Kell Brook's Corner Made the Right Call with Early Stoppage vs. Gennady Golovkin
It’s always better to stop a fight too early rather than too late.
Dominic Ingle was a man with an awesome responsibility last Saturday night in London.
He had to know things had the potential to go bad in a hurry, and if they did, his primary responsibility—his only responsibility, really—would be to make a tough call and protect his fighter.
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That all sounds good. It’s not exactly insider knowledge either.
But you see cornermen miss that type of call all the time in this sport. How many fights can you think of that went on a round too long? Two rounds? More? It’s much harder in the moment than it seems on television.
Ingle certainly didn’t endear himself to the 19,000-plus fans who packed the O2 Arena in London and were high on the euphoria of what they felt was a potentially budding upset as their man, Kell Brook, was pitched in a give-and-take battle with boxing’s resident boogeyman—Gennady Golovkin.
The Big Drama Show had become a high drama show.
Golovkin was a massive favorite. You can understand why.
He hadn’t heard the final bell in eight years and forced the better fighters in his division to do verbal gymnastics in their attempts to put a positive spin on "I’m just too afraid to fight him."
GGG wobbled Brook in the opening frame with a pair of left hooks that seemed to confirm everyone’s worst fears about a contest that featured the sport's best middleweight and possibly its best welterweight.
Too big, too strong, too powerful, seemed to be playing out in front of our eyes, and we weren’t even a full three minutes in yet.
Then a funny thing happened.
Golovkin found himself in a fight for the first time since he became a staple of HBO’s boxing programming a few years back. He began to look just a tad sloppier than we’re used to seeing and ate more than his share of Brook uppercuts.
Let’s be clear. We were a long way from where we could say an upset was brewing, but boxing is an expectations game, and few—if any—expected Brook to be ready, willing and able to hang in the pocket and trade shots with a historic knockout puncher like GGG.
He won the second round beyond a shadow of a doubt.
At the end of four frames, you’d have been well justified having the fight scored two rounds apiece or even three rounds to one in either direction. Two of the official judges had the former score, while the third had Brook up by two points.
The point is, Brook was very much in the fight, and that by itself qualifies as an upset.
All you had to do was log in to Twitter to see the various reactions ranging anywhere from those claiming GGG was a fraud to those debating whether Brook’s pending upset was the greatest in middleweight history or of all time in the sport.
But Golovkin has a different kind of power. He’s more than capable of flattening you with a single punch or putting money in the bank with a large number of accumulating shots that you don’t see paying immediate dividends but add up in a hurry.
Brook clearly hit the wall at the start of the fifth. He’d favored his right eye for several rounds and looked bad in the corner before the bell rang. That eye socket turned out to be broken in a post-fight medical exam and required surgery on Monday.
His movements became more labored as the bravado demonstrated in the previous four rounds drained out of him faster than a pint at any London pub. That’s not a criticism. It’s a function of taking the hardest punches in the sport during the bravest 16-plus minutes of his career.
The frequency and ferocity of those punches drastically increased in the fifth round.
You can't blame Brook; it's a fighter's job to be brave.
The corner is the last line of defense. Its job is to be practical and tell its man—no matter how hard it might be—that enough is enough and the right call is to go home and fight another day.
Brook was at that point. His body language screamed it.
He’d given all he had to give and put bigger, better-known fighters to shame by having the stones to step in when they stepped out. There was nothing else to gain and every opportunity to get hurt, perhaps permanently.
So Ingle threw in the towel.
It wasn’t popular.
A lot of people in his position wouldn't have done it.
But he did his job.
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