By Scott Gilfoid: Despite getting stopped in the 5th round and suffering a broken right eye socket in the loss to Gennady “GGG” Golovkin, welterweight Kell Brook says he wants to fight the winner of this Saturday’s match between WBO junior middleweight champion Liam Smith and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez.
Brook (36-1, 25 KOs) feels like the 154lb division will be a better one for him, and that he’ll do better in this weight class than he showed against the unbeaten IBF/IBO/WBA/WBC 160lb champion Golovkin (36-0, 33 KOs). Indeed, Brook thinks he can dominate the division, which is hard to believe because the guys in that division punch very hard.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s not much difference at all between the power of guys like Liam Smith and Jermall Charlo compared to Golovkin. There obviously is a difference, but not much.
Brook said this to skysport.com:
“I think it was so easy making middleweight and I filled out to the weight, but I believe my weight and strengths are going to be at 154lbs, light-middleweight. I think I’ll be unstoppable at that weight and I am looking at the Canelo and Smith fight next week, I would love the winner.”
So Brook thinks he’s unstoppable at 154? How would he know? The last time I checked, Brook hasn’t fought any junior middleweights during his career. He sparred with a couple during his recent training camp to get ready for Golovkin in working with Liam Williams and Liam Smith. I saw some of the sparring between Brook and Smith, and he did not look good. Heck, Smith was giving Brook more problems than Golovkin was at times.
The difference here is that Smith was staying really close to Brook, and nailing him with body shots. Golovkin was standing at medium distance much of the time, and this enabled Brook to land pot shots. I mean, I can understand why Golovkin was at medium distance, because he gets more power on his shots when he has space to load up. He also was probably not willing to get too close to Brook for fear he would tie him up in a clinch over and over again all night long like he did against Shawn Porter. We saw in the Brook-Porter fight that each time Porter would come in close to work on the inside; Brook would grab him in a time-consuming clinch.
I don’t know if it would be a good thing for Brook to be given a world title shot on a silver platter against the winner of this Saturday’s Canelo-Smith fight. With Brook having lost to Golovkin, I think it would be better if he actually earned the shot rather than going into the fight on the back of a loss. I mean, I think it would make the Canelo vs. Smith winner look potentially bad if they wind up facing Brook with him having lost to Golovkin.
If the idea is that champions should only fight the best, then I think Brook shouldn’t get the winner of the Canelo vs. Smith fight. You don’t go to the Super Bowl off the back of a loss, do you? It doesn’t make sense for a losing team to be allowed into a championship immediately after they lose the way Brook did against Golovkin.
I think if Brook wants to fight Smith or Canelo, he should focus on fighting the LOSER of that fight than the winner, because I think it’ll send the wrong message to boxing fans if Brook is seen getting a title shot against the winner of Canelo-Smith after the way he was beaten. We’ve got to send the right messages to the boxing fans that only the best get to fight for world titles, not guys that were battered and stopped in five rounds the way Brook was against GGG.
Brook says he think his trainer Dominic Ingle did the right thing in stopping his fight against Golovkin in the 5th round.
“Everyone’s got their own opinion. I came back from the second round and said I could not see out of the right eye to Dominic and I was talking to him,” Brook said to skysports.com. “He knows me and has seen me growing up as a kid, he is like a father figure. He is watching and if people look back, it was the right decision and I can fight another day.”
Well, Brook thinks Ingle did the right thing in throwing in the towel, but there’s a heck of a lot of boxing fans that don’t agree with his decision to stop the fight. The fans saw that Brook was still fighting back more or less on his feet, and he didn’t look particularly hurt other than his eye being swollen badly.
The only thing that that would give you cause for concern was the fact that Brook had pretty much stopped throwing punches after getting hit with a right hand from Golovkin in the bread basket. That shot caused Brook to stop functioning on offense completely. The only thing that Brook could do from that point was move up upper body and head to make some of Golovkin’s big shots miss. Some missed but many did not. Brook was taking a royal beating in there, and his mudding and feigning like he was getting hit was fooling no one, least of all Golovkin.
The Kazakhstan fighter mouthed the words, ‘Come on’ in daring Brook to try and throw something back at him. Brook didn’t take Golovkin up on his offer. He was stuck in the shutdown mode and could no longer throw any punches. Brook was basically a sitting duck and Ingle could obviously see that, which is why he threw in the white towel of surrender to save Brook from being smashed Golovkin.
It would have been interesting to see how much longer the fight would have played out had Ingle not thrown in the towel into the ring, because Golovkin was really loading up on shots. He looked positively gleeful with each power shot he threw. Golovkin wasn’t going to get tired of throwing punches, and Brook couldn’t make him miss forever. Those shots to the body were landing every time from Golovkin, and they made Brook look like an old man incapable of doing anything but holding onto the ropes for support as he inched along step by step.