Gennady Golovkin Must Get Creative to Make a Blockbuster Fight After Latest KO

Life would be a lot easier if Gennady Golovkin bounced balls or slapped pucks.

That way, the two-belt middleweight title claimant would be able to prove his claims of athletic superiority by simply beating the would-be competition in front of him and waiting for the other side of the bracket to supply a suitable victim for him in an ultimate championship setting.

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But boxing is neither basketball nor hockey, which makes Golovkin’s challenge unique.

Case in point: Saturday night in suburban Los Angeles.

No matter how many overmatched or outgunned wannabes like Willie Monroe Jr. arrive at Golovkin’s doorstep across the ring, there’s no guarantee the rampaging Kazakhstan native and his streak of 20 consecutive stoppages will ever get to the more lucrative side of the competitive fence.

Though lineal 160-pound champ Miguel Cotto's trainer, Freddie Roach, occasionally drops his rival’s name, and promoter Oscar De La Hoya has mentioned it recently in connection with his own spotlight-seeking client—Saul “Canelo” Alvarez—neither man is compelled to make the match unless or until it makes business sense.

And given the sort of fate Monroe met with, it’s no more likely the situation will change anytime soon.

“Fighters with options simply don’t get in the ring with Triple-G,” gushed HBO’s Max Kellerman on Saturday's broadcast.

“Why would they?”

In fact, the nephew of the last man to beat a pre-“Marvelous” Marvin Hagler came in as a prohibitive underdog and immediately looked the part, falling twice in the second round before steadying himself long enough to offset surrender until the first minute of Round 6.

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For Golovkin, it was impressive, one-sided and violent—all the elements that have transformed him from anonymous European hit man to a must-see TV entity since his premium-cable debut 32 months ago.

Still, once the SoCal celebration ended, the aforementioned reality hadn’t changed.

In order for Triple-G to trade in his “most feared” label for one that reads closer to “most accomplished,” the fact remains that he needs a proactive step in pursuit of that new validity.

Which means, rather than subsisting on the diet of Monroes, Martin Murrays and Daniel Geales that’s kept him going since he first claimed the IBO’s title strap in December 2011—or longing for big-name quarry to step up from 147 or 154 pounds—it’s high time Golovkin attempts a ladder climb of his own.

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Call it the Bernard Hopkins plan.

Though Kellerman likened Golovkin’s situation to Hagler’s in the 1980s—when the middleweight king waited for smaller foes to help “get him over”—it would probably be more prudent (and lucrative) for Golovkin to forget begging for Cotto and Canelo and instead take his “predator” act to 168 and 175 pounds.

Lest anyone forget, Hopkins was the top middleweight of the early 2000s and racked up 20 title defenses before hanging around long enough to be twice bested by Jermain Taylor in late 2005.

But unlike Hagler after his loss to Ray Leonard, B-Hop soldiered on, climbed two divisions to reinvent himself against Antonio Tarver the following year and went on to attract big-name foes such as Winky Wright, Joe Calzaghe, Roy Jones Jr., Chad Dawson and Sergey Kovalev in a stunningly compelling second act.

And though a now-33-year-old Golovkin seems in no danger of being upset at 160 pounds anytime soon, he also doesn’t appear on the verge of a big fight, which makes a reinvention of his own even more vital.

Some of the higher-rung options might want him just as much, too. Ali Sabir notes how "good" a Golovkin-Andre Ward matchup would be:

Long stretches of inactivity and upheaval have likely made Ward more amenable to the idea of a Triple-G fight than he’s been in the past, and the matchup of a pair of unbeaten champions in their early 30s would certainly move the HBO needle as much as a series of Monroe encounters.

Kovalev, meanwhile, has a situation at 175 that’s similar to Golovkin’s at 160. He’s built a quality resume KO’ing the flotsam and jetsam of the light heavyweight ranks, but he has thus far been unable to convince the quarry he’s most interested in—Adonis Stevenson—to sign a contract.

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Quitting that chase to take on a rising “middleweight monster” might be a welcome alternative.

The bottom line for Golovkin, even with 20 straight KOs, passion from HBO and a title reign that many feel is the most legitimate—if not the most lineal—at 160, is that it will take creativity to earn a spotlight.

If he wants a marquee fight with a star commodity, he and his handlers are going to need to make the prospect so competitively appealing that the risk of physical damage takes a distant back seat.

After all, you can’t win the big fight unless you get the big fight.