The similarities between Marvelous Marvin Hagler, the great, intimidating middleweight champion, and Gennady Golovkin, the concussion machine with the impish grin, are many.
Hagler is now, and has been for a couple of decades, a boxing deity. It wasn?t always that way, though. Hagler had one of the most difficult climbs to the top of any elite champion in modern memory.
He fought the toughest guys in the hardest places to win, judges against him, fans against him, circumstances against him. There were always unanswered questions, and no win, it seemed, was ever good enough or given enough respect.
Golovkin, the IBF-WBC middleweight champion, can empathize with Hagler. He?s 36-0 and has won each of his past 23 fights by knockout, a span covering well over eight years.
Yet, like Hagler in the 1970s and early 1980s, Golovkin has more than his share of skeptics, despite that glittering 36-0 record with 33 knockouts. He hasn?t quite done enough in the eyes of many, and some think his record has been built on smart matchmaking and soft opposition.
Here?s the funny thing, though: When Hagler won the critics over, he really won them over, to the point that when he actually was declining, it was overlooked, or missed.
He was 31 when he beat John Mugabi on March 10, 1986, and almost exactly 31 years later, it stands as his final victory. Hagler wasn?t Hagler in the bout with Mugabi. He didn?t have the snap on his punches or the fire in his belly or the speed in his fists that he?d once had.
But Hagler had so convincingly made them believers by repeatedly pulverizing the toughest group of guys outside of a mafia convention that few gave his less-than-stellar performance in the win over Mugabi much thought.
It was only when he lost to Sugar Ray Leonard 13 months later that it was easy in retrospect to see the decline.
Golovkin is less than a week away from the biggest fight of his life, a unification bout Saturday for the IBF, WBA and WBC middleweight titles against Daniel Jacobs at Madison Square Garden in New York, with the truly big opponent, Canelo Alvarez, looming tantalizingly in the distance.
Golovkin is more than three years older now than Hagler was in 1986 when he beat Mugabi. And like Hagler, Golovkin enters this fight against Jacobs still with something to prove.
A fight with Alvarez isn?t a given, no matter what happens with Jacobs on Saturday. Alvarez has to beat Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. in May, and then has to convince promoter Oscar De La Hoya to make the deal, which, to this point, De La Hoya has steadfastly refused to do.
And Golovkin is coming off one of his least impressive efforts. He stopped Kell Brook, who held a welterweight title, in five rounds in his last outing, on Sept. 10. Golovkin was hit cleanly in that fight and never really unloaded the way his legion of fans have come to expect.
He won when Brook?s corner threw in the towel but, like Hagler against Mugabi 30 years prior, it wasn?t the kind of decisive win for which he?d become known.
?If Danny hits Golovkin the way Kell Brook hit him, he?s going to get knocked out,? said Andre Rozier, Jacobs? long-time trainer.
One could look at the Brook fight in several different ways. The friendliest way is that Brook is a quality fighter with good speed and that Golovkin won on an off-night when he wasn?t so interested, fractured Brook?s eye socket and stopped him inside of five.
Golovkin admits it was hard to motivate himself for that bout and rated his performance just a three or a four on a scale of one to 10.
?Kell Brook was not an easy fight for me,? Golovkin told Yahoo Sports. ?It wasn?t interesting to me. Last year, I spent too much time talking with Canelo, with [Billy Joe] Saunders, with [Peter] Quillin, with [Chris] Eubank, with [Carl] Froch. It was too much. And [the Brook fight] wasn?t interesting. This year, I?m more serious.?
