Golovkin: I’m ready to fight whether it’s Canelo or a different opponent

By Boxing News - 12/08/2015 - Comments

Boxing: Golovkin vs LemieuxBy Dan Ambrose: IBF/IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (34-0, 31 KOs) is starting to come to terms with the reality that his next fight in 2016 might not be the one that he badly wants against WBC middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez (46-1-1, 32 KOs).

The negotiations between Canelo and Golovkin’s management was recently given an extension by World Boxing Council president Mauricio Sulaiman, and it’s quite possible that he’s going to let the negotiations play out without stepping in and drawling a line for a drop dead date where it needs to go to a purse bid.

In the meantime, Golovkin says he’s ready to fight against another opponent if he can’t get the Golden Boy promoted Canelo to agree to fight him. The most likely opponent that Golovkin would need to fight is #1 IBF mandatory challenger Tureano Johnson in a fight that would likely take place in February or March next year.

Johnson recently defeated Eamonn O’Kane by a 12 round unanimous decision last October in an IBF eliminator bout. Had David Lemieux beaten Golovkin in their fight on the same card, then Tureano Johnson would be fighting Lemieux next as his IBF mandatory rather than Golovkin. I think that would have been a 50-50 fight, because Lemieux is a pretty flawed fighter. But instead of Lemieux being the one to fight Johnson, it’ll be Golovkin, and that’s going to be an easy fight.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Johnson turns out to be a tougher fight for Golovkin, because Johnson looks to be a more solid fighter than Canelo with better stamina. We saw Canelo fade like usual in his last fight against Miguel Cotto last month in winning a very close 12 round decision.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC_IVHCgpqc

WBA “regular” middleweight champion Daniel Jacobs would be an ideal opponent for Golovkin if it were possible to get Jacobs and his promoter Lou Dibella and adviser Al Haymon to agree to a fight against the Kazakhstan fighter. Since it’s probably not realistic to assume that any of the three would agree to fight Golovkin, it’s not even a fight worth mentioning. It is interesting that Jacobs says he’s not afraid of Golovkin, but at the same time he’s not going to likely push to make the fight happen.

For Golovkin to get a fight against Canelo, he’s probably going to have to agree to some kind of catch-weight. Canelo has already mentioned a catch-weight of 155lbs, which he can’t enforce without threatening to vacate his WBC title. That would obviously be the nuclear option that nobody wants.

If you’ve got a champion that is willing to stick to his principals and vacate their title if they don’t get their way by forcing the fight at a catch-weight of 155lbs, then your kind of stuck considering placating that champion because the money is just too good not to.

YouTube video

Canelo hasn’t said anything about vacating his WBC title yet, but that could be his only option if the World Boxing Council president Suliaman doesn’t have a meeting where the WBC changes their rules to allow their champions to force their mandatory challengers to agree to whatever catch-weight that their champions want. That would be a major change of the rules by the WBC, and it would obviously make them look really bad in the eyes of the boxing public.

Once a sanctioning body starts allowing their champions to force catch-weight fights for all of their fights, then it kind of makes a mockery of the whole idea of defined weight classes. If a champion can come up with catch-weights for all of their title defenses, then you might as well not even have weight classes because it would be anarchy and chaos at that point.

That’s why it’s going to be really interesting to see whether Golovkin’s side or the WBC gives in to give Canelo what he wants in terms of his catch-weight handicap of 155lbs that he’s been using for his last four fights. It’s hard to understand why Canelo would want to continue to use the catch-weight at this point, given how heavy he is.

I could understand the whole catch-weight handicap if Canelo were a slim 140lb fighter wanting to step up to the middleweight division to fight one of the top guys in a non-title fight, but for a guy as heavy as the 170+ pound Canelo to want to use a catch-weight to defend his WBC middleweight title, it makes zero sense at all.



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