Gennady Golovkin was a middleweight Mike Tyson with killer knockout record but I saw a ‘choirboy’ first time I met him

The respected Abel Sanchez didn’t see the most feared fighter of his generation when Gennady Golovkin walked into his gym for the first time.

“That night I started researching who I was talking to because he didn’t look like a fighter; he looked more like a choir boy,” Sanchez once said when recalling his first impression in the high altitude of Big Bear, California.

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“I saw that he had 350 amateur fights, only lost five and beat a lot of the great fighters in the amateurs. 

“He’d had 18 professional fights and was ranked in the top two or three in most of the organisations. I was like, ‘Wow!’

“Two months later on a Sunday I get a call from one of the advisers and he asks me if I could pick up Gennady from the airport at 2pm because he was ready to train and had a fight scheduled for three months later [against Milton Nunez, in August 2010, in Panama City].

“I pick Gennady up at the airport, and as he’s walking out from arrivals, I say to him, ‘What about your bags?’ and he said in broken English, ‘No, coach.

“I come to train, not to vacation’. He had this little bag about two foot long, and that’s all he had with him.

“He came to do a job and we started working. After a few weeks, I caught him on the mitts and I thought to myself, ‘Wow. We have something here’.

“‘If you give me three years, you’re going to be the most avoided, undefeated middleweight world champion. I see what I need to do with you.’

“I also showed him the fight of Julio Cesar Chavez and Edwin Rosario, and I said, ‘This is what I want to make you. The difference is, you can punch.

“We’re going to make you fight like Julio Cesar Chavez and you’re going to be knocking people out with body shots’.

“He looked at me like I was nuts and I said again, ‘I promise you, three years and that’s where you will be’.”

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Three years after stopping Milton Nunez in 58 seconds, the intimidating Golovkin, then 31, and having left Matthew Macklin writhing on the canvas, was being compared not to the great Julio Cesar Chavez, but to Mike Tyson, a heavyweight great.

After arriving in Big Bear as someone Sanchez was unfamiliar with, he had beaten Macklin in his third fight in the US.

If it was convenient for those around him that for so long there was so much uncertainty about his background, it was equally convenient for them when, at a time when they were so determined to build his profile, that uncertainty contributed to the creation of numerous, mostly dark, myths.

“There was my twin brother, Maxim,” Golovkin wrote in 2017. “And there were my older brothers, Sergey and Vadim. They were much older.

“Sergey and Vadim were like my heroes. You know, like any older brother is.

“We would watch Mike Tyson fights, Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard. Amateur boxers from Russia. Even if I didn’t like fighting, I loved watching it. And we’d always talk about the fights.

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“I remember things became difficult. I was about eight or nine when the break up of the Soviet Union started. So things changed. Factories closed.

“Food was harder to get. We didn’t have as many beef dinners. Fruits and fish cost more. For the first two years, things were hard.

“Then Sergey and Vadim, they both joined the [Russian] army. They didn’t come back. These are the memories I don’t want to have.”

Golovkin, his twin brother Maxim and his parents were never told about the circumstances in which Sergey and Vadim died. Neither was honoured with an official funeral; all the Golovkins knew was that they had died – Vadim was killed first, in 1990 – four years apart.

The difficulty of Golovkin’s start to life – his home city of Karaganda was compared by Sanchez to “the worst part of [America’s] Detroit” – is inevitably credited with so much of the success that was to follow upon his arrival in California. 

It was Sergey and Vadim who had introduced he and Maxim to boxing. Regular street fights followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

“With Vadim and Sergey gone, I knew I had to start bringing in money to help support the family,” he also once said. “I had to find a contract and start fighting again. Max stayed at home to help look after Mom and Dad.”

At a time when Floyd Mayweather’s fights were being broadcast on Showtime, Golovkin’s impressive ascent meant that his fights were celebrated while paired with those of Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez by Showtime’s rivals, the even more influential HBO. 

By the time of his destructive victory over Kell Brook in London in 2016 it was apparent that Golden Boy Promotions, then overseeing Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez’s career, had been guiding Alvarez away from Golovkin. 

With Alvarez approaching his peak they then fought to a controversial split draw a year later. A similarly controversial split-decision in Alvarez’s favour followed in 2018 after the Mexican had served a six-month suspension for failing two drugs tests.

It took until 2022 before they agreed to an overdue third fight, when Golovkin was in decline and beyond his natural weight division at super middleweight.

The convincing defeat he recorded, via scores of 116-112, 115-113 and 115-113, was only the second of his career and the first that wasn’t disputed. It regardless did little to affect his reputation as one of the finest middleweights of all time.