Who needs to see Canelo-GGG III? I?d much rather see Gennadiy Golovkin-Sergey Derevyanchenko II.
The two middleweights waged a bloody war of attrition Saturday night at Madison Square Garden, 12 rounds of pure violence with all the artistry of a demolition derby.
Watching these two Eastern European warriors, the 37-year-old former middleweight champion from Kazakhstan and the 33-year-old relative novice from Ukraine smash into each other repeatedly only to back up and do it over and over again for 36 minutes had a kind of primal beauty.
And when the scorecards were read ? a unanimous decision for Golovkin, giving him back a sliver of the middleweight title he had lost to Canelo Alvarez in their rematch 13 months ago ? the Garden crowd, which had cheered raucously for Golovkin, greeting him with thundering chants of ?Triple G?? as he entered the ring, now showered the arena with boos.
Many fans on social media were surprised Triple G copped such treatment from the crowd.
That?s how much respect Derevyanchenko, in just his 15th professional fight, earned from the heavily pro-Golovkin crowd.
The most amazing thing about the fight was that it appeared it would end nearly before it started. Golovkin dropped an off-balance Derevyanchenko with a series of mostly glancing blows in the first round and opened a nasty gash above his right eye with a sharp left hook in the second.
But Derevyanchenko, whose only loss came to Daniel Jacobs last October, refused to be discouraged. He rebounded from the early onslaught to back Golovkin up in the third round, and repeatedly throughout the fight. And despite bleeding heavily from the cut between his eyelid and brow, an injury that caused the ringside doctor to twice hold up the start of rounds to check his fitness to continue, Derevyanchenko had his best moments in the last three rounds of the fight.
The opening minute of the 10th round was his best sequence of the fight. He drove Golovkin, who was never believed to have a reverse gear, backward with a series of 1-2s and appeared to have him close to a knockdown. But Golovkin was saved when referee Harvey Dock got caught out of position and found himself right up against Golovkin, his body virtually holding him up.
The rounds were close, the punches too numerous to distinguish, and the damage clearly visible. By the end of the fight, Derevyanchenko sported a large red blotch on his right cheekbone courtesy the leakage of his split eyebrow, which also dyed Golovkin?s formerly white trunks a sickly pink.
And Golovkin had swallowed so many right hands that his left cheekbone took on the look of a peach that had been dropped repeatedly on a concrete floor.
Judge Kevin Morgan scored the bout for Golovkin, 114-113. Eric Marlinski and Frank Lombardi had it 115-112, as did I.
But many of the rounds easily could have gone either way, and Derevyanchenko clearly has a stronger claim to a second shot at Golovkin than Golovkin has on a third fight with Canelo.
?Canelo?s probably licking his chops a little bit, but which fight would you rather see again?,?? raged Lou DiBella, Derevyanchenko?s promoter. ?That was (bleeping) World War III.??
