By Dan Ambrose: Former WBO middleweight champion Peter Quillin says Gennady ‘GGG’ Golovkin fights the same way each time while Saul Canelo Alvarez adapts each time he competes. Quillin isn’t coming right out to make a prediction for the Canelo-GGG 2 rematch on May 5, but he seems to be giving Canelo the best chance of winning due to his ability to adapt.
Quillin says he was fine with the 12 round draw the judges handed down for the Canelo vs. GGG fight on September 16 on HBO PPV last year. Quillin says he’s OK with that draw, because he feels he’s seen worse scores such as Golovkin’s fight against Daniel Jacobs last March on HBO PPV. Quillin thinks that fight could have been scored a draw. The judges gave Golovkin a close 12 round unanimous decision win mainly because Jacobs was knocked down in round 4, and he spent most of the first 6 rounds on the move rather than fighting.
“It was a draw,” Quillin said to Fighthype about the Golovkin vs. Canelo fight last September. “I didn’t mind that because you’ve seen worse decisions without a draw. What about Danny Jacobs vs. Golovkin before that? Could that have been a draw? The only thing we didn’t see in the Canelo fight is Canelo getting dropped,” Jacobs said.
The problem with Quillin’s opinion on the Golovkin vs. Jacobs fight is the boxing public didn’t see the fight as a draw. There are a small group of boxing fans that thought Jacobs deserved a draw, and an even smaller number that thought he should have been given a win over Triple G. But most fans thought Golovkin deserved the win over Jacobs. Most fans thought Golovkin deserved the win over Canelo. So that puts Quillin on the margins with his opinion about the Golovkin vs. Jacobs fight. He’s an isolated voice shouting in the wind, but it changes nothing. The fight is over with and Golovkin beat Jacobs, and the fans thought he deserved the win. The fans also thought Golovkin deserved the win over Canelo. That hasn’t changed.
”I got a lot of respect off of Canelo’s performance, because just imagine being told that this guys is a monster, he’s going to knock you out,” Quillin said. ”And then when you’re in there, you should just as much balls as he that person. For me, when someone says you’re going to get knocked out and you do really good. To me, Canelo’s defense looked a lot better than Golovkin’s. They both took solid shots. I think it’s a well-earned rematch,” Quillin said.
Quillin respects Canelo for surviving. Canelo still didn’t win, and the fans didn’t think he won, so the credit that he gets only goes so far. If the judges had scored the fight 8 rounds to 4 for Golovkin, you can argue that there would have been no point for a second fight. Winning by 4 to 6 rounds is more than a wide enough cushion for Golovkin to have moved on. It’s a well-deserved rematch in Quillin’s mind, because he has the minority view of seeing the fight as a 6-6 fight.
Canelo’s defense did look better than Golovkin’s, but his attention was on boxing and countering. Golovkin had a different goal. Golovkin was stalking Canelo and trying to wear him down with a fast pace. It worked well. Canelo was fighting on fumes from rounds 3 to 11. If you look closely at the fight, you see a tired Canelo after round 2, and he stayed that way until the 12th. Canelo was wanted to land pot shot counters, and he never tried to match the output Golovkin was throwing, because it would have been too hard for him to do that.
”It depends on the mind of the fighter,” said Quillin in talking about how Canelo and Golovkin are reacting to their previous fight. ”Maybe Golovkin feels he could have done something more or maybe Canelo found the puzzle and solved the puzzle. I look at it when a boxer fights a brawler. Don’t it look frustrating to watch that? You just cruise to a decision. These are the kinds of fights that make boxing. Canelo got the better shots, because we’ve see him look like 10 different fighters in different fights. He fought somebody and he turned on the slick boxing style to not get hit and throwing punches. It happened right after he fought Floyd [Mayweather], and went up there and did it,” Quillin said.
Golovkin knows now that he can’t fight Canelo on the outside the way he did most of the fight. That worked for Floyd Mayweather Jr. in winning a one-sided decision against Canelo, but it didn’t work for Golovkin and probably won’t be effective in the rematch. Golovkin is going to have to fight Canelo like he did against Kassim Ouma by staying in close the entire fight and turning it into a grueling war in June 2011. That fight was close at the time Golovkin stopped Ouma in round 10. The scores were 87-84, 86-85 and 86-85. Golovkin took a lot of shots in to land his harder punches. Ouma hung tough until the 10th round when Golovkin increased the pace and began teeing off on him with right hands to the head. The referee Guillermo Perez stepped in and stopped the fight once he realized that Ouma was defenseless on the ropes. Ouma didn’t fight for 2 years after that loss. If Golovkin gives Canelo beating like that, he could ruin his career. But if the judges aren’t going to let Golovkin win by out-boxing Canelo, then he has no other choice but to take the fight to him and try and turn him into a knockout statistic. Canelo will probably try and run, but I don’t think that’s going to work this time. Golovkin is going to stay on top of Canelo and force him to fight until the bitter end. If Canelo is smart, he’ll work on his conditioning because he was unfit last September. Canelo looked like he trained in the weight room instead of a boxing gym, and he didn’t have anywhere near the good enough condition to fight a hard 3 rounds. Canelo looked like he was trained for the beach to lie out in the sun rather than to fight, and it cost because he was gassing all night long in every round. Quillin obviously conveniently forgot that part.
