Middleweights in boxing history who could stand toe to toe with Prime Golovkin?

SRR, SRL, Hagler, Toney, Jones Jr, McClellan, McCallum, Steele, Monzon, Burley, Tiger, LaMotta, Ketchel, Greb, Walker, Flowers, Fullmer, Hopkins, Alvarez, and Eubank.

 

GGG is more technical than Tito. Hopkins and then Wright dismantled and exposed him with ease. At middleweight Trinidad wasn't the monster he'd been at welterweight.

 

Impossible to determine or answer that question. Golovkin has never been willing to open up and trade with a guy his own size who was down for a toe to toe brawl.

 

There are way too many MWs that could stand toe to toe and kick GG’s ass.

It’s been listed already

 

It's all theoretical when it comes to who could do it, but there's only one fighter that we know of in history who stood toe to toe with GGG and kicked his ass while doing it and that was Canelo.

 

I think the Bennie Briscoe that had Hagler using lateral movement might get a 'W' over GGG. As good as 3G is, & a potential HOFer, there were just too may MWs back in the day that would've welcomed his style. In fact most of the names mentioned would have had him using even more movement than he did with Canelo II.

 

This. GGG is not really (despite the marketing blurb) a toe-to-toe slugger. He's a boxer puncher who selectively turns up the heat depending on the opponent and the state of the fight in question. Very often big punchers are not great boxers and he will always fight off the backfoot against a puncher, working off the jab and trying to exploit mistakes. His tremendous footwork is what allows him to seem like he's crowding an opponent, but in reality he's on the edge of the box, ready to nullify an opponent's offence by taking a step back. He's really organised and systematic. People take fights like the Brook fight as representative which is not the case. If he had a bit more speed he'd be unbeatable.

 

No one ever accused GGG of being a reckless brawler. He is a very organized and systematic fighter, GGG is calculated. He has good footwork, not tremendous footwork, but very serviceable. No one though would confuse GGG's footwork with the kind of footwork Canelo utilized in his first fight with GGG.

GGG though only has himself to blame for being known as a brawler when after the first Canelo fight he started talking about Mexican Style and how Canelo didn't fight Mexican style. What you're saying, and accurately so, is that GGG has never really been a Mexican Style kind of fighter, but rather is a good boxer puncher who just happens to have big punching power. Which makes it all the more odd that he started going on about wanting Canelo to fight Mexican style after the first bout with Canelo. When he did that, combined with his high KO ratio, he became known as a big puncher or even a brawler rather than the boxer puncher that he always was. But as you allude to, that's not who GGG was. GGG as a boxer puncher shouldn't have needed Canelo to fight coming at him any more than Canelo would have needed GGG to fight coming at him. Great fighters are supposed to beat fighters no matter how they choose to fight.

 

They did the whole Mexican Style thing to Canelo to get him to come forward into Golovkin so as to counter him. Canelo is really good on the counter and they wanted to take it away from him. (In my opinion.) Turns out Canelo is really good coming forward, too. Without going too much into the result of the fight, it was a really good battle.

 

People forget that GGG doesn't really go toe to toe himself that much against top fighters, punchers.
He's a boxer puncher.

 

Loads of fighters in history could beat the best version of GGG. He's a great fighter with a great chin, but he can be beaten by any elite boxer with a chin and a decent level of defence. There have been very many of those at MW in the history of the sport.

 

Prime Nigel Benn would have walked through GGG.