Marco Antonio Rubio

By Dan Ambrose: WBC interim middleweight champion Marco Antonio Rubio (59-6-1, 51 KOs) believes he’s got a good chance of knocking out WBA Super World middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (30-0, 27 KOs) in their fight next month on October 18th at the StubHub Center in Carson, California.

Unfortunately for Rubio, few boxing fans and writers are giving him a shot at knocking Golovkin out or beating him by a decision. It’s not that Rubio doesn’t have the punching power to KO Golovkin in theory. It’s just that Rubio is going to have huge problems in taking the punishment that Golovkin will be dishing out.

Rubio has a good chin, as we saw in his 7th round stoppage win over the hard hitting David Lemieux in 2011. Rubio took terrible punishment in the first 5 rounds of that fight before taking over in the 6th round when Lemieux gassed out completely. But the reality is that if Lemieux hadn’t gassed out then it’s very likely that Rubio would have been finished by the 8th round.

He wouldn’t take another 3-4 rounds of the kind of punishment that Lemieux was dishing out in that fight, and it wasn’t competitive at all until Lemieux got tired. Before that, it was like Lemieux working on a heavy bag in nailing Rubio with punch after punch.

By Raj Parmar: It seems that WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (30-0, 27 KO’s) is finally emerging into the spotlight that he has been yearning for in the past couple of years. As he prepares to make his title defense at the StubHub Center in California, USA on October 18 against contender Marco Antonio Rubio (59-6-1, 51 KO’s), fans have been purchasing tickets for the fight at an extraordinary pace.

According to Golovkin’s promoter K2 Promotions, the fight has already sold half of its available tickets in about a week and is thus far the fastest selling boxing event ever at the StubHub Center.

By Bob Smith: In honor of the occasion of writing this article, and also to refresh my memory, I re-watched the fight between Marco Antonio Rubio and then undefeated middleweight David Lemieux.

Though Lemieux was the favorite and the harder puncher, and is still a top 10 or top 20 middleweight even now, four or five years later, the cunning, technique, defense, boxing skill, endurance, and confidence of Rubio were enough to allow him to weather the early onslaught from an overconfident Lemieux and come back with the beautiful win. Can Rubio repeat this feat in his fight with Golovkin?

First, before anything else, I want to say on a personal level that Marco Antonio Rubio is one of my favorite middle weights of this era. Sure, I like Golovkin best, and a few years ago, it was Martinez who was perhaps my favorite overall fighter, but Rubio was always in the top 6 or so. And the reason is that if I ever were a boxer, I would fight like him – he has a swimmers body, even more so than does Golovkin – broad shoulders, thin, long arms, respectable punching power for weight but nothing incredible, but more than anything else, he is a very well conditioned athlete, skilled defender, and a very intelligent fighter who sizes up his opponents well and has excellent game plans. (Yes, you guessed it, legendary writer Bob Smith is a former skilled swimmer who holds records from childhood that have lasted 20+ years.)

By Dan Ambrose: Marco Antonio Rubio’s WBC interim 160 pound title will be up for grabs in his fight against WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (30-0, 27 KOs) on October 18th, according to Steve Kim and Golovkin’s promoter Tom Loeffler of K2 Promotions.

This means that the winner of the Golovkin-Rubio fight will be the mandatory challenger for WBC middleweight champion Miguel Cotto. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean that Cotto will necessarily face the winner of the Rubio-Golovkin fight, because Cotto could very well vacate his WBC title rather than face Golovkin or Rubio (59-6-1, 51 KOs).

By Dan Ambrose: WBC interim middleweight champion Marco Antonio Rubio (59-6-1, 51 KOs) plans on using every trick in the book to try and defeat WBS middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin (30-0, 27 KOs) in their fight on October 18th at the StubHub Center in Carson, California.

Rubio, 34, and his trainer Robert Garcia are going to come into the fight with a number of different battle plans they hope will work. If one doesn’t work, they plan on abandoning it and trying something else out until something does finally work.