”And we’ve seen Gennady use more force and pressure,” Quillin said. ”We haven’t seen him with the flashy boxing style. If there’s anybody I’m going to give credit to, it’s a boxer that’s able to adapt to the situation and walk in there and move a little bit more, slip a little bit more and throw a little bit more jabs. He pretty much fights the same to me. We’re almost going to expect that when he fights somebody to see how that person reacts after they get hit by Golovkin. So we’re watching for that as a fan. We want to see that happen, and we want to see how well somebody is able to do that, and get it back and be able to do something after. We haven’t seen that until the Danny Jacobs fight where we’ve seen him box. I think that was Gennady Golovkin’s first boxer in a long time. The last time he fought a boxer was Kell brook, and Kassim Ouma. Yes, he [Ouma] did [give GGG problems,” Quillin said.
Quillin is wrong about Ouma being a boxer during the Golovkin fight. Ouma was slugging with Golovkin for 10 rounds, not boxing him. That was a war. Golovkin won, but there was absolutely no boxing whatsoever. Kell Brook tried slugging with Golovkin in the first 2 rounds of their fight in September 2016, but he changed tactics after suffering a broken eye socket in round 2. From rounds 3 to 5, Brook was mostly boxing/running from Golovkin. Brook didn’t do enough to win any of the last 3 rounds before he quit in round 5. Danny Jacobs boxed Golovkin in the first 6 rounds, and then slugged with him at times in the last 6 rounds. The judges were giving Jacobs a lot of credit in giving him 5 of the last 6 rounds. Golovkin was trying to box too much instead of slug, and that gave Jacobs an advantage in the second half of the fight. Golovkin might have been able to KO Jacobs if he’d been pressuring him like Dmitry Pirog did in knocking him out in the 5th round in their fight in 2010.
Stephen A. Smith of ESPN is favoring Canelo to beat Golovkin in the rematch, because he’s enamored with his superior hand speed that he showed in their fight. Smith liked Canelo’s defense with the way he was getting out of the way of Golovkin’s shots. Canelo’s defense wasn’t there in the second half of the contest. It was only present in the first 6 rounds when Golovkin was fighting him from the outside. When Golovkin began to pressure Canelo in the second half of the fight, he wore him down and had him looking ragged. Canelo was then getting hit a lot, and his form broke down and wasn’t the same fighter. Smith has selective recall in remembering how Canelo was eluding punches in the first half of the fight, but not remembering how he was getting hit repeatedly once he started being pressured by Golovkin in the second half of the fight. If Golovkin pressures Canelo hard in the first 6 rounds, you’ll see him being a lot, and getting tired out for the second half. That’s not good for Canelo, because if he’s already exhausted going into the last 6 rounds, then there’s a good chance that he’s going to get knocked out.
“I am more optimistic of his chances in the rematch,” Stephen A. Smith said about Canelo on ESPN’s First Take. “My point is the biggest reason why I would go with Canelo in the rematch is I saw Triple G, who couldn’t find him much too often. It was incredible how much slower he looked than Canelo in the first fight. If Triple G had caught Canelo with some of those punches, I don’t think Canelo would have gone the distance, and Canelo is a hell of a fighter that can take a punch. He is the real deal, but his speed and his ability to be evasive shocked me to death. That’s why I would give him the edge over Triple G in the rematch. He’s just faster than Triple G; not just offensively, but defensively,” Stephen A. said.
I don’t think Canelo has any other options in the rematch but to stand and fight this time. Golovkin will have trained hard to keep him from running this time, so that won’t work like it did last time. That means Canelo will have to either fight or spoil by clinching to try and shut Golovkin’s game down. I’ve never seen Canelo use holding before to keep his opponents from throwing punches, but I’d never seen him run for 12 rounds before until last September. Team Canelo is going to try to do something Golovkin will least suspect, and the only thing I can imagine Canelo trying to do is clinch and shut Golovkin’s offense by holding all night. Canelo won’t win fans that way, but I don’t think he cares. Canelo was being booed by his boxing fans after his fight with Golovkin last September due to the fans being upset with his running and him being a poor sport while being interviewed. Canelo might go and hold all night long and note ven care that the fans will boo him.
Canelo is faster than Golovkin, but he still appeared to lose the fight against. Golovkin showed that he could beat a faster fighter with nonstop effort. Golovkin worked harder than Canelo with his blue-collar approach to fighting and had him too tired to do anything from rounds 3 to 11. The fight was lost for Canelo in those rounds. The judges GAVE Canelo a 12 round draw, but the boxing fans felt Golovkin won. As such, Golovkin is coming into the rematch with Canelo as the winner and it’s up to the Golden Boy star to try and prove that he can do better in the rematch to try and even things out at 1-1. Canelo can’t count on another controversial draw, because you can bet the judges are going to be leaning over backwards to give rounds to Golovkin so they’re being seen as showing favoritism to Canelo. It would make the judges look incredibly bad if they gave Canelo a controversial win or draw after last time. The judges need to get things right this time around, and I think they’ll make sure they do that so that they’re not viewed as giving Canelo a win or a draw based on his popularity rather than his talent.
