Gennady Golovkin’s Special Power Should Be Appreciated, Not Overly Analyzed

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NEW YORK -- Visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art can be separated into two categories. One group, the larger one, consists of people who simply know what they like and what they don’t; their tastes are defined solely by simple sensory perception. The other, comprised of university-trained art scholars, can break down the great masters’ artistic expression into dry treatises of technical minutiae.

And so it was on Saturday in Madison Square Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art for those who create lasting impressions on a different sort of canvas. It can be presumed that the vast majority of the sellout crowd of 20,538 was there because it appreciated the concussive power of a once-in-a-generation wrecking machine named Gennady Golovkin. Others, presumably with better-trained eyes, were on hand to do additional research on the kind of exquisitely gifted big hitter with which boxing hasn’t been so enthralled since a young Mike Tyson came out of the neighboring borough of Brooklyn, N.Y., all snarling defiance and a searing desire to inflict as much pain as humanly possible on the unfortunate soul who had the misfortune to be in the opposite corner.

In a nuanced performance that in equal parts satisfied Group A and Group B, Golovkin (34-0, 31 KOs), the WBA middleweight champion, registered his 21st consecutive victory inside the distance, stopping IBF 160-pound titlist David Lemieux (34-3, 31 KOs) in the eighth round with a precise, unhurried performance that might be described as part Claude Monet and part Jackson Pollock. That power -- of a sort that can make an opponent’s blood run cold -- was still evident; when referee Steve Willis stepped in and wrapped his arms around the battered Lemieux, it was because his compassion had overridden any inclination to allow a gallant but thoroughly beaten man further chances to launch a magical lightning bolt that somehow might save him from inevitable defeat.

“I had to do something,” Willis said, explaining his rationale for moving to save the battered Lemieux, who had been dropped only once, in the fifth round, from himself. “David is a very competitive fighter, and as long as he was able to throw punches he was going to keep trying, but his chances of winning were decreasing as the fight went on. Against a guy like [Golovkin], he was going to get really hurt. I’m here to protect the fighter’s health; that’s my top priority. I couldn’t let him continue to take punishment. I gave him every chance I could, and I still hesitated too much. It was over.”

Perhaps there were those, in the live audience or those fight aficionados who watched Golovkin’s HBO pay-per-view debut from the comfort of their living rooms or dens, who felt a twinge of disappointment that the Kazakhstan-born, Los Angeles-based slugger hadn’t gone after Lemieux like a ravenous lion after a slab of raw meat. That might be because Golovkin respected Lemieux’s considerable power, which didn’t quite match his own, or it might be because the pugilistic Pollock wanted to demonstrate to the public that deep in his soul there were the more muted, dappled colors of a Monet on the easel of his padded gloves. Timeless art, after all, can be exhibited in several ways and on several levels.

“I’m a boxer, too,” explained the 33-year-old Golovkin, who rightly sees himself as so much more than a one-dimensional blaster. “I respect David. He’s a champion, but it was a different class. Today was boxing school for David.”

Punch statistics furnished by CompuBox -- which tabulate quantity but cannot accurately substantiate quality -- give a rough outline of the textured evolution of Golovkin as ring artist: He landed 280 of 549 punches, an extraordinarily high connect rate of 51 percent, and an even higher percentage of his power shots, 110 of 190, or 58 percent. However, it was his jab -- 170 of 359, or 47 percent -- that was a revelation. There are jabs that score points but merely sting, and there are those -- the battering rams wielded by, say, Sonny Liston and George Foreman -- that not only can produce knockdowns but even knockouts. Golovkin’s jab revealed itself to be stiff, accurate and a damaging weapon in its own right.

“[Golovkin’s] jab was telling all night,” said two-time heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis, who was in attendance and whose jab also became a more integral part of his arsenal after he turned his career over to the late, great trainer Emanuel Steward.

All of this makes fight fans of varying stripes -- those who can recognize exceptional power when they see it but don’t particularly care to ruminate on its source, as well as the intellectual probers who need to break down that power into its various components -- gravitate toward “GGG” like metal to magnet.

