One of my all time favorites. Been rewatching some of his fights. He had a big and noticeable drop off starting around the Chilemba fight. The bottle ruins fighters. There was a brief period during which Sergey Kovalev was the clear best fighter on the planet p4p. Mayweather and Pacquiao had been in decline for a good while by that point. Certainly, both were not anywhere close to what they once were by that point. For a brief few years he was a truly magnificent fighter. Especially over the first 6 rounds. Stamina was his only weakness. I told my coworker the other day who is a big boxing fan that a prime Kovalev would damn near shutout Bivol. Not even kidding. I think going into the 7th round (if Bivol even makes it that far) it's very likely that Kovalev is up 6 rounds to 0 on the cards. This content is protected
Peak Sergey was a MONSTER. But, you also can't equate Bivol and Cleverly, that's whopping great disparity in quality there! IMO, Kov, Bivol & Beterbiev are all around the same level - though I'd be more interested to see PRIME Beterbiev with PRIME Kov, as I don't think Kov could handle Beterbiev's inside attack and bodywork IF, Artur can get past Kov's jab. Kov's jab was a weapon!
Nah, Bivol was terrified of Beterbiev's power. An old AB had him running away from a partially landed jab. A peak Sergey Kovalev dominates Bivol. Kovalev and Beterbiev are a level above Bivol.
I remember the hype. Until he fought Ward, all we had were threads like: “A prime Roy Jones wouldn’t last 3 rounds” Every week. Then Andre did a psyche job on him, and that was that.
Kovalev was not better than Chocolatito Gonzalez I'm afraid. Kovalev was a tremendous talent at his best but he was never deserving of the mantle of P4P no. 1 imo.
He beat Ward easy. And he was already on the decline from the bottle. Shall we point to the many times RJJ was knocked out cold. I rate RJJ highly, but his chin can't handle Kovalev.
Ha! Andre walked up to his face like nobody else had ever done at the pressers. He looked him in the eye and told him that he wasn’t going to get destroyed and that he was going to break him down. The first fight was close. The rematch saw Kovalev fall apart. And people can talk about the low blow finish, but he’d already been beaten by that point. Both physically and mentally. In the middle of the fight, Andre ripped him to the body with two great body shots, which were 100% clean, which nobody could have disputed. And he turned around in desperation and looked at Tony Weeks, insinuating that they weren’t legal. And that’s when he’d given up. Nobody on this forum said that he was washed at that point. Most of the forum believed that he was going to destroy Andre. So imagine Roy in his prime? Why would we point to Roy’s knockout losses? Anybody knows that he could have beaten a post-HW/shot version. But a prime Roy Jones? That jab would never have found him. Kovalev was a bully. If he couldn’t beat Andre Ward across 2 fights, he was never beating a prime Roy Jones.
Do you really want to start comparing post prime performances between RJJ and Kovalev? Cuz that could get ugly for RJJ. The website called YouTube is a great tool.
I don’t know what you’re watching to think that he was on another level to Bivol, and that he’d have dominated him for 6 rounds, before knocking him out. Silly.
Yes, the Chilemba fight I believe he got a KD but didn't get his usual stoppage and definitely didn't look as devastating. That's when Ward got interested in the fight because he sensed Kovalev had lost a bit. Ward knew he was better than Chilemba, so it's obvious he suddenly fancied his chances. That's why people giving Ward all this credit aren't being honest about the sequence of events. It's exactly the same as Saunders only wanting GGG when it seemed the edge had come off. In fact it only took one fight for people to start questioning if GGG had started slipping and that was the Jacobs fight. This is how these warrior fighters think, they literally wait for opponents to start declining.