Is GGG An Alltime Great?

Ward "If ya goes up, ya can't come back down."

also Ward "Ya have to come up to 168 if you want to fight me"

also Ward "Not like that! I meant you have to come up to 175 if you want to fight me"

 

That's a pretty low bar for most Christians I have met, to be fair.

 

Found the Dino alt

 

It's true man, THIS GUY KNOCKS OUT HEAVYWEIGHTS IN SPARRING!!!!! He held back against Canelo (who was 7'2 and 375 lbs in the fight btw) to bestow his fans a glorious brawl rather than a first round KO.

Have you ever seen Wladimir call GGG out? Thought so.

 

whelp can't argue with that

 

I respect the amateur fights.

It’s wear and tear.

We’ve discussed this before.

I’ve discussed it with Serge.

They need to be taken into account.

They need to be respected.

But at the same time, nobody has any specifics.

You do not know who he fought.

You could give me the odd name.

You could give me some names of who Loma, Beterbiev and Usyk fought too.

But you wouldn’t be able to name 90% of their opponents.

And you have no idea of the quality of the opposition, or the intensity of the bouts etc.

Many of them also took place when they were really young.

So for all we know, pro fighters with less amateur bouts could have had harder spars.

Beterbiev and Usyk have had lots of amateur bouts, and only a small amount of pro fights.

Yet they’re both fighting into their late 30’s and into their 40’s.

Yet had they have had less amateur fights and more pro fights, they may not be as fresh as what they are today.

They might be badly faded. Even retired.

If GGG had fought less amateur fights and more pro fights, then like Hagler, he may have retired earlier. He may not have fought into his late 30’s.

So you cannot compare amateur fights to pro fights. And again, especially as you don’t know the specifics.

 

The Ward fight was a non starter.

Like Serge says, GGG had Lemieux lined up, whilst also believing that Canelo would follow.

Whereas Ward had been inactive, where he’d publicly admitted that he wasn’t sure if he could comfortably make SMW again.

The only way it could have happened, is if GGG had got that Canelo fight after, as well as a clear win over him, and if Ward could have had at least one tune up, and proved that he could comfortably make SMW again.

A lot of ‘ifs’ on both sides.

It was never really viable.

 

Yeah, I already said that you'd say that. It's all covered in my post.

 

So you’ve just purposely ignored where I’d discussed it in detail?

You don’t have any in-depth knowledge of pretty much anyone’s amateur career, and especially GGG’s.

 

Depends how you score the first 2 Canelo fights.

If you scored the fights like 90% of people for the first fight and 75% of people for the second, then yes. He has 2 wins whilst being past his prime against a top 5 generational P4P fighter, who was just as much of a ‘natural’ middleweight as GGG, whilst destroying the rest of his competitions, bar 2 close fights with Jacobs and sergiy.

If you want to act like Golovkin ‘drew’ and ‘lost’ which in all fairness are the official results, or arguments that he ‘fought timid against the A side’ (outboxing Canelo in the centre of the ring on back foot) then he might fall short.

 

You discussed nothing in detail, you only explained how much you didn't know.

So what DO we know?

Golovkin started boxing at the age of 11. He went pro at 24. That's 13 years of boxing. That is 13 years of training and sparring for the 350 amateur fights. You don't seem to think that this is at all relevant.

He says his record is 345-5. Could be different, some people say he has as many as 8 losses. Regardless, that's a tremendous record. It implies that he's either a liar or that his opponents were mattresses. How do we find out whether or not he fought all the stiffs in asia?

Very simple: when he turned pro he was already a complete fighter. The footage exists. Go look at his early fights. He is a superlative boxer (actually a better boxer than he was under Sanchez who wanted him to slug more) and his opponents struggle to land a punch on him. You don't become a boxer that good by fighting your little sister and the guy across the street.

His amateur results likewise speak for themselves: Gold at the 2000 Junior worlds, gold at 2003 Amateur Championships and silver at 2004 Athens Olympics. And we know that the boxers he beat to get those wins, guys like Dirrell and Bute, were top level fighters in the pros.

Finally, we have the word from Golovkin himself:

“I’ve had champions as my opponents, I’ve had mandatory challengers,” Golovkin told a group of reporters at a press conference Monday afternoon in Manhattan. “I wouldn’t say Canelo is the best. He’s a top opponent, of course. He’s a very difficult opponent, but as you can see he loses… “I’m talking about the number of amateur boxers in my amateur career who did not turn professional,” Golovkin said. “Their boxing skills and strategy in boxing was paramount. It took them like three rounds to figure you out and fight the strategy against you that leaves you no chance to win.”

^ Can't link to the article because it is on another boxing site.

This content is protected

 

This information is common knowledge to any of his fans.

What I’m saying, is that nobody has any specific information of those 350 fights.

Yes, we have some information.

But we don’t have specific information.

Also, many other fighters turned pro earlier and trained for significantly longer.

 

What I'm saying is that we don't need "specific" information. The information we have and which can be inferred is sufficient.

 

No, it is not.

Not for any serious debate.

Again, you don’t know the opponents, you don’t know the level that they fought at, or the level of intensity etc.

GGG, Usyk, Loma and Beterbiev, are all great fighters. Obviously.

They all had obvious wear and tear through their amateur careers.

However, had they have turned pro earlier and had less amateur fights but more pro fights, then they may well have had very different careers and less longevity.

You cannot compare amateur fights with pro fights.