Gennadiy Golovkin vacated his last remaining middleweight title today, giving up his WBA strap, leaving ‘regular’ champion Erislandy Lara as the only champ with the sanctioning body.
There’s a lot of speculation that Golovkin will be announcing his retirement in the coming days. He’s turning 41 on April 8th, and his chances of receiving the lucrative paydays he’d been used to getting from his colossal contract with DAZN would seem to be a thing of the past.
If Golovkin will make good money now, he must be inventive by hustling fights against the top names from 147 to 175.
Typically, you wouldn’t think that a smaller fighter at welterweight or junior middleweight would be interested in fighting Golovkin, but with how he looked in his last three fights, it’s reasonable to assume that they view him as a soft target.
If Golovkin wants to stay around and try and get the most money possible, he’ll need to be crafty about it and become a Jake Paul type of fight hustler.
It would have been a brave move on Golovkin’s part if he’d decided to keep his WBA title and defended it against the crafty southpaw Lara (29-3-3, 17 KOs), but it would have been a tough fight, equally as tricky as his recent trilogy match against Canelo Alvarez last September.
After Golovkin’s loss to Canelo last September, he had sounded upbeat, talking about how he still had his two titles at middleweight that he could defend. However, when Golovkin was ordered by the IBF to defend against his mandatory Esquiva Falcao, he chose to vacate that belt. To be sure, that would have been a harrowing fight for Golovkin, and he could have lost.
Now, when Golovkin was ordered by the WBA to defend against the 39-year-old Lara, he chose to vacate that belt as well, leaving some boxing fans to speculate whether GGG’s next move will be to retire.
This move by the 40-year-old Golovkin (42-2-1, 37 KOs) had been predicted well ahead of time by boxing fans and writers because after the WBA ordered him to defend against their regular champion in a belt-consolidation move at 160, it was only a matter of time before the popular GGG gave up the belt.
With Erislandy Lara, the lone WBA middleweight champion, it’ll be interesting to see if Danny Garcia goes after him next. That would be an exciting fight for the fans, and Garcia would be looking to become a three-division world champion.
