By Allan Fox: Last night boxing fans saw a mostly one-sided fight with IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (33-0, 30 KOs) stopping Willie Monroe Jr. (19-2, 6 KOs) in the 6th round at the Forum in Inglewood, California.
Monroe fought well in rounds 1, 3 and 4. Things went really bad for Monroe in the 2nd round though with him getting knocked down twice from hard power shots from Golovkin. Abel Sanchez, the trainer for Golovkin, thinks the fight should have been halted in the 2nd round when Monroe was badly hurt from a left hook from Golovkin.
The referee Jack Reiss let the fight continue on, but Monroe was in bad shape for the remainder of the round.
“I thought they could have stopped the fight in the second round, but Gennady wanted to work on some things. What we saw tonight was 70 to 80 percent of how good Gennady can be,” Sanchez said via the Las Vegas Review Journal.
Golovkin said that he let the fight continue past the 2nd round because he wanted to put on a show for his friends and the fans that had come out to see him fight at the Forum in Inglewood. To be sure, it looked like Golovkin purposefully allowed Monroe to stay in the fight until the 6th because he wasn’t nailing Monroe with the same kind of vicious head shots in rounds 3 through 5 like he’d done in the 2nd round.
Eventually, Golovkin turned up the heat again in the 6th round and hurt Monroe with two powerful uppercuts that sent him staggering backwards to the ropes. Moments later, Golovkin hit Monroe with a left hook that landed to the side of his head, causing him to drop to the canvas. Monroe got up at the count of 10, but then told the referee Jack Reiss “I’m done.”
Monroe showed some good things in the 3rd and 4th rounds. He moved well, and frequently caught Golovkin with hard left hands and jabs. Against a lesser opponent than Golovkin, Monroe would have dominated the fight like he’d done against Brian Vera in his last fight, and like he’d done in ESPN’s Boxcino tournament in 2014. But Golovkin was far above the guys that Monroe had been fighting in the talent department, and Monroe simply didn’t have the skills to do the same things to Golovkin that he’d done against those fighters.
“I felt very strong tonight,” Golovkin said. “I knocked him down twice but I didn’t want an easy round the next round. I wanted to keep working in the fight.”
Golovkin certainly looked very strong in this fight. He showed one-punch power against Monroe. What was really impressive was how Golovkin mixed up the power in his shots. Golovkin was throwing with moderate power much of the time, but then he would all of a sudden load up with a big shot and nail Monroe. The sudden increase in power had devastating effects on Monroe. He obviously wasn’t ready for Golovkin’s power when he loaded up his shots.
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