We are not getting the fight that was promised. Tomorrow night was supposed to be the biggest for the sport in 2018, but GGG lost his Mexican dance partner in Canelo Alvarez following his two controversial failed drug tests. Vanes Martirosyan steps in to save the date, but there really isn’t much to get excited about here anymore.
I won’t waste much of your time here. This isn’t a good fight. I could come up with a number of metrics, career recaps, or other narratives to illustrate this, but instead I am going to go with an anecdotal note. Before writing this preview, I wrote one for the Ryan Garcia versus Jayson Velez headlined show on Golden Boy on ESPN tonight. That is a middling and normally overlooked fight series, yet I can tell you I am much more enthusiastic about its main event than I am for this HBO World Championship Boxing show headlined by Gennady Golovkin (37-0-1, 33 KOs).
Some of that is a natural disappointment, of course. We aren’t getting the rematch we have all been salivating over. There is also a sense of dread hanging over everything that we never will get it either. But mostly the problem is just Vanes Martirosyan (36-3-1, 21 KOs). Look, I am not going to shit as much on Vanes as everyone else is. He can fight. He has wins over the likes of Willie Nelson and Ishe Smith. He was also competitive in his losses to Erislandy Lara, Jermell Charlo, and Demetrius Andrade. Again, Vanes Martirosyan is a pretty good fighter. He can be competitive at world level.
The problem is more than that. For one, he has never really been exciting. But beyond that, he also clearly lost to those three. He is a junior middleweight, not a middleweight. Vanes hasn’t fought in two years and also took this fight on short notice. He’s doing all of this to fight this generations great middleweight in Gennady Golovkin. Say what you will about the division’s strength over GGG’s reign and his overall resume, but the Kazakhstan destroyer has been soundly dismissing challengers on Martirosyan’s levels for years even without them facing the size, inactivity, and short notice challengers that Vanes is here. There is just no way for him to realistically win this fight.
That is all there really is to it. What GGG is getting tonight is paid for his camp and some high level sparring in a big fight setting. That’s it.
The co-main event here is a first for HBO as they will be airing a women’s bout when undisputed female welterweight champion Cecilia Braekhus (32-0, 9 KOs) of Norway defends her belts against American Kali Reis (13-6-1, 4 KOs). The show begins super late too at 11 PM Eastern. Do what you will with it.
