No Weaknesses on Display in Gennady Golovkin's Dominant Win vs. David Lemieux
Gennady Golovkin is no monster.
Oh sure, he hits like he has bricks in his fists, has won 21 straight fights by knockout, including 15 consecutive title defenses, and is one of the hardest pure punchers in all of boxing. But Golovkin isn’t just a force of nature, something people speak of in fear during the dead of night while huddled around a campfire.
Rather, he’s a skilled technician, a well-oiled machine, a precise-punching masterclass boxer. ESPN.com’s Dan Rafael hailed Golovkin’s win as a “supreme performance” in which he “methodically broke apart” his opponent.
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That assessment of Golovkin’s Round 8 demolition of David Lemieux is spot-on. The 33-year-old undefeated middleweight from Kazakhstan is a complete fighter.
“I’m not just puncher,” Golovkin told HBO’s Max Kellerman after the fight. “I’m not just crazy fighter. I’m boxer.”
When he speaks, Golovkin’s English is broken, but not as badly as Lemieux was by the end of the fight. While most pundits probably thought Golovkin would have his hand raised by the end of the night, it seemed at least plausible that the accomplished and aggressive Lemieux might be able to be competitive for at least a round or two.
Nope. It was a bloodbath.
In fact, snagging Lemieux’s IBF middleweight title, to go alongside his WBA championship, didn’t appear all that difficult at all.
That’s the thing about Golovkin—it always looks like he’s the only one in the ring not getting punched.
In a way that was true at Madison Square Garden on Saturday night in New York, for while Lemieux was busy throwing punches, he wasn’t very successful in landing many of them.
And Golovkin was. His crisp and powerful jab broke Lemieux’s nose early in the fight, and he never stopped smashing blood out of it for as long as the fight went on.
It was a mismatch from the start.
At the start of Round 3, HBO’s Jim Lampley went as far as to wonder how much longer Lemieux could keep working his ever-failing strategy of trying to land jabs and right hands from a distance.
“How many jabs can you eat before you make bad decisions,” Lampley rhetorically asked the HBO pay-per-view audience.
The answer was probably more than anyone thought he could, but fewer than he’d probably have liked.
Because Lemieux ate jabs all night. If he had started to consider them part of his diet after about Round 2, could anyone have really blamed him?
Golovkin landed what seemed like just about every jab he threw. That’s not all that typical for a Golovkin fight, or at least it’s not normal to see him so dedicated to employing the craft.
Usually, Golovkin boxes a bit at the beginning, then walks his opponent down and bludgeons them.
But Golovkin isn’t just the stalking marauder boxing fans have come to know and love in recent years. He’s a complete fighter, one who can box from a distance as good as anyone in the sport today.
That’s almost not fair. How can arguably the best pressure fighter in boxing north of flyweight champion Roman Gonzalez be such a slick boxer too? Is that even a thing?
To his credit, Lemieux tried to win the fight. According to CompuBox (via HBO), the 26-year-old Canadian tossed 191 jabs and 144 power punches at Golovkin. But very few of them connected, and even those that did had little to no effect on the newly unified middleweight champion.
Nope, this Golovkin isn’t just a good puncher. He’s a balanced fighter with excellent defense when he wants to be.
That he wanted to be was a testament to Lemieux's power. Lemieux is legitimately one of the best punchers in the middleweight division. He didn’t win the IBF title Golovkin yanked out of his hands on Saturday by being cute and nimble.
He’s a puncher.
But Lemieux couldn’t land anything of consequence until he was well worn out from the same combination that befuddled recently retired Floyd Mayweather’s opponents over 49 professional prizefights.
Not only was Lemieux getting crushed by laser-like punches from virtually all angles, but Golovkin was slipping and dodging Lemieux’s usually formidable offense all the while.
Nothing tires a fighter out like missing punches. CompuBox numbers indicate Lemieux missed a lot them, 82 percent of the jabs he threw and 62 percent of his power punches. Even when the managed to land clean, as he did in Round 6 and Round 7, it didn’t do much more than rile Golovkin up. Anytime Lemieux hit Golovkin as well as he could have hoped heading into the fight, Golovkin simply shook it off and landed power shots to the head and body in bunches.
Golovkin landed 170 of 359 jabs and 110 of 190 power punches. At times, it seemed like he could land whatever he wanted from wherever he wanted to land them.
So while Lemieux was tough, game and willing to engage Golovkin at every turn, referee Steve Willis was probably right to halt things during Round 8. Lemieux had already been dropped in Round 5, spun sideways in Round 7 and genuinely beaten up for every minute of every round.
Why should he take any more punishment? As great as Golovkin looked on the night, it wasn’t a fair fight.
Golovkin-Lemieux was a complete mismatch.
Golovkin is quite possibly the most perfect fighting force in boxing today. He can jab from a distance. He can dodge and parry. He can land hard combinations to the head and body. He can apply pressure and inflict pain.
He’s the real thing, people.
Golovkin is easily the best middleweight in the world. He’s at or near the top of many pound-for-pound lists already too.
But to this point in Golovkin’s increasingly impressive career, what was fueling his growing bandwagon was his scariness as a puncher. It didn’t matter what kind of defense he had, because nobody could stand up to his power.
But Golovkin is so much more than just a scary puncher. In a way that makes him even scarier.
He’s not a monster. He’s a weapon, and as good a one right now as boxing has ever seen.
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