The Hottest Boxing Storylines for the Week of October 13
It's finally a fight week, and we'll set you up with all the storylines that will dominate the week ahead.
Gennady Golovkin returns to action on Saturday night at the StubHub Center in Carson, California.
Does Marco Antonio Rubio have any shot of upsetting the Kazakh bomber? And is GGG in position for high-profile fights next year, should he win?
Nonito Donaire returns on the undercard of GGG vs. Rubio, but has he bitten off more than he can chew after a string of disappointing performances?
Then we move on to the latest installment of the Floyd Mayweather soap opera and try to figure out what's happening with Danny Garcia.
All this in the hottest storylines in boxing.
Does Rubio Have Any Shot Against GGG?
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Rubio is considered little more than a dead man walking in boxing circles these days.
The 34-year-old Mexican has the tall task of facing WBA middleweight champion and devastating knockout artist Golovkin on Saturday night, and few are giving him any chance.
And with good reason.
GGG has stopped his last 17 foes inside the distance, demonstrating tremendous natural boxing ability, otherworldly power and the type of killer instinct you can’t teach.
Rubio, on the other hand, is one of those fighters who have been around forever. He’s a solid professional with a gaudy record, but he’s come up well short each and every time he’s stepped up in class.
Kelly Pavlik stopped him, and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. dominated him for a wide decision in his previous attempts at a 160-pound title, even if Rubio holds a meaningless (at least for him) interim belt.
Rubio has been stopped on three prior occasions—though not since 2009—just doesn’t have the firepower to keep Golovkin honest or the pure boxing ability to negate his huge power advantage.
Was this the best fight available for GGG at this stage?
You’ll have to ask his promoters, but there’s no real reason to question it.
Big-name opponents aren’t exactly lining up to face him, and you can’t blame them. That could change in a hurry after this fight, but more on that later.
It’s not even that Rubio is a bad opponent—you could certainly do worse. It's just that Golovkin operates on a whole different level.
Is Donaire in over His Head?
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Donaire just hasn’t looked right since dropping a clear-cut decision to Guillermo Rigondeaux last April at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall.
The fight wasn’t particularly damaging, at least physically, but it seemed to zap a fair bit of his confidence, leaving him a shell of his former self.
Donaire was rocketing up the pound-for-pound ranks at the time of the defeat, and he looked downright pedestrian in rallying from behind to knock out Vic Darchinyan in his comeback fight.
He took a share of the featherweight crown from Simpiwe Vetyeka in May, but the fight and the result were controversial at best.
The Filipino Flash will defend that title against undefeated featherweight power puncher Nicholas Walters in the main support bout for Golovkin vs. Rubio on Saturday night.
Walters, who holds the “regular” WBA 126-pound title as opposed to Donaire’s “super” title, is a fighter on the upswing. He obliterated Darchinyan his last time out and has the type of punching power that could shake a less-than-his-best Donaire.
This just seems to be one of those fights where one fighter is on the way up and the other is on the way down.
It’s a proving-ground fight in that sense, and either Donaire will return to some sense of prominence with a win, or Walters will have his star-making moment.
Is Anyone Safe from Floyd's Wrath?
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Mayweather is at it again, and the latest targets of his wrath are his father and trainer Floyd Mayweather Sr. and longtime promotional partner Oscar De La Hoya.
The pound-for-pound king had this to say to Ben Thompson of FightHype.com regarding his father:
"Well my father is totally wrong. Like I said before, we have people constantly being removed from the Mayweather Promotions team, Team Mayweather, and we also have people being removed from The Money Team. I want my dad to be with my team, but if he continues to go out there and speak on things that he has no knowledge about without communicating with me, then I must get a new trainer.
"
Mayweather was responding to an assertion from Floyd Sr. that a Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao showdown was all but guaranteed to happen next year.
It’s the latest signs of rocky waters assailing the SMS Money Team that he has built over the course of his dominant run atop boxing.
But Mayweather wasn’t done there.
He assailed longtime promotional partner De La Hoya, whom he has always had a tense relationship with stemming from their 2007 bout, telling Thompson: "Oscar De La Hoya has always been disloyal; very disloyal. He was very disloyal to Richard Schaefer. Richard Schaefer built that company from the ground up. I don't have anything against Eric Gomez at all, but De La Hoya is a piece of s***. Oscar is a snake!"
Those are strong words from a man who has been dishing out a lot of them lately.
Mayweather also challenged De La Hoya to line up Saul "Canelo" Alvarez for dates on Mexican holiday weekends next year.
The drama—whatever else you think of it—has been pretty entertaining, and it’s good for the Mayweather brand in that respect.
Where it all leads us?
Who knows?
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Will Golovkin Get Canelo or Cotto in 2015?
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It’s poor form for a fighter to look past an opponent, but we aren’t constrained by such limitations.
Golovkin shouldn’t have much trouble dispatching Rubio, and he’s already considered to be the best middleweight in the world by a fair amount of people.
And he’s suddenly in prime position to land some high-profile fights.
It’s widely believed that Canelo Alvarez and Miguel Cotto will meet sometime next year in a hugely important pay-per-view showdown, and the winner could wind up facing Golovkin later in the year.
GGG’s promoter Tom Loeffler, in comments to Mike Coppinger of BoxingScene.com, remains optimistic about the chances of his charge landing a significant fight next year.
Canelo's team has previously expressed an openness for a Golovkin fight (h/t Bad Left Hook)—Cotto remains to be seen—and that could be just the type of event the Mexican star needs to wrest the second of two Mexican holiday weekends from Mayweather.
Suddenly, Golovkin appears just one—widely expected—victory away from securing the types of fights that could bring him to the next level.
What's Happening with Danny Garcia?
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Garcia marched into 2014 with a ton of momentum off his career-defining win over Lucas Matthysse on the Mayweather vs. Canelo undercard.
But you can consider most—if not all—of that gone.
Garcia is the unified junior welterweight champion, and his 2014 campaign has been a few pegs short of impressive.
He survived—literally—with the mother of close calls against Mauricio Herrera in Puerto Rico this past March, but that fight looks like a diamond compared to his farce win over Rod Salka in August.
That fight was a gross, dangerous mismatch, and it never should have taken place.
Garcia’s mandatory challenger is tricky Ukrainian boxer Viktor Postol in a fight that’s unlikely to ever see the light of day. There’s very little market for it, and Garcia’s closeness with Al Haymon could provide problems in negotiations with Top Rank.
Garcia and Postol are close to reaching a deal that would allow the champion a voluntary defense before being compelled to take his mandatory. These types of things happen all the time in boxing.
For lack of better words, a champion pays off a challenger in order to avoid a fight he doesn’t want. Nothing new here and nothing particularly unusual about the practice.
Who Garcia will end up facing instead, however, remains open to debate.
But it can’t be another Salka.
That’s for sure.
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