....It is close enough Bokaj ,, so pull your head out of your ass .. It was a rigged ODLH venue with Byrd turning in a 118-110 scorecard and getting SUSPENDED ..... so if you are going to jump on him .. be prepared to take it .... because there is NO MONEY in BOXING for an old GGG to continue .. The POPULAR red head got pushed thru ... so ya STFU ...
No. And anyone claiming it is just a waste time imo, so I won't argue it any more than I will argue that water is wet.
I found a draw to be within reason. That Byrd missed a good fight and turned in a preposterous card doesn’t mean it wasn’t close. To me, when I score, any result that can be worked out if all the close and even rounds go one way or the other is a reasonable result — even if I had all the close rounds going the the other way. So in a 12-round fight, if Fighter A wins four rounds clearly and Fighter B wins four rounds clearly and I have one round even and three close rounds for Fighter B … if another judge gave all those rounds to Fighter A then him winning a decision is not out of line in my eyes. And, as I’ve pointed out many times, a fight can be razor close and still have a 120-108 scorecard. If every round is razor close and a judge gives Fighter A all 12 rounds by the narrowest of margins, that doesn’t mean the fight wasn’t close and super competitive, it means one judge thought one guy won all the close rounds. It is, again, a reasonable result. As for GGG, I think honestly his resume looks a lot like Wilder’s. Two of his three fights with Fury were super competitive — he got a draw once thanks to two knockdowns (and within a whisker of a KO in the 12th … a different judge may have waved it off with Fury on his back blinking or counted a bit faster and that result swings) and the third fight was an incredible shootout even though he took the fatal bullet, so to speak. The result of his resume, like GGG’s, is a bit lacking but both defended their titles a number of times successfully against guys who were ranked by that organization.
I do find it quite interesting that the kind of mythologizing of old-time boxers, which the 'Classicists' are often accused of falling for (typically, by 'Modernists'), has actually been occurring in real-time, on this thread, about a modern-day fighter (and similar distortions are likely being replicated elsewhere across the ether). It isn't too difficult to imagine Golovkin being researched, in many decades to come, and it being a bit of a chore to discern between fact and fiction. While I don't include, in the latter, personally expressed ideas about how good Golovkin was, the denial of recorded results and rating him, based on an imposed version of events, will have in all likelihood muddied the waters. Of course, barring a global catastrophe, the researchers of the future should have the film, at least, from which to visually verify and draw some independent conclusions.
He is ridiculously overrated and I dont buy the idea that everyone ducked him. The guy feasted on nobodies and the instant he stepped up (to fight a smaller fighter) he couldnt beat him, and NO I didnt not score any of the Canelo fights for him. I had the first a draw and the other two clear decisions for Canelo. When you couldnt beat the only elite fighter on your resume convincingly it says a lot about you. And frankly he couldnt beat the best contenders he faced convincingly either.
I think part of the ‘historical fact’ is this: HBO glommed onto him as a, to be honest, cheap commodity they could present as some kind of discovered monster who had been lurking in the shadows (as in he hadn’t had much if any mainstream composure) without breaking their considerably depleted bank. Same with fellow EE Sergey Kovalev. They were both punchers and good but yet weren’t commanding major purses. HBO had had its budget slashed to ribbons and was grasping at straws. Problem was, there wasn’t enough in that downsized HBO piggy bank to pay the top guys to face GGG (or Kovalev for that matter) so they mostly feasted on lesser lights while their divisions moved on without them — GGG was locked into the HBO contract and couldn’t break it to take the bigger fights and HBO wasn’t going to bid major PPV money to make those fights either. So I don’t think it’s so much ‘oooh, everybody’s scared of him, they won’t fight him’ as ‘meh, HBO is offering chump change, I can make that elsewhere.’ Especially concerning unifications and such — guys expect to be paid big money for big fights, and HBO was instead paying chump change.
What exactly was the amount HBO was offering people to fight GGG? The network didn’t have the budget to make the important fights by this point.
Golovkin fought in a woeful era and called out smaller guys to beat the band , but when the challenge of facing Ward was offered to him , he ran away kicking and screaming. Overrated !
GGG is over age, not over rated. He should have retired after Canelo 1. Just like Hagler did. Fk the robbery!!
All very valid points. It would require tremendous mental gymnastics that would make Olympic judges proud to argue Golovkin was the real deal middleweight champion setting the record for defenses when he had his vacant/interim trinket belts. This isn't a knock on Golovkin as a boxer, he does get some excuses for some of the things that derailed his career (bad promotion, ducking, etc). But many people often want to just give him unearned bonus points.
HBO didn’t disclose the amount of its budget for boxing that I know of, but it is well documented that it was slashed: https://nypost.com/2018/09/27/why-hbo-is-stunningly-leaving-boxing-behind/ Here cites a report that it was cut to $25m. That’s not big money when the budget include announcers, production, travel and purses: https://www.bloodyelbow.com/2016/5/...view-has-a-break-even-goal-of-just-75000-buys
You think I’m supposed to know when HBO doesn’t release the figures? We know it was slashed and the decrease was considerable from all the reporting. We know they backed off a lot of bigger fighters/fights and had to try PPVs for people who weren’t PPV-worthy (was it GGG who had a PPV that sold fewer than 100K and was considered a disaster at the time). We know that it is now zero because whatever return they were getting on their boxing investment didn’t satisfy them so they did away with boxing altogether.