By Eris Baldwin: Kell Brook (36-1, 25 KOs) tried his best tonight but he suffered a right eye injury that led to his fight against IBF/IBO/WBA/WBC middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (36-0, 33 KOs) being stopped in the 5th round by referee Marlon Wright at the O2 Arena in London, England.
Brook said after the fight that he was not impressed with the punching power of Golovkin. After hearing so much about Golovkin’s punching power, Brook said he wasn’t what people thought he was. As the fight wore on, Brook says he realized that Golovkin is just hype and that he was no different than himself.
Photos/Matchroom Boxing
Brook believes that if he hadn’t suffered an eye injury in the 1st round that led to the fight being halted, he would have come on in the 2nd half of the contest to get the win.
“I expected him to be a bigger puncher,” said Brook about Golovkin.
Golovkin was taking some of the power off his shots in order for him to land, because Brook was using so much head and torso movement to elude the shots from Triple G. The shots that Golovkin was landing in the fifth round appeared to be very powerful, and they looked lethal. Perhaps Brook might have been hit harder in his sparring sessions with Liam Williams and Liam Smith. If those guys can punch harder than Golovkin, then they’ll have a great future ahead of them both.
“A few rounds before, I told him [Dominic Ingle] my eye is gone,” said Brook. “I could see three or four of him out there in the right eye. I’m frustrated. I have so much more to give. I was starting to settle into the fight. I believe I would have took over at the middle to the last part of the fight. All the hype about him; as the fight wore on, I felt he’s just a man like me. I was getting more and more confident. I was coming. I could only see out of one eye.”
When asked if he would have liked to have continued fight in the 5th, Brook said, “Absolutely. With a fight of this magnitude, I should have carried on. Me as a warrior, I wanted to carry on. Knock me out. I think I would be more strong and confident at 154, and I’ll take over the 154lb division,” said Brook.
Brook’s trainer Dominic Ingle made the ultimate decision to have the fight stopped in the 5th round rather than letting his fighter continue to take punishment. It was pretty obvious in the 5th round that Brook was totally finished and he wasn’t going to go much longer. Even if he made it out of the 5th, Brook was to take worse punishment in the 6th. He was tired, hurt from the punches, and injured. Brook won’t admit it, but he looked tired and a little punch drunk at the time of the stoppage. It’s possible that the weight that he had put on for the fight caused him to fade in the 4th and 5th rounds.