Open Letter To Gennady Golovkin

Photo courtesy of Suzan Classen

by Sarah Deming

NEW YORK, N.Y.–Thank you, Gennady Golovkin, for taking just three rounds to dispatch Daniel Geale and retain your title. Three is the magic number: quick enough to get us home early, long enough to love. One of the G’s must stand for “generous.”

Thank you for wearing shimmery white trunks of a pre-hip hop length that evoked ancient rites, and thank you for confining the advertisements to discrete patches on each leg. Thank you for your perfect middleweight body and golden skin under the Garden lights. Thank you for the mysterious permasmile onto which we project our own meanings. Thank you for training hard for light work.

Thank you for your streak of 17 stoppages and your record of 30-0 (27 KOs), the highest knockout percentage of any active champion. Knockouts are better than decisions. Not because they are more violent but because they are negotiated by the actors in the ring rather than the functionaries outside it. Nobody likes to be judged.

Thank you for cultivating superb balance and timing. Trainer Abel Sanchez attributes your “numbing” power to these fundamentals. This is more praiseworthy than heavy hands.

[[MORE]]At the post-fight press conference, you called your style, “Like Mexican. Is not boxing, is fighting.” 

What you do is boxing. But thanks for saying what you said, because it was adorable. Everything you say is adorable, even the vacuous soundbites written by your publicists. Keep learning English so you can say more things.

That first round with Geale lasted four minutes instead of the standard three, and nobody seems to know why. Did you do it, GGG? Is there a Hogwarts of boxing in Kazakhstan where they taught you to bend time?

You dropped him once in the second but chose to chill. It would have been tacky to end it after two, since Geale had come all the way from Australia. You gave him time to bleed. When you came out for the third round, you wore a spot of his blood on your left pectoral like a boutonnière.

Thank you for finishing him the way you did, first taking the best counter he could throw and then countering that, as though to test the superiority of your own right cross. When Abel Sanchez only gave your performance a nine out of ten because you were looking too much for the knockout, maybe that was what he meant. Maybe there would have been a way to get your shot off without having to suffer, but thank you for suffering.

Something happened in the pre-fight presser that I keep thinking about. Gary Shaw, the promoter of Daniel Geale and Bryant Jennings, said that we should ask Jennings about his childhood on the rough Philly streets.

“I don’t think anyone has gotten that story,” Shaw said.

When Jennings took the mic, however, he read us a Tweet he had just posted. I can’t find it; maybe they made him take it down.

“People should know your capabilities but not your battles, because if you let them know your battles they will view you as incapable.”

Did you see Jennings win the split decision over Mike Perez on your undercard? Probably you were too busy doing secret Kazakh warm-ups. You didn’t miss much; middleweights work so much harder than heavyweights.

What Jennings said about battles made me think about your smile. Nobody has mined the gold of your past – those three deaths in Kazakhstan – the way they dug up the cancer of Geale’s mother and laid it shoddy on the table. Don’t let them do it. Not because it would instill doubt in your capabilities, but because you might need that gold some day.

“This is a shit sport with no loyalty,” Gary Shaw said, but we can forgive his despair. You had just beaten the shit out of his fighter.