By Sean Jones: Gennady ‘GGG’ Golovkin (37-0-1, 33 KOs) says his rematch with Golden Boy Promotions star Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez (49-1-2, 34 KOs) will be the biggest fight of his life on May 5th at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. Their HBO pay-per-view televised contest means everything to Golovkin. He wasn’t want to be denied a victory over Canelo a second time. That’s why Golovkin wants to knockout Canelo this time.
Golovkin will be turning 36 on April 8th, and up until now the biggest fight of his career was his first fight with Canelo on September 16th last year. Golovkin feels the previous fight with Canelo wasn’t fair. The fight was marred by a controversial 12 round draw.
Despite the questionable scoring by the assigned judges for that fight, Golovkin says he was happy to keep his IBF/IBO/WBA/WBC middleweight titles. He walked away knowing he’d won the fight, and he was supported by the boxing public, who saw it as a clear win for him. Canelo came out of the fight tainted with yet another decision that that should have gone against him. More anything, Canelo is the one that needs to prove himself in the rematch, because he’s been involved in several controversial decisions during his career arguably should have resulted in losses for him.
“This is the most important fight of my life. It’s a history fight. It’s a fight that will highlight my championship reign,” Golovkin said to ESPN.com. I have nothing to prove in this fight. I just want to win. I want to win, I want to keep my belts, I want to stay world champion.”
Golovkin doesn’t have anything to prove in the rematch. He’s right about that. But for him to get the win over the highly popular Canelo, he’s going to need to do more than just win. Golovkin will probably need to score a knockout for him to be 100 percent certain that his victory isn’t snatched out of his hands in the rematch on May 5th. I think Golovkin realizes that though, which is why he’s saying he wants to knockout Canelo. That’s the ideal outcome for Golovkin. He’ll take a decision win if it comes to that, but he wants a knockout of Canelo just to be safe.
Golovkin feels the HBO commentators showed bias during his fight with Canelo last September. Golovkin doesn’t mention names of who was showing bias in favor of Canelo, so one is left to guess. HBO’s unofficial ringside scorer Harold Lederman scored the fight in Golovkin’s favor 8 rounds to 4 over Canelo. Lederman can’t be the one that Golovkin is talking about.
“I’m always for fairness. This fight did not have any fairness, but this has not bothered me personally,” said Golovkin. “The [HBO] commentators showed a bias. This type of judging is what is hurting boxing. I was disappointed in the commentary of the fight.”
Canelo is a very popular fighter, and he’s young at 27. He’s going to be fighting on HBO for many years to come. If the HBO commentators weren’t tearing into Canelo by speaking the obvious about how he was running and looking timid for 12 rounds, then you venture to guess that they didn’t want to destroy the guy. He’s going to be around for a long time. Long Golovkin is gone from the sport, Canelo will still be there. If Canelo stays with HBO for the remainder of his prime years, then the network will likely bring in good ratings, if he doesn’t start getting knocked out left and right by the guys he’s matched with. Golden Boy has been careful in the type of guys that they’ve matched Canelo up against until his last fight with GGG, and he clearly lost that fight in the eyes of the boxing public. The question is, did the HBO commentators avoid saying too many negative things about Canelo’s performance against Golovkin due to him being an important fighter for the network or was this simply a case of them admiring how he fought? We’ll likely never know. None of the HBO commentators are going to admit to being biased in favor of Canelo.
Golovkin shouldn’t care about the commentating by HBO, as they’re not the ones that score fights officially. I think boxing fans didn’t take their cues from the HBO commentators in choosing who they felt won the fight. You can say that the chatter from the HBO commentator’s is static noise in the background during fights, and it likely has no effect on the perception of the boxing fans that watch the fights. The fans saw what took place in the ring. They don’t need Max Kellerman of HBO to tell them what happened.
Golovkin out-landed Canelo in 10 of the 12 rounds last September in their fight on HBO PPV, and he did appear to be in control in 9 of the 12 rounds. The judges scored it a draw, but they made themselves look bad with their scores, because the boxing public didn’t agree with them. The CompuBox stats show that Golovkin out=landed Canelo in the fight. Yeah, many of the punches Golovkin landed were jabs, but they were power jabs that were like power punches. When Canelo was hit with the jabs, his head was snapping back like he was getting hit with big shots. That’s one of the reasons Canelo was running from Golovkin.
Canelo didn’t want to stand his ground even though he was mainly being hit by jabs instead of power shots. Canelo didn’t like getting hit with jabs, and he knew there was nothing he could do about it, so he would run away to his left rather than come forward and try and fight. It was always to the left that Canelo would run to. He wasn’t running to his right, because that would have put him in the line of fire of Golovkin’s right hand. Golovkin landed 218 of 703 shots through for a connect percentage of 31. Canelo landed 49 fewer punches in connecting on 169 of 505 shots for a connect percentage of 33. Golovkin threw almost 200 more punches in the fight that Canelo. That’s significant.
Golovkin’s power shots were more powerful than Canelo’s punches, and yet the judges still gave him a 12 round draw. The judge that had Canelo winning 10 rounds to 2, Adalaide Byrd, was not impressed with what Golovkin was doing. That score was so off from the fight that took place it reflected badly on that judge. Then there was the judge that that gave Canelo round 7, which is a round that the other 2 judges had Golovkin winning. It was inexplicable to have Canelo winning the 7th round, as he was pounded unmercifully by Golovkin for the entire round. The only thing I can think of in defense of that judge is maybe he scored the round based on a single shot Canelo landed at the start of the round, and then ignored Golovkin battering him for the last 2 minutes and 50 seconds. That’s the only thing I can think of to understand how the judge could give the 7th round to Canelo. It wasn’t a competitive round. Golovkin dominated the 7th. It looked like an easy round to score.
Canelo isn’t happy either obviously with the results of last September’s fight with Golovkin. Being treated like he was given a gift draw against Golovkin can’t be a pleasant experience for Canelo. He would have been better off if the judges had simply given him a loss so he wouldn’t be looked at by fans as a pampered fighter that was saved by the judges. It would have been much better for Canelo to have been given a loss to Golovkin, so he could come into the rematch looking to avenge the defeat. Golden Boy could have come up with a great slogan to sell the fight to the boxing fans, and I think it would do well. But with the way the last fight ended, it looked like Golovkin was robbed of a win, and now we’re going it again in the same city in the same venue at the T-Mobile in Las Vegas. This was a bad idea all around to have the second fight staged in the same venue as the last one. Someone from Golden Boy should have told Canelo that it would look bad for them to go back to the same place as last time after the controversy. It just makes Canelo look worse, because he was seen as being saved from a loss by the oddball scoring by the judges last September, and now he’s going right back to the same place. It looks bad. Why did Canelo want to go back there? Why didn’t Golden Boy convince not to go back to the same place?