Golovkin vs Rolls undercard starting to come together

When Gennadiy Golovkin returns to action at Madison Square Garden against Steve Rolls on June 8, he’ll be making his DAZN debut and looking to set up a potential third fight with Canelo Alvarez.

Golovkin-Rolls has basically nobody excited, other than maybe Steve Rolls on some level, and the undercard probably isn’t going to be a whole lot better, given that the show is a month out and just started to piece together its other fights. The show is a GGG/DiBella co-promotion.

Junior middleweight prospect Charles Conwell (9-0, 7 KO) will face Skender Halili (16-2, 13 KO) in a 10-round fight.

Conwell, 21, fought at the 2016 Olympics for Team USA, losing to India’s Vikas Krishan in the opening round. Conwell was all shocked when they announced Krishan as the winner in that fight, but Krishan deserved the win, and it’s no knock on Conwell or his pro prospects. Conwell was barely 19 years old in Rio, and Krishan was an amateur veteran.

So far as a pro, Conwell, now 21, has mostly been off the radar, but he did fight on ShoBox in Nov. 2017, dropping Roque Zapata three times and winning a six-round shutout.

Halili, 29, is big and tall for 154, listed at 6’0” with a 74½” reach, whereas Conwell is listed at 5’9” with a 67” reach.

Worth noting, I suppose, that Halili beat Anthony Young back in early 2016, in fact he stopped him in the fifth round. Anthony Young just wiped out Sadam Ali on the Canelo-Jacobs card this past weekend, but we’ll find out going forward if that’s because Anthony Young is a hidden gem or Ali was just shot and ripe to be wiped out. But given the rest of Halili’s record, it’s about the only thing to say.

It also looks like welterweight Brian Ceballo (8-0, 4 KO) will face Jonathan Steele (9-3-1, 6 KO) in another 10-round fight. 25-year-old Ceballo recently fought on Lou DiBella’s Broadway Boxing debut on UFC Fight Pass, winning a TKO-3 over Ricardo Garcia.

Steele, 28, lost his last fight to Bobirzhan Mominov on March 23. He’s also been beaten by Sanjarbek Rakhmanov and Enriko Gogokhia and is 2-3-1 in his last six fights after a 7-0 career start.

BoxRec are also listing 23-year-old 168/175 prospect Ali Akhmedov (14-0, 10 KO) and 19-year-old lightweight prospect Mario Ramos (8-0, 7 KO) for 10- and eight-round fights, respectively. They both last fought on March 24 in Hollywood.

This basically — and I don’t mean this as an insult to the card, actually — looks like a Broadway Boxing-level show with a GGG fight on top pushing it into Madison Square Garden. Which is fine, I suppose, and I’m more excited about the Broadway Boxing-level undercard than I am the main event.