Is it genetics? A few days prior to his unification date with Lemieux, Golovkin thanked his parents, father Gennady Sr. and mother Elizabeth, for passing along the genes that resulted in his having such a sturdy, punch-resistant chin. If that is the case, then perhaps dad and mom contributed to Golovkin’s ability to chop down rivals as easily as an especially powerful lumberjack wielding his ax on a skinny tree.

Is it analytics? In the expanding field of sports science, boxing’s geek squad might earnestly explain the importance of weight transfer, torque, punch velocity, arm angles and turning the wrist over at exactly the right moment to maximize impact. To them, Golovkin’s signature takeout shots merely present opportunities to devise pie charts, computer graphics and mathematically precise formulas to validate their theories as to what makes a puncher a puncher.

Is it physics? The analytics crew draws heavily on Sir Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion, the last of which explains the transformation of potential energy into kinetic energy. For the uninformed, the formula for such a transformation is (1/2)mv^2. Just try remembering that the next time Golovkin slobberknocks a future victim into a twitching heap of tortured humanity.

Given his rising profile as a can’t-miss attraction, by far the most attractive fight that can be made in 2016 would be a unification matchup with the winner of the Nov. 21 bout between WBC and lineal middleweight champion Miguel Cotto (40-4, 33 KOs) and former WBA/WBC super welterweight titlist Canelo Alvarez (45-1-1, 32 KOs) at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas. It would represent a clash of power against power, of irresistible force against immovable object. It would be, most likely, everything that Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Manny Pacquaio should have been but wasn’t.

There are those -- like former middleweight champions Sergio Martinez and Nino Benvenuti, who weighed in on Golovkin and Cotto at the most recent International Boxing Hall of Fame induction weekend in June -- who believe that Cotto, 34, as legendary a figure as the future hall of famer has been, will never share the same working space as Golovkin. If that assessment is indeed correct, then the best hope for the next real super fight would be for the 25-year-old Alvarez, who has demonstrated time and again his willingness to take on the toughest challenges, to emerge as Golovkin’s tallest roadblock to immortality.

“We always thought Canelo would be the more likely one to fight Gennady, but you got to give Miguel a lot of respect,” said Tom Loeffler, of K2 Promotions, Golovkin’s promotional company. “Gennady will be at the [Cotto-Alvarez] fight, and he’ll be looking to fight the winner. Canelo has proven he’ll get in the ring pretty much with everybody at 154 [pounds]. Cotto has been, uh, very selective in his negotiations for being the middleweight champion. That’s no disrespect to Cotto; it just seems to be the case. I think Cotto has had a great career, a hall-of-fame career, but he’s at the end of it.”

At 33, “GGG” probably understands that his most daunting future opponent might be the relentless march of time, unless he finds a way to sip from the same Fountain of Youth that has nourished the seemingly ageless Bernard Hopkins, the Golden Boy executive whose company promotes Lemieux and Canelo. Golovkin’s window for performing incredible feats in the professional arena opened relatively late and might not remain open as long as he and his backers would prefer, so the occasion to strike, for posterity and the biggest paydays, is now, when his star is still in ascent and his punching power at its most mesmerizing.

Art that pleases the eye and touches the soul comes along all too rarely, be it in museums or inside the ropes of a boxing ring. Golovkin seems poised to enter that rarified realm, and the only mistake that his fans can make at this critical juncture is to overthink what they are seeing and feeling when he does his thing. Enjoy it while you can, because nothing lasts forever.

Bernard Fernandez, a five-term president of the Boxing Writers Association of America, received the Nat Fleischer Award from the BWAA in April 1999 for lifetime achievement and was inducted into the Pennsylvania Boxing Hall of Fame in 2005, as well as the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame in 2013. The New Orleans-born sports writer has worked in the industry since 1969 and pens a weekly column on the Sweet Science for Sherdog.com.