Why boxing needs Chris Eubank Sr

Watching Chris Eubank Sr's Christmas Day interview with IFL TV's Kugan Cassius, I was reminded of the salient words of Oscar Wilde: "Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities."

Combining the style of a 19th century dandy and pride associated with a Roman gladiator, Eubank exists on a different plane than anyone else in boxing. He attracts ridicule for daring to try and elevate in word and deed the sport to its rightful place as one in which timeless virtues of courage, skill, honour, and resilience are reaffirmed. In this respect, he understands that when two highly trained and developed fighters meet in the centre of the ring, it is not only a battle of fists and wills that ensues but also a merging of the human spirit. In the process they transform one another and themselves, undergoing the kind of spiritual cleansing that can only come with pushing one another to the very limits of human endurance and pain. It is why when the Irish rebel Terence MacSwinney opined that it is not those who can inflict the most, but those that can suffer the most who will conquer, he could have been describing a sport that is as old as humanity itself.

It is this very philosophy - the philosophy of the ages, no less - that Eubank Sr has embraced in his approach to the fight game. In response he has attracted not only ridcule but even contempt from those for whom the sport is reduced to a a business and glorified scrap. Such a facile rendering of the sport has done much to push it towards the long grass of mediocrity and cynicism, forced to compete with MMA and WWE wrestling as a result.

This contempt for Chris Eubank Sr from some in the game has reached the point where promoter Eddie Hearn has seen fit to rip the piss out of the man by impersonating his voice. Just pause to consider how perverse it is to have a man who's probably never thrown a punch in anger in his entire life, laughing at one of the bravest and toughest men ever to lace up a pair of boxing gloves. Love or loathe the man, you cannot but respect the way he insists on ploughing his own furrow. It is why the likes of Hearn and Warren find him so difficult to deal with, the fact he refuses to bow down and accept anything less than the cream when it comes to managing his very able son's career.

Some of the points he made during his recent IFL interview were impossible to argue with - such as the fact that it is the fighters not the promoters who should receive the lion's share of revenue generated by marquee fights; such as the fact there is nobody better qualified than he to steer his son or be in his corner; such as the fact that promoters are in it for the money more than anything else; and such as the fact he has proved in his own career the wisdom of his methods, however "deluded" they may have and continue to appear to others.

Watching him take time to consider his words, his determination to articulate himself as powerfully and eloquently as he can, is a refreshing reminder that while undoubtedly a brutal sport, boxing does not need to be approached brutishly.

Eubank Sr is also quite correct to point out that his son is one of the most explosive and exciting fighters around. However as to him "wrecking Golovokin", this is debatable. Having said that, nobody thought he had a prayer going in against the wrecking machine that was Nigel Benn back in 1990, did they? With both he and Eubank Jr supremely confident of the outcome to this fight, when it eventually comes, it's already guaranteed to be a riveting prospect.

The sport of boxing needs characters like Chris Eubank Sr. After all, just as in life itself, for those who excel we are talking a game that is chess not chequers.

Bernard Hopkins v Father Time - there could only be one winner

The age-worn truth that in boxing Father Time is undefeated springs to mind with regard to the emphatic and sad end to the ring career of Bernard Hopkins, punched out of the ring by WBC International light heavyweight champion Joe Smith Jr in the 8th round of their clash at the Los Angeles Forum at the weekend.

It was an especially cruel denounement to the career of a fighter, in Hopkins, who goes out as one of the finest middleweights to ever grace the ring, and who over the last decade had successfully carved out a niche for himself as a fighter for whom Father Time was less a biological fact and more a minor inconvenience. To his credit, he had us all fooled into believing him - believing that, yes, he was so special and unique that he could go on as long as he wanted. We allowed ourselves to consider him a permanent fixture in the ring, convinced that someone so freakishly dedicated to the sport in all its various aspects, who lived the life like no other fighter on the planet, whose attention to every detail was obsessive and who was never less than in top shape, had managed to transcend the ageing process as no Beverly Hills plastic surgeon ever could.

