BROOK BEWARE
Golovkin has been taking on grown men since he was eight...and beating them!
THE baby- faced assassin called Gennady Golovkin smiles when he talks to all and sundry, smiles when he walks down the street, smiles most broadly of all when he goes about his knockout business in the prize ring.
The Kazakh with a punch like a mule-kick is at his happiest when flattening challengers for his world middleweight titles. A routine which he expects to continue when Kell Brook, Sheffield’s world welterweight champion, steps up in London’s O2 Arena tomorrow.
Golovkin is a living, breathing conundrum, unfailingly courteous in conversation, unrelentingly deadly inside the ropes.
At approaching 35 he looks younger than 25. The charm is disarming, as all his 35 professional opponents have discovered, 32 of them while being stopped brutally and prematurely.
The damage is inflicted with heavy hands and a light heart. The only time a shadow flickers across those elfin features is when he is asked to recollect his upbringing.
This is not only because life was tough in the Kazakhstani city of Karagandy in those oppressive years when the Soviet Union was breaking apart. He had a Russian coal-miner father and a loving Korean mother to steer him through those hard times.
It is what happened to his two elder brothers which seems to be at the root of a reluctance to talk about his boyhood. Sergey and Vadim took Gennady to the boxing gym as an eight-year-old. When they saw the damage of which his fists were capable they picked street fights for him against grown men, which he invariably won, as a hardening process for the boxing life to come.
That sibling bond was broken when Golovkin’s brothers failed to return home shortly after joining the Soviet Army. There was no burial with honours or explanation of how they died. Not for casualties of the secret wars being waged in Russia at the time.
Golovkin says only that ‘life was hard’. But it does seem that the steel behind the smile was forged in that dark, sinister mystery.
Triple G, as Gennady Gennadyevich Golovkin has become known, is fighting for more than the global recognition of his talents which he hopes this weekend’s high-profile exposure in Britain will accelerate.
He is fighting for the memory of the brothers he lost and for his twin, Max, who he says was a more accomplished boxer but who let him go first to amateur glory and is now part of his team.
It all makes for explosive alchemy which Brook is bracing himself to resist. The problem for our English challenger is that even if piling on the pounds helps him carry his own punching power up to middleweight, it is unlikely to deflect or deter Golovkin.
The most demoralising stoppage on Golovkin’s video highlights reel is the one where he knocks an opponent out at the very moment in which he himself is caught by a huge right to the jaw but not does not flinch.
He says: ‘I am lucky with the genes which went into my chin. Something does happen when I am hit with a big punch but I do not feel the power. It is a game for me. I don’t try to get hit but when I do it becomes an opportunity for me.’ And he smiles.
As for his own heavy hands, he praises Brook for agreeing to fight him when so many others duck those punches, Mexican arch-rival Canelo Alvarez among them and, he suspects, Chris Eubank Jnr.
Whether or not Brook can make a fist of it at the higher weight, this gives Golovkin the chance to fight in the UK, which he has long craved.
He says: ‘British boxing has a great history and knowledgeable fans. I know they will be pulling for Kell but that doesn’t worry me. I love the atmosphere of the big fight — and the chance it will give me to impress the world.’
He advises Brook he is taking him ‘very seriously’ despite the differential in their natural boxing weights. But when it comes to Triple G in the ring, Special K needs no warning not to be fooled by the smile. TV: LIVE on Sky Box Office from 6pm. Main event around 10pm.