Kell Brook's Risk Will Be Rewarded Regardless of Outcome vs. Gennady Golovkin

You can bet that Kell Brook has heard it all by now.

The 30-year-old welterweight titlist from Sheffield, England, has been called everything from stark-raving mad to completely delusional ever since he signed on for a likely ill-fated challenge of Gennady Golovkin for the unified middleweight title on Sept. 10 in London.

No matter, though.

Brook has already proven his point.

He’s a throwback who doesn’t particularly care about weight classes or conventional wisdom. He's quick to talk himself up to anyone who will listen, but he has the fortitude to step up and step in with the universally recognized baddest dog in the yard when so many others passed on the chance.

That includes men bigger than him and presumably stronger, men who wear belts that declare them world champions, and men who claim to be the “face of boxing.”

Brook put them all to shame. That doesn’t change regardless of your opinion on his chances of leaving the O2 Arena with all his faculties intact, much less a king’s ransom in middleweight gold and one of the biggest upsets in recent boxing history.

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Maybe we’re waxing poetic just a bit here, impressed by a fighter who ran his mouth and then ran headlong into a fight that left the rest of the 160-pound division in boxing’s equivalent of the witness protection program.

Lots of fighters spend lots of time telling you how tough they are. It’s almost a reflex. They’ll fight anyone until they can actually fight them, and then you start to hear about money or timing or some other excuse that falls flat.

The Brit is a fearless guy, and his stock goes up no matter what happens in this fight. Even if he's sent into orbit, fans will recognize him as the guy who stared down the big dog when so many others ran for their holes.

He didn’t hesitate when offered the opportunity.

Per Dan Rafael of ESPN, Brook agreed to the fight just a few hours after Chris Eubank Jr. got cold feet and scuttled a proposed bout that seemed all but finalized. He accepted the same terms offered to Eubank, despite holding a title and being a bigger name, and the fight was announced.

It was that quick.

Brook was that confident, and yes, perhaps that crazy.

You need to be some combination of supremely confident and a bit rattled in the head to want to step in the ring and face Golovkin. He’s not a mythical god from Mount Olympus (so far as we know, he’s a mortal), but he’s shown virtually zero flaws in his armor.

Golovkin is unassuming outside of the ring. He’s jovial. He comes across as a big kid just living the dream, all smiles and still somewhat taken aback by all the attention and accolades he receives.

Go ahead and try to mesh that with the cold, calculating striker you see in the ring on fight night.

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But when you’ve lived through the things that Brook has faced recently, you can understand why a boxing match, even against a fighter as dreaded as the man he’ll stare down in London, doesn’t rate near the top of the fear ladder.

Brook was the victim of a gruesome machete attack while on holiday shortly after defeating Shawn Porter in his second stateside appearance to capture the IBF welterweight title in 2014.

It was an unprovoked attack that left him with a massive 12-inch wound around his left thigh.

The wound did more than threaten his boxing career. It threatened his life and required 32 staples and several pins to keep closed. He was lucky to survive—which was obviously the most important thing—but his boxing momentum had wholly stalled.

In that context, you can see why he’s eager to prove himself and resistant to the type of fear that has kept many of Golovkin’s other callers from taking the plunge. Once you see your life flash before your eyes, there’s really nothing else that can scare you.

“I will find a way to win. These fighters who’ve been in with him have already lost before they went in,” Brook said, per Edward Chaykovsky of Boxing Scene. “I’ve faced death in the face, and this is fun to me.”

That says a lot about who Brook is as a fighter and as a person.

Even if you don’t think he can win, or you think he's just plain crazy, you’ve got to respect a man who talks the talk and then walks the walk. Especially since that doesn't happen much these days.