Andre Ward offers Golovkin fight at 175

By Boxing News - 11/28/2016 - Comments

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By Allan Fox: IBF/WBA/WBO light heavyweight champion Andre “SOG” Ward is willing to fight middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin, as long as he moves up to 175 for the fight to take place. Ward and Golovkin’s management talked about a potential fight between them earlier this year, but the match-up failed to take place. Ward is now fighting at light heavyweight and recently beat light heavyweight champion Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev by a controversial decision on November 19 of this month to win his three titles.

Ward and Kovalev will be fighting each other in a rematch in early 2017 to clear up the controversy. There’s no telling who will win that fight. Based off what took place last time they fought, Kovalev could wind or he might wind up losing another controversial decision.

It’s unlikely that Ward will be able to generate enough offense to win a clear decision, because he doesn’t throw an lot of punches, and he does a lot of wrestling on the inside.
Ward said this to TMZ.com about a fight against Golovkin:

“Personally, I don’t see the fight happening,” said Ward about the Golovkin fight. “He’s at middleweight and I’m at light heavyweight. But if he wants to come up and take that kind of challenge, I think it would be a tremendous fight for the fans to want to see.”

I think you would have to favor Golovkin over Ward if they were to fight each other now. The way that Golovkin throws a lot of punches would make it tough on Ward. Golovkin has a much busier fighting style than Ward or Kovalev. Golovkin is also a better inside fighter than Kovalev. Golovkin isn’t a mauler like Ward though. If Ward is just going to hold Golovkin on the inside, then there’s probably nothing he’ll be able to do about that.

You would have to hope that a good referee would be assisgned to the fight to prevent the fight to be turned into a wrestling match on the inside. The referee that worked the Kovalev vs. Ward fight, Robert Byrd, just stood and watched the mauling without stepping in and taking points off.

There’s no point in Golovkin fight Ward if it’s not going to be an actual fight. Golovkin would have a hard time getting his shots off if he’s going to be held all night long. If there was a referee like Jay Nady that worked a fight between Golovkin and Ward, I think we’d see a real fight involving punches being thrown for 12 rounds. But if it’s a referee that just lets the fight turn into a wrestling match, then I don’t know if Golovkin can win a fight like that.

It’s doubtful that a fight between Golovkin and Ward will happen soon. I do think it will happen in the future if Ward can keep winning, which is very questionable. He didn’t really establish that he beat Kovalev. If all Ward can do is maul the best light heavyweights in the division rather than beat them in the normal fashion, it’s going to be hard for him to get past guys like Artur Beterbiev, Oleksandr Gvozdyk and Adonis Stevenson if/when he ever faces those fighters.

For Ward to beat the top fighters, he would need to actually fight and not hold unless he keeps getting judges that don’t mind scoring rounds to Ward for mauling. I don’t think Ward did nearly enough to beat Kovalev, but apparently the three judges that worked his last fight felt so. I don’t know if three different judges will be good with holding and wrestling from Ward in his future fights. At some point, I think there’s going to be some judges that will prefer offense rather than mauling from Ward.

At that point, he’s going to start losing his fights. That’s why I think it’s unlikely that Ward will be able to keep winning long enough for a fight between him and Golovkin to take place. Ward isn’t dominant at 175 in the way that Golovkin is at 160. I think Ward is nearing the end of his career in terms of him being a top fighter. Unless he’s backed off against lesser competition in the near future, I think he’s going to get beaten over and over by the top fighters in the division whether he chooses to hold and maul or not.

“I think the fight with Golovkin should have happened before the Kovalev fight,” Ward said. “That fight was talked about, our teams had some correspondence, and it just didn’t work out. I’m not here to expose them or throw them under the bus or nothin’ like that. But I will be honest with the fans because there is a lot of confusion out there. They didn’t want the fight. They flipped it and said we were ducking and dodging. If you read the e-mail [of an offer for the fight] it was clear – we gave them a 50-50 split so there wouldn’t be any arguments.”

The Ward vs. Golovkin fight didn’t take place. I think Ward needs to move on now and forget about Golovkin. Ward has Kovalev problems ahead of him with their rematch in early 2017. That should be Ward’s entire focus, because his win over Kovalev was seen as a robbery in the eyes of a lot of boxing fans. There’s certainly a percentage of the fans that felt that Ward deserved the victory, but it appears that more fans saw it as a Kovalev win. That’s a problem for Ward, because it suggests that he didn’t do enough in his fight with the Russian fighter to be seen as a victor.

Ward is going to need to work on his offense for the rematch, because he might not be able to win the fight if all he’s going to be doing mainly is grappling with Kovalev on the inside. Like I said, grappling might please some judges, but other judges might be more inclined to prefer fighting. If Ward can’t fight Kovalev by throwing punches, then it’s going to be tough for him to win a second fight unless the same three judges as last time are assigned to the rematch. I don’t think that’s going to happen.

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