Gennady Golovkin Stuck in Boxing Purgatory Until He Can Fight Canelo Alvarez

It’s good to be Gennady Golovkin.

After all, the 33-year-old is unbeaten in a decade-long pro career, he’s got a TV-friendly style that’s yielded a burgeoning international fan base and he’s considered by most significant boxing know-it-alls to be the best full-time middleweight on the planet.

Problem is, for the very same reasons, it’s not so good to be Gennady Golovkin.

Thanks to the violent qualities he’s shown while bulldozing a path to the top of the 160-pound empire, the Kazakh affectionately labeled Triple-G has found it difficult to attract big-name opposition willing to risk status and health by standing with him inside a 20-foot square.

He was unable to land a fight with consensus divisional kingpin Sergio Martinez before a gimpy-legged version of the Argentine was swallowed whole by Miguel Cotto at Madison Square Garden in 2014. Then, after subsequent victories had planted Golovkin squarely on Cotto’s radar, the decorated Puerto Rican dissolved into a stuttering puddle whenever the specter of unification was raised.

Cotto was ultimately conquered by fellow weight class interloper Canelo Alvarez instead, and though the red-haired Mexican immediately maintained he’d not duck the looming challenge, Tuesday’s blockbuster announcement of a May 7 match with Amir Khan—who’s never weighed north of 147 pounds for a professional fight—did nothing to boost perception that a showdown was imminent.

For the record, Team Golovkin isn’t conceding that the springtime match has any impact on its chances of striking a deal with Alvarez and Co. The World Boxing Council has ordered that Alvarez (its full-fledged champion since the Cotto win) fight Golovkin (its interim champion for the last 15 months) or risk being relieved of the shiny green title belt. And for the time being, that’s good enough.

“The winner will be mandated to fight against GGG in the next fight,” said Tom Loeffler, managing director of K2 Promotions, which works with Golovkin. “We can't control what Canelo does. We can only go by what is mandatory by the WBC, and it is clear that the winner would have to fight GGG or get stripped of the title.”

Neither Alvarez nor promoter Oscar De La Hoya have said they’d follow a Khan win with anything other than a Golovkin encore. But given that he’s never weighed within five pounds of the middleweight limit, and would presumably have a laundry list of less-menacing post-Khan options from which to choose, a trigger pull on Golovkin would be as shocking as a Peyton Manning dab this Sunday in Santa Clara.

Short of that surprise, it’s probable that Golovkin’s hitch in purgatory will be a long one.

The IBF/IBO/WBA champ is days from an official announcement of his own April 23 headline appearance on HBO, Loeffler said. But the likely foe for the match—designated IBF mandatory challenger Dominic Wade—is hardly recognizable to anyone beyond the sport’s hardest core, having beaten precisely one middleweight slotted better than No. 45 by the London-based Independent World Boxing Rankings.

And even if Golovkin uses him to stretch a KO streak into its eighth full year, it’s not as if the other non-Alvarez names on the division’s horizon—WBO titleholder Billy Joe Saunders, championship progeny Chris Eubank Jr., once-beaten cancer-killer Daniel Jacobs and recent Saunders victim Andy Lee—would inspire much more than a night’s worth of zeal from even the most rabid premium cable sycophant.

Even worse, now that Floyd Mayweather Jr. is off the market and Andre Ward has put on weight, the most fleeting of chances for other mega-events have vanished, too.

Loeffler had long insisted Golovkin would shrink to 154 pounds or swell to 168 for a significant enough opportunity, but while James DeGale is a reigning super middleweight with a diverse skill set, he doesn’t yet have the resume of a Ward or the star power of a Mayweather—and he doesn’t on the surface seem to meet the promoter’s own litmus test for making a ladder climb worthwhile.

“He wants to unify the 160 division. If the other 160 champs won't fight him, (it) would have to be a big fight outside of his division that he makes easily,” Loeffler said, setting super middle as the scale ceiling and presumably ruling out would-be dream matches with Ward or Sergey Kovalev at anything past it.

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“(It’s) 168, if there is a compelling fight for him that is against a marketable fighter that generates additional revenue, if there is no middleweight champion at the time willing to fight him.”

Ironically, given those iffy alternatives, treating the anonymous Wade as more than a speed bump may wind up being Golovkin’s best springtime strategy for revving Canelo’s middleweight engine.

Unless, that is, he’s OK with residing in limbo for good.

All quotes were obtained firsthand.