Golovkin vs. Canelo increasingly resembles the imaginary bout between Adonis Stevenson and Sergey Kovalev?
After Saturday?s disappointing performance against Daniel Jacobs, unified middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin and his team are mapping plans for the remainder of his career. It?s reasonable to assume that Canelo Alvarez would be on his radar if not at the top of the list, but that superfight increasingly resembles the imaginary bout between Adonis Stevenson and Sergey Kovalev, which failed to materialize when it might have mattered.
But fear not. Triple G has an opponent in mind, even though it?s not the opponent most fight fans want to see.
?Saunders is my dream fight,? said Golovkin after outpointing Jacobs at Madison Square Garden. ?It is my ambition to take from him the only belt I am missing.?
Golovkin?s dream of adding Saunders? WBO belt to the many belts he has amassed makes a perverse kind of sense, insofar as sense and perversity align.
It?s not as though Canelo is clamoring for a fight Triple G. Avoidance is more like it. But both fighters know that that?s the match most people want to see, so they talk about and talk around it, much as Adonis Stevenson blathered about wanting to fight Kovalev.
But Saunders wants to fight Golovkin as much as Golovkin wants to fight Saunders.
?I?ll travel anywhere,? Saunders said. ?I?m not bothered about fighting him in Kazakhstan?I?ll fight him in a field for all I care.?
The fight in a field isn?t likely to occur, at least not in the boxing hotbed of Kazakhstan, but it?s just the sort of novelty that is likely to attract the casual fan?s attention.
?He wants the WBO belt and I?m willing to put it on the line,? continued Saunders. ?Golovkin is strong but he can be outfoxed. A boxer always beats a puncher and he has never faced anyone as awkward or tricky as me.
?I?ve seen faults and flaws in him that I know I can take advantage of. I want to see how good I really am. In my own head, I know I am capable of beating him.?
Reality begins in dreams. Sanders has a dream. Fight fans have a dream. As does Triple G, which is something he and Canelo have in common. The only difference is that Golovkin dreams of fighting Saunders, whereas Canelo dreams of stopping Chavez Jr.
