By Scott Gilfoid: Matchroom Sport promoter Eddie Hearn expects his fighter Kell Brook (36-1, 25 KOs) to return to the ring in the spring or summer of 2017 following his 5th round TKO defeat to IBF/IBO/WBA/WBC middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (36-0, 33 KOs) last Saturday night at the O2 Arena in London, England. Hearn expects the 30-year-old Brook to make a full recovery from his eye surgery to repair a broken right eye socket he suffered last Saturday in the loss to Golovkin.
There’s no word yet from Hearn who Brook will be fighting when he returns to action next year. I suspect that it won’t be a talented junior middleweight. With Brook coming off of an eye injury, I think Hearn will feed him a couple of lower level 2nd tier fighters to get his confidence back and to make sure that his surgically repaired right eye is functional. I’m not sure why Hearn isn’t talking about wanting to put Brook back in with Golovkin. I mean, Brook was saying after the fight that he would want to get back in the ring with Golovkin, because he felt he would take over the fight and out-box the Kazakhstan fighter in the second half of the contest. If Brook really believes that he can beat Golovkin, then he should get Hearn to put him back in there with him. I’m just saying.
When Brook does eventually start fighting contenders again, I see him being matched against bottom feeders rather than the dangerous contenders like Julian Williams. What we’re probably going to see is Brook being maneuvered into a No.1 position by one of the sanctioning bodies before he eventually fights for a title at 154.
Brook bulked up in weight to challenge Golovkin for his middleweight titles last Saturday. However, when the fight got one-sided in the 5th after Golovkin hurt Brook with a body shot, Brook’s trainer Dominic Ingle tossed in the white towel to have the referee stop the fight. The pro-Brook crowd booed like mad, as Brook was still on his feet and seemingly cogent.
Brook wasn’t throwing much back at Golovkin, but he was doing a reasonable job of making some of his punches miss their mark. Golovkin looked like a man on a mission in that round. There was still one minute left in the round when Ingle threw in the towel, and Brook had just been hit with two hard shots and despite attempts at making Golovkin believe he wasn’t bothered by the punches, he was well on his way to being knocked out. If Ingle hadn’t thrown in the towel, Brook would have taken a bad beating with the time in the round. Golovkin wasn’t going to get tired of throwing punches, and Brook’s face looked bad.
“He’s never experienced defeat and that’s hurt him quite badly, let alone the broken eye socket,” Hearn said to skysports.com. “He’ll be popping into the hospital in Sheffield for a little operation. It’s nothing too major and it should mean he’ll still probably return next spring or summer, which is about the time he would have been looking to fight again anyway.”
Come on, Hearn has no way of knowing for sure how Brook will recover from his eye surgery to repair his broken eye socket. Hearn can speculate that Brook will be able to come back from the surgery by early to mid-2017, but he can’t know for sure. There’s a real chance that it might take longer for Brook to come back. You can’t know. It’s not as if the doctors are fixing a machine. This is a human and everyone is different. Hopefully Brook can come back by the spring or summer of next year, but we’ll have to wait and see whether that’s going to be the case.
Brook, 30, is talking about moving down to the junior middleweight division to try and campaign as a 154lb fighter. He thinks he’ll be able to excel in this division, and he says he wants to fight the winner of this Saturday’s fight between WBO 154lb belt holder Liam Smith and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez.
“The injury was painful but I think the defeat was more painful,” said Hearn. “I’m just pleased he came out of the fight with no serious injuries because if an injury like that progresses during the fight it can get worse and worse and could have affected his career long-term.”
Yeah, I bet the defeat was a painful one for Brook to digest, but I think it’s not going to be the last time that he gets beaten. With Brook moving down in weight to 154, he’s going to obviously taste defeat once he’s matched tough against the likes of the Charlo brothers, Demetrius Andrade, Erislandy Lara, and Liam Smith. Brook is going to have to fight one of those guys sooner or later, because there are no soft touches for him to face when it comes to the champions in the division.
It could have been much worse for Brook if his trainer Ingle hadn’t thrown in the towel to save him. If that hadn’t happened, then I think he would have been really hurt by Golovkin. In looking how tired and hurt Brook was in the 5th, he was going to get hit with something from Golovkin sooner or later that was going to put him down for the count. If Brook had stayed on his feet, he would have likely have been broken apart by the Kazakhstan fighter piece by piece.
Hearn should try and convince Brook to take some weight off and go back down to 147, because I don’t see him having a future at junior middleweight. All the top guys in that division are just as heavy as Golovkin, and taller than him. The Charlo brothers both rehydrates to the 170s and the same with Erislandy Lara. These are big guys with better hand speed than Golovkin and very, very good punching power. I don’t think for a second that Brook beats any of those guys. Liam Smith is another dangerous puncher who just wears you down in the same way that Golovkin. I actually think Smith would be an even bigger problem for Brook than Golovkin, because Smith would be throwing more body shots, and he’s a devastating body puncher. I don’t think Brook could stand up to Liam Smith’s body attack for 12 rounds without getting knocked out.