Golovkin broke (middleweight) Matthew Macklin's ribs. 2013. George Groves (super-middleweight) has confirmed reports that Golovkin broke his rib in a 2014 sparring session. Golovkin broke (middleweight) Martin Murray's nose. 2015. Golovkin fights (welterweight) Kell Brook in 2016. Brook is "unlucky" to suffer a broken eye socket.
So in how many fights did Golovkin break someone's eye socket? Once? I'd say if you end up having forty-odd fights and you break one guy's orbital bone that guy can probably consider himself fairly unlucky. Not sure again what the weights have to do with the strength of Brook's bones either by the way. He's basically the same size as several middleweights and by all accounts had been completely killing himself making 147 for years.
Not really, when the man is breaking bones quite consistently. You could equally call Brook lucky for not having his ribs, jaw, nose or some other available bone broken. We can think of dozens of ways he was "lucky", if you want to talk about luck in that sense. (You could probably look at every fight and find things "unique" about it, something that didn't happen in the majority or all the other fights of X, but that doesn't mean something flukey happened.) I'm sure you could statistically argue that Brook was "unlucky" to be stopped in the 5th round, because most Golovkin opponents weren't stopped in that round. ..... it's not a good argument. Simply : A boxer was hit in the face by a devastating puncher, a world champion who was known to inflict damage ... and damage was inflicted, the boxer sustained an injury. It's really a bit strange to imply that was something of a "fluke" occurrence, in my opinion. But you probably do want to argue about it. Carry on. The other guy is right.
I wasn't making any claim about the strength of his bones. They are very possibly as strong (or stronger) than the bones of Groves, Murray and Macklin, none of whom could prevent Golovkin from breaking them. But, all other things being roughly equal, a career welterweight with no professional experience of fighting world class middleweights, is likely to be less able to defend himself from injury against a devastating 160 pound champion than is a professional boxer who has faced multiple good middleweights and/or super-middleweights in their career.
A quote from Spences trainer Dereck James talking about Spences power. “This guy can punch, let me tell you. In his last fight, he broke the guy’s (Alejandro Barrera’s) jaw. That’s the only reason that guy quit. In the fight before that he broke the guy’s (Chris van Heerden’s) orbital bone. He breaks guys’ jaws and ribs and noses all the time time in the gym while sparring. All the time." Spence obviously hits hard, but I think it's safe to say that Golovkin hits harder and if that's true we have to presume he has broken a lot more bones than have been listed in this thread.
Yeah, it would be a national disgrace if only the Brits were found to have broken under the Golovkin assault.
lol Martin Murray took a hell of a lot of punishment in his fight with Golovkin and they don't come much tougher than Murray. Did us proud that night even in defeat. Worth noting that Murray is a big middleweight and he couldn't keep Golovkin off him, so what chance did welterweight Brook have. Was always going to end badly for Kell.
Exactly. Brook was always likely to lose the fight, but lots of fights happen with that being the case, many more even more one sided than Golovkin v Brook. But to sustain the sort of injuries Brook did was always somewhat unlikely, even though people are now pretending it was some sort of given. It's odd that boxing fans before fights which are largely mismatches often say 'X could get seriously hurt here,' which not only seems somewhat unsavoury given the dangers associated with the sport, it also (thankfully) rarely happens. As I said before, if people want to moan about 'terrible promotion' when it comes to mismatches under Hearn, have a moan about Michael Sprott being chucked in as a punching bag against Joshua or something like that. People are talking about Brook v Golovkin like it was some dwarf of a welterweight moving up to fight a giant.
