With Gennadiy Golovkin edging out a decision win over the weekend, in a fight a good number of people believe he lost, Golovkin’s promoter Tom Loeffler discusses all the rumors of Golovkin entering this fight with an illness. Check out some excerpts below...
Loeffler on if he ever thought there was a point in the fight that Golovkin was in danger of getting stopped:
“I’ve never seen Gennadiy hurt in the ring, I’ve never seen him down in sparring or in a match so I wasn’t afraid of that. You know, whenever it goes to a decision — you know, we’re not used to GGG fights going to a decision. When he had 23 knockouts in a row you didn’t have to worry about who was gonna get the decision.
“We had the Danny Jacobs decision, the two Canelo decisions — which we disagreed with both of those decisions. In Daniel Jacobs he had the knockdown and won the fight. Here, he had the knockdown and won the fight. So I think the right man won...but when it’s a close fight like that there are some concerns when you’re waiting for the judges’ decisions.”
On his overall impression of the fight:
“I thought it was a fair decision. Like I said, he scored the knockdown in the first round which put him ahead. Then he opened the cut in the second round...and then kept hitting that cut over the rest of the rounds. [Golovkin] was landing the harder punches. Derevyanchenko landed power shots but they didn’t equal GGG’s power shot. So you could see that [Derevyanchenko’s] eyes were really closing. I was in the back with both guys when they got checked by the doctors and his eyes were really starting to close quickly...as soon as it was 15-20 minutes of no work [Derevyanchenko’s eyes], they were swelling fast. Both those eyes are going to be completely shut tomorrow.”
On how Gennadiy was feeling after the fight:
“He was happy. He’s a two-time middleweight champion now. He’s going to try to extend that championship run that he had with twenty title defenses in the first run. So now we’ll see how far the second run is gonna go for him. There’s some great fights out there, great matchups. We were talking about potentially a Murata fight in Japan — that’s a huge international event...That’s one fight but there’s a lot of other fights out there that are very interesting...We’ll sit down to see what direction he’s going to now that he is a champion again...”
On how much pressure he and DAZN are going to try to put on Canelo to make a third fight:
“We thought the third fight was gonna happen September 14th but, you know, we did do two fights with Canelo — it wasn’t easy to do those fights, we had to make a lot of concessions on our side. You know, Canelo’s vacated a title before to not fight GGG when he didn’t feel the timing was right and I don’t think he felt the timing was right for whatever reason September 14th, even though I think DAZN, that was really in their plans with that big contract that they gave him. You know, if it’s not in Canelo’s plans you can’t force a guy to get in the ring with GGG. We learned that a long time ago...”
On the reports that Golovkin was sick during fight week:
“He wasn’t that ill. He was ill but he wasn’t ill to the point where the fight was in jeopardy. The worst I’ve ever seen him was the Rosado fight, the second time on HBO, and we knew if we would’ve pulled him out of that fight it would’ve really put a setback on his career, on the fast track on HBO. So with Rosado he had the flu, here I would categorize it more as a head cold which never is comfortable but, you know, certainly that can’t be used as an excuse because he fought a tremendous fight — he knocked Derevyanchenko in the first round, opened up that big cut in the second round, so even though he was a little bit ill during the week, I don’t really think that affected his performance...”