Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Gennady Golovkin. Ask any serious boxing fan and he — or she — will tell you, this is the number one fight on everyone’s list . And with Mayweather still, apparently, dragging his feet on choosing an opponent for his Sept. 12 date on the American premium cable network Showtime, fans still hold out hope that the dream matchup remains at least a possibility.
One of those fans appears to be Golovkin himself. The undefeated (33-0) middleweight champ born in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, but now fighting out of Los Angeles, now says that he is willing to drop as much weight as he can in order to face the smaller Mayweather on Sept. 12.
That September date concludes Mayweather’s six-fight contract with Showtime, but the 38-year-old who at 48-0 still reigns as the undisputed pound-for-pound king of the sport continues to insist that he will retire from the sport following that “farewell” fight.
The latest rumors, reported just this week, say that Mayweather has already chosen former welterweight champ Andre Berto as his opponent, and that the fight will air for free to the public on the CBS television network — of which Showtime is a subsidiary — rather than on pay-per-view.
But Golovkin seems to disbelieve those reports.
“Right now this is the biggest fight in the world,” Golovkin told ESPN and HBO boxing commentator Max Kellerman this week. “He’s a great champion. Look at me, I’m not big, I’m not fat. My couple of last fights – I was 158, 159.”
Mayweather generally fights as a welterweight — at or under that division’s 147 pound limit. But Golovkin told Kellerman he would drop down to 154 to fight Mayweather — who has attained a weight near that mark for previous fights.
When Mayweather battled Miguel Cotto in 2012, the weighed in at 151, and he hit the scales at 150.5 for his lopsided win over Saul “Canelo” Alvarez last year.
The real question, and the one that confounds boxing fans who believe that Mayweather has compiled his 48-0 record by generally taking the lowest-risk fights possible, is whether Mayweather would risk his coveted undefeated mark against a massive power puncher such as Golovkin, who has KO’ed 30 of his 33 opponents.
Mayweather’s own father, who is also the fighter’s current trainer, said earlier this month that his son is looking only for “easy fights” to end his career.
On the other hand, Mayweather did say in a recent interview that Golovkin would offer “a good fight for me.”
Sadly for the boxing world, it appears Floyd Mayweather Jr. will ignore the pleas for a fight from Gennady Golovkin — but boxing being what it is, nothing is certain until the fighters are actually in the ring.
[Images: Al Bello/Getty Images]