Martirosyan ready for his shot against Golovkin

Vanes Martirosyan watched Ronda Rousey, a longtime stablemate at their local gym, rise to fame as the UFC’s first women’s champion, and now the veteran boxer believes it’s his turn with a May 5 fight against Gennady Golovkin at StubHub Center.

Martirosyan predicted Rousey’s rise early in her mixed martial arts career, he recalled on Monday during a gathering with the media, when she won a fight after she got a nasty bite on the leg by a pit bull.

“She got 50 stitches in her leg and then she won the next day by armbar…that’s when we knew,” he said of Rousey, who called him during his interviews. “She’s like a sister to me,” he said.

Edmond Tarverdyan, the trainer who has worked the corner for both fighters, has come to understand his boxer well enough to foresee something special, too.

“I know Vanes like my five fingers, and if Vanes is happy and excited, he’s the most dangerous man,” Tarverdyan said. “He has that now. His personality is perfect for this. To have this great, big fight, to have all this attention on him ... he loves that pressure.”

Martirosyan (36-3-1, 21 knockouts) turns 32 on May 1. He’s never been a world champion, and he’s in his stiffest test against Golovkin (37-0-1, 33 KOs), the threebelt middleweight champion who stands as the longestreigning active champion and seeks to tie Bernard Hopkins’ record with a 20th consecutive middleweight title fight without a loss.

Golovkin is fighting fellow 2004 Olympian Martirosyan because Mexico’s former two-division world champion Canelo Alvarez submitted two positive tests for the banned performanceenhancing drug Clenbuterol.