The crowd-pleasing Kazakh is unhappy that a superfight with Canelo Álvarez has been tabled yet again, which could spell bad news for stand-in Danny Jacobs
Stop me if you’ve heard the one about the middleweight who was too good to get a big fight, the prodigious talent who time and again found himself on the raw end of the elemental risk-versus-reward calculus at matchmaking’s essence. Once upon a time it was Charley Burley, described by no less estimable fistic minds than Eddie Futch and Ray Arcel as the greatest all-round fighter either had ever set eyes on, whose formidable ability and skin color in the 1940s cruelly conspired to earn him the unenviable title of best ever boxer to never be granted a world title shot. In another day it was Marvelous Marvin Hagler, avoided like the dentist throughout the 1970s until he could be sidestepped no longer, to whom Joe Frazier once warned: “You got three strikes against you. One, you’re a southpaw. Two, you’re good. And three, you’re black.”
Today it’s Gennady Gennadyevich Golovkin, the charismatic Kazakh knockout artist known as Triple G, who has torn through boxing’s 160lb division with a rare blend of patience, technique, unnerving pressure and devastating power in either hand. Unbeaten in 36 pro fights with 33 knockouts, he’s like a middleweight Tyson without the baggage. Even before Canelo Álvarez’s win over Miguel Cotto for the WBC and lineal middleweight titles in November 2015 – and certainly since then – a showdown between the Mexican superstar and Golovkin for all the marbles in boxing’s glamour division has loomed as the biggest fight that can be made today. Golovkin was then one month removed from an eight-round obliteration of David Lemieux to unify the WBA and IBF belts in his pay-per-view debut. The fruit would never be riper.
Related: Álvarez-Golovkin is the new mega-fight, but we’ll have to be patient | Kevin Mitchell
It seems the people who are least likely to fight him are the people who talk the most about fighting him.
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