months that it took for Golovkin’s promoters to negotiate the Jacobs fight, it would be bad news for the Kazakhstan fighter to get trapped into a seemingly never-ending negotiations with Eubank Jr. and his father. That doesn’t mean that Golovkin shouldn’t at least try to make a deal with Eubank Jr. Perhaps the fight can be made between them, but I wouldn’t personally invest more than a week in the negotiations if I were Golovkin. If the Eubank Jr. fight isn’t made within a week, then Golovkin should move on and put Eubank Jr. on permanent ignore. There are some fights that aren’t meant to be made, and that could be one of them for GGG.
“We saw an opportunity to fight this IBO super middleweight world champion [Quinlan], and we thought ‘why not,’ it’s not middleweight but it’s a world title, it’s a huge thing to bring that title back to England. People are going to want to see that. He knocked out Daniel Geale in his last performance, so he’s not playing around. Any world champion wants to keep his title belt, unless you’re Canelo Alvarez who doesn’t want to fight Golovkin, then you give it up, but this guy’s coming over here to defend his title with everything he’s got,” said Eubank Jr.
I don’t think winning the IBO belt is seen as the same thing by boxing fans as winning one of the major titles like the IBF, WBA, WBO and WBC. I might be wrong, but I don’t think the fans are going to be overly impressed with Eubank Jr. winning the IBO strap against an obscure champion like Renold Quinlan.
I must say, I’d never heard of Quinlan before until Eubank Jr. signed to fight him. Of course, I don’t follow Geale’s career that closely ever since he was knocked out by Golovkin and Miguel Cotto, and beaten by Darren Barker. Those three losses that Geale suffered against those guys has caused me to pay less attention to him, as he seems more like a guy who left his best days behind him four years ago. Geale was a decent – but not a great fighter – in his prime, but by the time that Quinlan fought him, he had definitely slipped a couple of notches from the guy he was 1,500 yesterday’s ago.