Eyes are on the Gennady Golovkin ring return, which will unfold in California at StubHub and HBO Saturday night. But not every eyeball. Some boxing fans are still a bit fixated on the fight that didn’t happen, the scrubbed scrap between GGG and Canelo, and not totally on Golovkin versus Vanes Martirosyan.
Anyone reading this knows probably a good deal of the particulars on the hows and whys of that saga.
But what will come next, if, as so many expect, GGG downs Vanes Saturday night? One would think they’d get that sequel in place for when Canelo’s suspension is up. But Golovkin told Yahoo! Sports on Thursday that there is only a “10 percent” chance their rematch will take place in September.
Golovkin and trainer Abel Sanchez sense, word is, that the Mexican might fight someone other than the Kazakh in what would be his first fight in almost a full year, since he fought GGG in Vegas, on September 16, 2017.
GGG shared a bit more abut why he pegged the probability of the Sept. 15, 2018 sequel occuring with Iole.
“I would say it’s about a 10 percent probability at this point that it happens,” Golovkin told Yahoo Sports. “I would say only about 10 percent that it happens. … I think 10 percent is high; it’s bigger than it should be. I made 99 percent of the concessions for the fight with Canelo on May 5. 99 percent of them were by me, and now he’s the one not here.”
I posited that theory to Eric Gomez, the executive at Golden Boy, Canelo’s promoter, and asked him if he agreed, that there was only a 10 percent chance of the re-do happening in four months.
“No, we want GGG,” Gomez told me. “If it doesn’t get made, it’s not because of us, it’s because of them, and we’ll move on.”
You can read into GGG’s talk to Iole, about how he believes he made excessive concessions to make the first fight. Seems like he’s dug in his heels, and feels leverage is now more on his side, and terms to come should reflect that.
Gomez, understandably, being that him and Loeffler haven’t met to delve into terms for the soon-perhaps-to-be-reborn-sequel, didn’t share any thoughts on what ask from Team GGG might be too high a hurdle.
“Probably GGG’s afraid, he’s scared, he knows Canelo is younger, faster, stronger,” is the theory he shared with me.
My three cents: This, friends, is likely negotiative posturing. I think the sequel gets hammered out for the early fall.