By Scott Gilfoid: As I predicted, IBF/IBO/WBA/WBC middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (36-0, 33 KOs) stopped challenger Kell “Special K” Brook (36-1, 25 KOs) by a 5th round technical knockout on Saturday night after his trainer Dominic Ingle threw in the towel to have the fight halted at the O2 Arena in London, England. Believe it or not, Brook was ahead on the scorecards at the time of the stoppage, which is hard to believe.
I had Brook winning only round two. Brook was staggered in round one, and running from round three. I don’t how the judges could have had Brook ahead. I had predicted that Ingle would toss in the towel the first Brook got in trouble, and that’s what happened.
Photos/Matchroom Boxing
Brook was taking one-way punishment at the start of the 5th round by Golovkin after getting caught on the ropes. As I predicted earlier in saying that Ingle would throw in the white towel of surrender as soon as Brook started taking punishment from Golovkin, and sure enough, that’s what happened. The stoppage was pretty pathetic, because Kell looked like he might have been able to make it out of the round, but Ingle didn’t let him by throwing in the towel. It took a while for the referee Marlon Wright to notice the white towel of surrender that was thrown into the ring. Golovkin was able to get in at least five good head shots before Wright noticed the white towel.
Brook had his moments in the fight in the first three rounds, but the fight began to get out of hand by the 4th, as Golovkin upped the pressure and the pace of the fight. Brook was then stuck covering up and trying to fire shots off the ropes. The crowd gave Brook energy to keep fighting at times, but he was so overmatched.
In round four and five, Brook was running and holding and not really doing much. The running was terrible to watch.
“Kell is a good fighter, but he’s not a middleweight,” said Golovkin. “Big respect, but he’s not so strong. I just don’t feel his power. I would like Billy Joe Saunders, because he has WBO belt.”
Brook was blabbering after the fight about how he would have kept fighting but that he was seeing five of Golovkin due to his injured eye. It seemed to me that Brook couldn’t handle the power shots he was getting hit with, because Golovkin really upped the pace of his attacks starting in the 4th. Brook was running like mad, but Golovkin was still able to hit him to the body and with occasional head shots when he would trap. It wasn’t easy to trap Brook through, because he was like a slippery eel and just running and holding. He was not trying to win.
Brook was blaming his loss on his eye afterwards, saying that he saw five Golovkin’s out there after he suffered an injury to his right eye in the 3rd round. The boxing fans weren’t cheering Brook though when he was making the excuses. They were silent in a way that suggested that they weren’t all that happy with Brook coming up with an excuse for his loss rather than him giving credit to Golovkin. Broo me. k then said he hurt Golovkin and staggered him at one point. I’m not sure when Brook supposedly saw Golovkin hurt, because he never looked hurt
“I hurt him. I saw his legs buckle a couple of times. I expected him to be a bigger puncher,” said Brook. “I thought I was tricking him,” said Brook.
This is so, so sad. Brook reduced to dreaming up a fight that didn’t even happen. Where in the heck was Golovkin hurt in the fight, and why did the judges have him ahead at the time of the stoppage?
“I would fight him again,” said Brook. “It’s just with the eye, it kept me from coming forward. But when you can see five of them, you don’t know which way to go. I think I’d be more suited to 154. I know Liam Smith and Canelo are fighting next week. I’d like to fight the winner.”
Why would the winner of the Liam Smith vs. Saul Canelo Alvarez fight want to fight a guy that was just knocked out like Brook? With the excuses that Brook was making about his loss, I would think that the Canelo-Smith winner would want to distance themselves from him. They would be better off facing someone that is actually WINNING like Golovkin.
When Brook’s promoter Eddie Hearn was interviewed, he said, “He [Brook] was ahead on the scorecards.”
At this point the crowd booed Hearn. I guess he figured wrong that the fans would cheer him saying that Brook was ahead on the scorecards at the time of the stoppage, but he may not have realized that the fans actually saw the fight. They saw how Brook only appeared to win the 2nd round. In all the other rounds, Brook was getting worked over by Golovkin and forced to run. By the 4th, Brook’s face was getting broken up by GGG and it was only a matter of time before he was knocked out in a clinical fashion. It’s too bad Ingle didn’t let the fight play out a little further, because with the squawking that Brook was doing after the fight, you would think that he would have wanted to exhaust every opportunity to win the fight. But Brook wasn’t complaining at all about the fight being halted. I think he looked relieved that it was stopped. That’s what I saw in his face. He looked relieved.
Ingle probably saved Brook from taking more of a beating and getting stopped either in the 5th or the 6th. No way was Brook going to make it to the 7th. He looked like he had fallen apart mentally and physically by the 5th and he was in full scale retreat mode. He lost any sense of try ng to win the fight. It was pure retreat. That’s why it was hard to understand what Brook was yapping about after the fight when he was talking about how he was tricking Golovkin and how he had him staggering. It was just sad to hear Brook reduced to making excuses.