By Bart Barry
I didn’t get through the first five minutes of “Face Off: Golovkin / Lemieux.” It’s not because the format is awful, though it is, and it’s not because all five characters are dull, though they are, but because the language barrier, this time, made the willfulness of HBO’s promotional lugging too much to watch comfortably. Everyone was there to satisfy a contractual obligation to market Gennady Golovkin, and they performed it with all the inspiration of a salaried sales staff chorus-chanting “this product sells itself” for 12 minutes.
It was a now-standard part of prefight festivities, and the fight getting previewed by commentator Max Kellerman was Saturday’s title match between “two middleweight destroyers” – Kazakhstan’s Gennady “GGG” Golovkin and David “The Dangerous, Rising, Action Star out of Canada” Lemieux.
A professional writer should be persuasive, and since most contemporary sportsfans are persuaded by yelling, either indignant vibration or vindicated combustion, it behooves someone writing a column like this to be convicted, and if not to be convicted, to fake conviction (with adverbs). This column will fail, then, by that standard; you, dear reader, are paying for certainty, but this column, for once, will give you exactly what you paid for.
I remain unconvinced by the Golovkin opus, and it is an opus, a model harmony of moving and generally selfinterested pieces – fighter, trainer, promoter, publicist, network – conjuring from superficially hopeless materials a pay-per-view concert in Madison Square Garden. A man born to America’s sworn enemy, learning nearly no English during his extended residence in the United States, beginning his title reign five years too old to achieve a Top 50 consideration, and having fought not one all-time-good fighter during his middleweight reign, will be fighting on pay-HBO an opponent dismissed by aficionados four years ago, after getting washed-and-worn by Marco Antonio Rubio (yes, the same) and decisioned by someone named Joachim Alcine (the only win for Alcine during an eight-match downward swirl).
I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel good to see someone who looks like me finally winning a fight, though!
That is likely the reason the rules of ascent are suspended for Golovkin by normally sober people. From the earliest moments of Golovkin’s rise, this has felt especially manufactured to me. My first Golovkin experience happened three Junes ago in Las Vegas at a media breakfast the morning before Timothy Bradley decisioned Manny Pacquiao. A goodish number of us gathered at Wolfgang Puck’s, and the excellent publicist Bernie Bahrmasel was our host – and I mention Bernie by name because only Golovkin himself has done more for Golovkin’s career.
I knew nothing about Golovkin but was ringside when Golovkin’s HBO-debut opponent, “Disappeared” Dmitry Pirog, put in some miraculous 2010 work on a guy named Danny Jacobs (yes, the same), and I respected the opinions of the other writers gathered at the breakfast tables, and I was hungry. Golovkin did not speak nine English words that morning – his trainer, Abel Sanchez, fed him some answers and then began to answer questions himself, and then the delightful Rick Reeno suddenly burst in as a Russian interpreter – and yet, veteran writers, excellent craftsmen whose words you’ve read and admired, performed genuine acts of inquiry on Golovkin. I left early and on my way out said to a man whose perspective I admire, “That may be the dumbest thing I’ve yet seen.”
“What? No,” went his reply, “I think Golovkin’s for real.”
It was a reply heard from a lot of guys back in the media room, and I began to think: Pre-work was done here.
It’s late 2015, now, and I wish more than anything about Golovkin’s ascent that he’d had the chance to fight Pirog. I have no idea how the match might have gone had Pirog not withdrawn with a back injury that apparently never healed, but it would have introduced me to Golovkin the way a fighter should be introduced. Instead, Golovkin went right through a shortnotice nobody from Poland, Grzegorz Proska, yanking the chain of his own 1-3 swirl unto retirement, and the fuse was lighted on a giant stick of hyperbole. Months later, Golovkin, at age 29, became a young Mike Tyson by stopping a 21-5 junior middleweight, on the first flush of his own 0-5 swirl, and the Golovkin myth became a mania. Rumors of gym-war feats began to materialize, and by the time Juan Manuel Marquez spearchiseled Manny Pacquiao that December, the name Golovkin was being intoned in Las Vegas fight conversations like Batman at Comic Con.
And of course, nobody had the balls to fight Golovkin, boxing’s most feared fighter, except men of historic courage like Osumanu Adama and Daniel Geale and Willie Monroe Jr.
Golovkin, a pleasant guy and excellent technician, has done nothing in a prizefight that aesthetically justifies a pay-per-view appearance against anyone less than Andre Ward, and David Lemieux is way less than Ward, but pay-per-view is where he’ll be Saturday because, we’ll be told, it’s what the market will bear, because we seem not to have learned a thing by watching Al Haymon use market dynamics to decimate our beloved sport in 2015. The number is fixed, 300,000 buys establishes Golovkin as a superstar, and 300,000 buys will be got if Time Warner Cable itself has to make the purchases.
The most any aficionado can hope from Golovkin-Lemieux is a moment or two examining enough to teach us something we don’t know already about Golovkin – perhaps his recent defensive lapses were not choreographed as they say; maybe a man who needed a half hour to stop Martin Murray actually does not hit harder than Sonny Liston – and that is all. David Lemieux is a b-level talent even in this risible era, and Golovkin’s chloroforming him will argue greatness no more loudly than Floyd Mayweather’s decisioning Robert Guerrero did.
TBE, GGG – I guess it’s all marketing to me.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