We were wrong. And so was he.

His defeat, the manner of it, was a rude awakening. It brought us to our senses, or at least should have brought us to those senses, when it comes to the notion of putting a 27 year old in the ring with a 51 year old. No matter how dedicated, how great his career, such a notion could only ever be delusional, one that should never have been entertained for a second. And with due respect to Smith an in-prime, even past-prime Hopkins would not have lost a minute of any round in a fight against an opponent of this calibre. However this was not a past-prime fighter in there, it was a man whose pride in thinking he could defy Mother Nature proved his undoing. It bears repeating: in so doing he and those around him were guilty of lapsing into delusion.

Yet we find ourselves in an era in boxing which delusion is the new normal. Consider the evidence. Britain's Amir Khan believing he stood a chance against Canelo given the size difference - delusional: Kell Brook moving up two weight classes to face the hardest-hitting middleweight the sport has seen in generations and believing he stood a chance - delusional: Tony Bellew believing he can match David Haye for power at heavyweight - delusional: and worst of all, Conor McGregor believing he can transition from MMA to boxing and share a ring with Floyd Mayweather - utterly delusional.

The aforementioned does not describe boxing as the sport we all know and love, it describes boxing as a circus - a sport so fixated on PPV buys and generating revenue for promoters and TV networks it has lost touch with its soul.

There is a wider social and cultural issue involved here. Boxing, like every other sport, does not exist in a social or cultural vacuum. To a large extent it reflects the times we live in; and we are living in a time where spectacle is everything and integrity is nothing. In boxing this lack of integrity is not a malaise suffered by those who fight. Far from it. Fighters such as Bernard Hopkins and Kell Brook are the epitome of integrity, men who have earned every plaudit and every purse they ever won. But the system that controls boxing, never known for its purity of heart, has turned into a squalid corporate and money making racket, worse in many ways than it was under the mob back in the day. At least back then the sport and its fans were being humped by people with personality.

The woeful lack of honest boxing writing and journalism is another crucial aspect in boxing's decline as a sport and reinvention as a circus. Most of those we rely on to report on the fights are little more than PR secretaries for promoters and the networks. Holding the sport's powers that be to account on behalf of the fans is a thing of the past, with writers knowing that if they do they will suddenly find their applications for press passes denied and, with it, the privilege of being ringside and close to the action. The result is a chasm between what's being reported and what we see with our own eyes.

In boxing, despite what any promoter or fighter says, weight divisions matter, size matters, and age matters. Bernard Hopkins deserved better than to go out on the back of such a humiliating defeat. What he gave to the sport, his old school style, science, and ring smarts, married to a backstory that is the stuff of movies, elevated him to a venerated position in in the sport. But ulitmately, as clever and astute as he undoubtedly is, that bugbear of every fighter who can't let it go, vanity, got the better of him in the end. His fight against Joe Smith Jr was not boxing it was something else.

The sooner we get back to boxing the better.

Haye v Bellew - Beauty and the Beast

By the time David Haye meets Tony Bellew in the centre of the ring on March 4, 2017, at the O'2 Arena in London, we will already have witnessed a build-up that many would have paid to watch regardless of the fight itself, given the personalities of both fighters and the needle taht exists between them.

The surprising thing about this contest is that it arrived out of nowhere. Bellew had just climbed off the canvas at Goodison Park after being dropped in the first round of his vacant WBC cruiserweight title fight to destroy Ghana's Ilunga Makabu in the third, nailing him with his trademark left hook in front of 30,000 raucous fans in the summer. Though Bellew has never been a fighter anyone would ever confuse with Bambi, the rant he delivered upon taking the mic after the fight was so raw it could only have come from the soles of his feet, during which he called out the 'Bitch from Bermondsey', excoriating him for "conning the public" over the course of two comeback fights against terrible opposition.

