(This commentary article on Saturday night’s Canelo Alvarez-Gennadiy Golovkin pay-per-view fight originally appeared on David’s site www.boxingwriter.co.uk in the UK. Read more about his take on the sport, as well as the history/nostalgia of the sport there.)
I sat on the edge of the couch, waiting for one of the three greatest middleweights of my life to walk into the ring. Twenty or more title fights stretched into his record, a long string of wins, a red mark or two that didn’t diminish his reputation as the best 160-pounder of his generation. And perhaps, whispering it softly, best of all.
At 40, the question remained. Such was my intoxication with boxing, the 4am ring walk, the dark channel, the pay-per-view fee, nothing deterred me from tuning in. A dangerous opponent, younger, fresher, stronger too, maybe? I had it all to do.
The year was 2005. The fight was Bernard Hopkins vs. Howard Eastman. A lot has changed since then. Much has remained the same.
It is a fight that few remember. And for good reason. On Saturday night, Gennadiy Golovkin, faced his nemesis, Saúl ‘Canelo’ Álvarez for the third time and belatedly, because Canelo’s handlers thought they had seen weakness in 2017, it was deteriorated enough that the Mexican of flaming hair defeated him. Fair and square.
It is a reflection of Golovkin’s age, mine, and the dilution of the passion he had for boxing in the heady days of 2005, that I opted to watch the fight ‘live’ on Sunday afternoon, with the duties of the day complete, the Saturday night’s dream preserved. Where once Hopkins and Eastman encouraged me to stay up into the wee hours of the morning or get up before the fun, now not even the trilogy of these two great rivals can do it. Possible to feel guilty about the expected insult, but the fight proved everything that was expected. A heated display between a diminished Golovkin boxing the best fighter at a new weight and an illustration of the old boxing truism, ‘it’s a young man’s game’.
Golovkin is clearly not the man he once was. You may retort, “talking to my wife, neither do I,” paraphrasing Muhammad Ali’s conversation with Howard Cosell, but the Kazakhstani man turned pro in 2006, a year after Hopkins beat Eastman and lost two losses. in a row against Jermaine Taylor. . It’s been a long and destructive run, and yet he chooses to spend the next year or so, with an unsatisfying conclusion by the traditional benchmark of his official record.
The slowdown preceded Saturday and promised rest and recuperation for an aging fighter, but he delivered what he always does; decline, a loss of reflex, synchronization and effectiveness and the inhibition they create. A boxing ring is not the place to falter.
This pause, when the brain is engaged but the body is not, is commonplace in tired fighters. 40-year-olds don’t win fights like this. There are exceptions. Bernard, George and Archie luminous between them. But they don’t.
Perhaps the biggest reveal was the evidence that Canelo is also beyond his own hotheaded peak. The fact that he failed to more definitively capitalize on Golovkin’s lukewarm start and allowed, if that’s the appropriate term, the veteran to depart his vertical trilogy largely without issue speaks to his own limits on toughness and brutality. , with 32 years and himself with 17 years in a professional career. It will be eye-opening to gauge how bold the pairing of him is from this point on.
He has been a busy fighter pushing the limits of his talent and size and it has been a refreshing effort in a world of inactive, risk-averse fighters. Perhaps Canelo is also starting to pay a price. Talk of resting and healing before facing Dmitry Bivol again, if the Russian light heavyweight champion wins his next contest, is brave and ill-advised in equal measure.
With flaws in his record that those of us who testified know are wrong, Golovkin could walk away with his reputation intact and his name etched just below those of his middleweight predecessors, Hopkins and Marvin Hagler. Of course he won’t.
Boxers rarely win big fights at 40, and they rarely retire when they should. So it will go on. Accumulating unseen damage and resisting the reality and truth that was clearly presented to him on Saturday night.
