Gennady "GGG" Golovkin: setting the record straight on several matters.

No, faulty logic.

What you've described is the average height range for men, period.

...also the median height for male professional boxers in the middle range of weight classes.

They are weight divisions, and not "height & weight" divisions. There should be no expectation of proportionality, yet many fans seem to believe otherwise. (incorrectly).

5'10" or so is actually the average height for everything fromm light welter to, I'd say, light heavy.

You can have a doughy 5'10" 140lber, and a ripped 5'10" 175lber. People just don't get it. Things like this aren't reducible to an X axis versus Y axis type of zero-sum grid.

 

Clearly not what I meant. He is a boxer, stylistically, as opposed to a puncher.

No. What you're describing is one specific individual style of boxer, not the definition for the general style of boxer (to which your more specific class is subordinate in the hierarchy - a species within a genus, let's say. Your fallacy lies in applying the species' description to its up-line genus...)

Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Guillermo Rigondeaux are "boxers", yes, but so are Gennady Golovkin and Omar Andrés Narváez.

Now, while Mayweather and Rigondeaux have enough similarities in their resting stance, movements, and tactics that you can say they're both more or less fit to be categorized as having alike styles (not to say identical, since each has their good & bad habits and signature quirks) - but obviously neither of them fights anything like Golovkin or Narváez. Likewise, nor do Golovkin and Narváez fight anything like each other.

All four, however, are equally "boxers", as opposed to punchers.

Yes, in pound for pound terms, Golovkin has more power relative to his foes than do the rest, followed by Rigondeaux, with Mayweather and Narváez basically taking what they can get if and when it comes, as far as stoppages go, but virtually never are they expected to register one.

Makes no difference. All four: boxers.

Froch, Provodnikov, Rios, Maidana = all punchers, four completely different types of puncher, but all punchers nonetheless.

Of course. Nor do boxers have to behave in a certain way that satisfies your preconceived visual notion of 'how a boxer ought to look'.

Eh, debatable.

Carlos Maussa, Shawn Porter, Antonio Margarito, Vic Darchinyan, and Cornelius Bundrage are recent or active fighters who reached the highest pinnacles of the sport (if you measure such things by world titles, which increasingly fewer do these days...but still...), all punchers, all with very questionable skills. Effective fighters all, but none of them 'skilled' - even as punchers, even making that distinction from "boxer". All of them, in various ways and to various extents, are or were a sloppy mess in the ring.

Correct.

100% incorrect. He realized he wasn't going to stop Bouadla or Gardner, so he let up on the gas pedal and began to pick his spots and make sure he was racking up enough points using clean effective punching, ring generalship, and effective aggression to win the rounds. He blatantly gave up, outside a few hail-Mary passes late versus Gardner (and those were on a lark, Golovkin almost egging himself on and showing his playful side) on getting the KO with either of them. AND THAT WAS IN THE INFANCY OF HIS PRO CAREER, let alone now with his ring IQ having increased exponentially.*



*Golovkin is kind of like a Saiyan from DBZ, every time someone gives him problems he comes away from it wiser & better for it. (granted, in the 2nd half of his career it has become rare for anyone to give him problems...really we're talking Ouma, Stevens to a lesser extent, and Murray - and the latter two were by and large viewed on the whole completely one-sided contests...)

 

My guess is the latter, that she's from a Korean family who emigrated to Russia either during her lifetime or a generation before. I have, in all my digging, never seen her referred to as anything but "Korean". Not a mixture of anything. That doesn't preclude her necessarily from having a mixed background, but in the absence of any reason to believe she has anything else in her blood all we can go on is knowing for sure that she's "Korean". (and therefore assume Golovkin is, until otherwise proven, exactly ½ Korean - and of course ½ Russian, but 0% ethnically Kazakh, that much is certain...)

I've seen a lot of very lazy journalism that both implies he's ethnically Kazakh (referring to his roots there or whatever, neglecting that neither of his parents are from there or possessing a drop of Kazakh blood, and that his 'roots' only go back 1 generation - and really just ½ a generation as nationality goes, since he was born & raised in the Soviet Union, not Kazakhstan which didn't exist yet) or, worse, placing him on lists of "active Muslim boxers" along with the likes of Amir Khan, Bernard Hopkins, Zab Judah, etc. :-(

My mistake. That was haste on my part, and once again lazy journalism on somebody else's. I just went off a quick Google search which yielded a result calling Tszyu ethnically Siberian (and didn't bother vetting the source, or even clicking the link ) - I actually stayed an hour late after work to finish this before hitting the gym and so things got a bit more rushed than I'd have liked.

Oh, I'm well aware of the HNN-GGG rivalry. :yep

I'll plead the fifth on omitting that (it wasn't really relevant to the point I was making anyway; the fact of the matter is that Golovkin vs. Nunez was awful as a world title bout and Golovkin vs. Tapia deplorable as a first defense - through no fault of Golovkin's own, and I never said it was, but the fact is they were awful).

My original point (which the HNN thing has nothing to do with) was that Golovkin had already fought much better opposition than Nunez & Tapia long before he was in a position to contend for a world title.

I'm well aware that HNN didn't want GGG, and that he knew full well he would get decapitated if that match-up came off.

I'm a big N'Dam N'Jikam fan (far more than I am a fan of Golovkin's, both his personality & in-ring style) but I readily admit all that much. :good

All true. He did the best he could, all things considered.

It all worked out in the end, as he is now poised to be the poster boy of HBO Boxing. (making him, by default, the most visible face in mainstream boxing in the West)

Which of them regularly, consistently beat up guys that are currently super middles, light heavies, or cruisers, when they were amateurs? :think

He may not hydrate to any more on fight night than your average middleweight but he is most assuredly physically stronger. Curtis Stevens is considered a bulky middle (and has competed extensively at super middle, light heavy, and even cruiser himself) and resembles a bodybuilder, yet Golovkin wound up imposing himself on him - not just with precision punching and superior skill, but with physical brawn.

 

Explain this comment. Be specific.