Bellew, who recently tasted the limelight as Ricky 'Pretty Boy' Conlan in Sly Stallone's well received Rocky spinoff movie, Creed, is not easy to like. He comes over as boorish with a bully-boy mentality at times. Moreover, his smack-talk about Haye's "sponge haircut" carries with it a racial connotation that he needs to drop, else the build up may well spill over into the kind of nastiness that boxing doesn't need. That said, you can't argue with his achievements in the ring, testament to his dedication and the fine work that he's put in with his trainer Dave Coldwell. His most recent demolition of B J Flores proved that his victory over Makabu was no fluke. Though possessing a body that wouldn't look out of place at McDonalds, Bellew carries real power in his hands, in particular a left hook that is a true thing of beauty.

As for David Haye, what can you say about a guy who when at his best is one of the most exciting fighters on the planet? Though justifiably attracting criticism in recent times for being overtly mercenary in his approach to the game, taking fights against less than credible opposition and taking the boxing public for a ride in the process, he is no hype-job and can really fight. Since teaming up with Shane McGuigan, joing a stable that includes his old Adam Booth stablemate George Groves, along with Carl Frampton and up and coming star Josh Taylor, Haye appears to have rediscovered his taste for the game. A big factor in that is of course his recovery from the bad shoulder injury he sustained during camp while getting ready to face Tyson Fury back in 2013. It seemed at the time he was looking at retirement, yet a year later he's back getting ready to face Tony Bellew in a highly anticipated encounter.

The smart money has to be on Haye, given his experience of operating at heavyweight plus the fact he is the technically superior fighter. Yet, saying that, the Liverpudlian and Evertonian has made a career out of proving people wrong. Clearly he will be relishing the opportunity to do so again.

For the purists out there this fight is being decried as a mismatch, pitting a crusierweight against a heavyweight. But Haye is no natural heavyweight and will no doubt come in lighter than he normally does. He could do with boiling off some of that muscle mass he carries anyway, and in terms of bone-structure, height and overall dimension he and Bellew are not that far apart.

For Bellew this fight is a win-win, as no matter what happens he remains the WBC cruiserweight champion. He and Coldwell are banking on the fact that Haye has not been seriously tested since his fight against Dereck Chisora in 2012. They maintain that they see flaws they can exploit, which in conjunction with the momentum Bellew is currently riding on the back of two impressive performances gives them every reason to feel confident.

Regardless, my money is on David Haye. He's faster, more explosive, with experience of having been in with seasoned heavyweights. Though getting on in years, he hasn't taken huge punishment in the ring, and the lack of decent opposition he's faced since returning to the ring, this will not, I contend, be as much of a factor as some maintain. He is undoubtedly up for this battle, which will tell in the quality of the sparring and sparring partners he will use to get himself ready.

I don't see one this going past four rounds.

Scotland's Josh Taylor is a special talent

Every Scottish fighter operating in the lighter divisions who shows the first hint of potential is immediately burdened by comparison to Ken Buchanan, the greatest fighter this small nation of five million has ever produced. It is a burden they are forced to carry as they try to live up to the great lightweight world champion's tremendous legacy, one of the greatest ever cultivated by a lightweight anywhere in any era. In every case up to now it has proved a curse, damning the unfortunate recipient of such high expectations with unrealistic promise.

The latest to be handed "the next Ken Buchanan" label is Josh Taylor, who has just claimed the vacant Commonwelath super lightweight title in only the seventh fight of his professional career against a tough and seasoned campaigner in the shape of Derby's Dave Ryan, former holder of the same belt. It was a significant step up in opponent for Taylor, a southpaw who can switch hit with inordinate skill. Prior to the fight he'd never gone beyond two rounds as a professional, something which added to the pressure of headlining in front of his home fans in Edinburgh meant it was a real test for the 25 year old former amateur star. It was a test he passed with flying colours from the opening bell, as he proceeded to school his opponent with a dazzling array of combinations, speed, reflexes, and superlative timing. Moving in and out, side to side, by the third round Taylor was on fire, peppering Ryan with jabs, hooks, left hand leads and bodyshots, before vacating the space to ensure that anything that came back was connecting with fresh air.

