By Tim Fletcher: Unbeaten #3 IBF Dominic Wade (18-0, 12 KOs) isn’t afraid of IBF/IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (34-0, 31 KOs), because he sees him as just another fighter with flaws like any other person. Wade, 25, will be looking to take advantage of the flaws in the 33-year-old Golovkin’s game when the two of them meet each other on April 23 on HBO, at the Forum in Inglewood, California.
Wade never wavered at accepting the fight against Golovkin when it was offered to him by his manager Al Haymon. Wade believes he can beat Golovkin and pull off a huge upset on April 23.
Wade has a long amateur career of close to 200 fights, and he’s been in the ring with a lot of different talented fighters. He’s seen really good fighters at the amateur level, but he still hasn’t faced a difficult fighter at the pro level. Wade’s toughest opponent thus far was 41-year-old Sam Soliman, who Wade essentially lost to last year in June. Wade was given a 10 round split decision victory, but a lot of fans still thought he lost the fight. The fans loudly booed the decision when it was announced at the Little Creek Casino Resort, in Shelton, Washington, USA.
“I don’t think he’s Superman,” Wade said to the latimes.com. “He’s human, just like me, eats the same things I do. So I’m going to take this shot. … This is my opportunity to shock the world and that’s what I’m going to do.”
Golovkin is nut superman that’s for sure. But in order to beat him, you’re going to have to take his big power shots for 12 rounds without getting dropped or knocked out. Golovkin has knocked out his last 21 opponents, and he’s clearly not easy to survive against. Golovkin has only had one tough fight in his entire 10-year pro career and that was his fight against former IBF junior middleweight world champion Kassim Ouma in 2011. By that point in Ouma’s career, he was no longer the same fighter he’d been six years earlier when he held the IBF 154lb title.
Ouma had recently been beaten in five out of his last seven fights going into his clash with Golovkin. However, instead of Ouma being an easy mark for Golovkin, he really gave him a lot of problems with his high work rate and his ability to punch on the move. Ouma kept throwing short punches all night long and not worry about loading up on them. Golovkin’s face ended up getting badly swollen by the 9th round.
Ouma’s movement also created a lot of problems for Golovkin because he was forced to follow him around, and he was walking into a lot of shots. Golovkin eventually trapped Ouma in the corner in the 10th and got a stoppage with Ouma still on his feet with his hands down by his sides. If Wade can follow the blue print created by Ouma, then this is a fight that he can definitely win.
“We’ll check him out, not too much time, because we have to do what we have to do to be prepared, but we’ll look for his weaknesses,” Wade said.
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