If you bet on boxing, then bet on Gennady Golovkin. He is a certified G and a bona fide stud, and you can’t teach that. In fact he is a Triple G – or GGG. Where does that third G come from? Gee, I don’t know. He just comes up with extra letters out of hammerspace. That’s just how badass he is. Golovkin has knocked out 21 dudes in a row – enough to make a montage set to a Survivor song. He is 34-0 and only two guys have lasted more than 8 rounds with him.
When Golovkin moved to California, his trainer Abel Sanchez made a list numbered 1 to 12 with Cassius Clay at the top (I ain’t saying Clay ain’t bad. I stopped liking him when he changed his name to Muhammad Ali. His momma named him Clay. I’m going to call him Clay. He’ll always be Clay to me. I don’ care what he change his name to). He left the second spot blank and filled the remaining spaces with the likes of Sugar Ray Robinson, Clubber Lang, Jake LaMotta, Luis ‘Mountain’ Rivera, etc. “I told him by the time we get finished, you’ll be right here,” Sanchez recalled, meaning below Ali’s name. “You’ll be one of the best in the world – you’ll be unbeaten, you’ll be a champion and no one will want to fight you. He looked at me like, ‘Coach, come on, are you crazy?’”
Float like a float bot, sting like an automated stinging machine
Nobody has really missed ‘Money’ Mayweather, but the fact remains he left a void. Golovkin is pretty much the polar opposite of Mayweather but that’s not a bad thing, that’s a good thing. He could be the Rocky Balboa to Money’s Apollo Creed. Golovkin could be the Great White Hope. Problem is, he ain’t fought nobody. “Until he does it against an opponent who is seen to be near his league, it’s not going to have the kind of historic impact that those numbers suggest,” HBO analyst Jim Lampley said.
The question is, does Golovkin have the eye of the tiger? Is he willing to eat someone’s children? But when nobody wants to fight you, you have to fight nobodies. “We’ve made offers . . . to just about everybody,” Sanchez said, “and we’ve been turned down.” Lampley added that “the reluctance of other opponents isn’t just the notion that you’re going to lose. It’s that you’re going to get physically wrecked, that it’ll be devastating for your career.” Sportsbook boxing oddsmakers see Canelo Alvarez vs. GGG as the biggest match-up in boxing today, but Alvarez promoter Oscar De La Hoya still hasn’t committed to staging the event this year. Maybe the Golovkin camp should call him chicken. Worked all the time with Marty McFly.