Gennady Golovkin stopped David Lemieux in eight rounds on Saturday at Madison Square Garden in New York.
The fight was booming at the gate. More than 6,000 tickets were sold in a two-day presale, the most ever for a boxing event at The Garden.
Where it was not booming, surprisingly, was the pay-per-view market.
The fight marked Golovkin’s first appearance on pay-per-view and according to sources reporting to Fight Hype.com, the numbers are not looking very auspicious.
Multiple sources reported that Golovkin-Lemieux sold approximately 150,000 pay-per-view buys, a second source said the number would be less, and a third added that numbers were still being tallied.
With the victory, the Kazakh has knocked out or stopped his past 21 opponents, and is in line to face the winner of Cotto-Canelo in 2016.
A fathomable explanation for the low number could be any of these two things: 1. Golovkin is not a boxing superstar yet. 2. Lemieux was not a formidable opponent.
Both are correct.
Golovkin has not connected with the average American fan – at least not yet. No one can deny his boxing abilities; he proved that on Saturday with a brilliant performance, but that is not the issue.
He does not have a solid command of the English language yet. When he is giving an interview and not articulating in a way that is reassuring, that is when promoter Tom Loeffler or trainer Abel Sanchez jump in to assist.
Golovkin needs to be more captivating, trash talk a little, stir the pot, but it has to look real. An angry, determined Golovkin is one thing in the ring, but we need to see some of that ferocity outside as well.
Recently, the middleweight king starred in an Apple Watch commercial, but unless you follow boxing wholeheartedly, nobody knew who that was. It was a guy throwing punches to a Rocky-like theme song; there was no mention of Golovkin, and he did not speak.
All of this will not matter if he fights a top-level fighter, and he is in the position of doing so.
Everyone thought, for the most part, that Saturday was going to be a 21st century Hagler-Hearns. It just turned out to be a fight where one fighter was two-three echelons above the other.
He did not destroy Lemieux like we previously thought, but it was a smart move in the end. Lemieux is a powerful puncher, but lacks speed, and has trouble following up on his punches against a moving target.
As a result, Golovkin spent most of the night pounding Lemieux with a stiff left jab and exemplified that he can be a solid defender when he wants to.
Golovkin is a great fighter, but still has work to do to be considered a superstar in boxing.
– Ryan O’Hara @OHaraSports
*Update* According to Fight Hype, Golovkin-Lemieux is struggling to reach 125,000 PPV buys.
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