In fact, so one sided was this contest that the brutal shot to the body that ended the fight in the fifth came as a gesture of kindness, given how one-sided it had been, stopping Ryan to rapturous scenes both in and out of the ring.

Afterwards, Taylor's promoter and manager, Barry McGuigan, repeated the claim he's been making since Josh Taylor signed to him - namely that he considers Taylor to be the best fighter Scotland has produced since Buchanan, before going on to assert that after a couple of more fights the newly crowned Commonwealth champion will be ready to face and defeat Ricky Burns. This was no hyperbole on McGuigan's part; the Irish boxing legend genuinely believes that under his son Shane's tutelage, Josh Taylor can achieve greatness in the sport. That said, it seems premature to be calling out a champion in Ricky Burns who's been to hell and back in the ring, a fighter who brings to any fight such a massive hinterland of experience and adversity to draw on. While undeniably more talented and multifaceted than Burns, Taylor at this stage would be better focusing on developing his craft without being placed under unnecessary pressure, with the British title currently in the possession of Tyrone Nurse a more realistic and worthy goal at this stage.

A product of Lochend ABC in Edinburgh, Taylor hasn't put a foot wrong in either his amateur or pro career thus far. Sparring with the likes of up and coming pros John Thain, Tommy Philbin, and Lewis Benson on a regular basis helped shape the foundations upon which Shane McGuigan has been able to work since he turned pro after taking the gold medal at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. Being part of the same stable as Carl Frampton, George Groves, and Davd Haye is clearly paying huge dividends when it comes to the 25-year-old's development, which added to the abundance of talent he brings to the table is a combination that deserves to be described as irresistible. Yet despite mixing in this kind of company, Taylor remains humble and respectful, attributes that augur well for the future.

His amateur coach and proprietor of Lochend ABC, Terry McCormack, retains a close relationship with a fighter who first waklked through the doors of his gym when he was 17. During the years he had him under his wing, McCormack organised two trips across to Freddie Roach's famed Wildcard Gym in Hollywood, where Taylor sparred with the likes of Frankie Gomez and Guillermo Rigondeaux, excelling on each occasion. The point is that Josh Taylor hasn't appeared from nowhere. His development is the result of years of painstaking work, sparring, and conditioning. How many world champions and legends owe their early development to amateur coaches who played a crucial role not only in forging their foundations as fighters but as men? These, truly, are the unsung heroes and mainstay of the sport.

The McGuigans deserve credit for their ability to recognise talent when they see it, and Josh Taylor is a special talent make no mistake. He fights with the confidence and composure of someone who will not and cannot be denied.

As far as comparisons go, Ken Buchanan's world famous tartan shorts may finally have found a Scottish fighter fit to fill them again.

Boxing on trial in wake of Mike Towell tragedy?

Every death that occurs in a boxing ring is a death too many. For the family and friends of 25-year-old Scottish boxer Mike Towell, who recently succumbed to injuries sustained during his fight against Dale Evans in Glasgow, the knowledge that he died doing something he loved will likely be submerged in the pain they are suffering over his loss, with the fact he leaves behind a partner and baby only compounding the tragic circumstances of his death.

I have been writing and commentating on the boxing long enough to understand that it exists in a parallel universe in which those involved willingly substitute fantasy for reality, evidenced in the way words such as ‘warrior’ and ‘heart’ and ‘durable’ and ‘iron’ (as in Iron Mike Towell), when describing a given fighter’s attributes, are part and parcel of the lexicon. This has the unwitting effect of dehumanising those who step through the ropes buoyed along by an ocean of pride, discarding the human frailties we all possess, every last one of us, in service to a sport and culture in which to acknowledge them is tantamount to blasphemy.

Writing these words while visiting Los Angeles, where for the past week I’ve been visiting Freddie Roach’s famed Wildcard Boxing Club in Hollywood, a gym that is a magnet for fighters from all over the world, it is hard to comprehend how a sport that has done so much to improve people's lives can now be on trial within a mainstream that could never come close to understanding it? On any given day here you are privy to ‘ring wars’, sparring sessions that most fans would happily pay money to watch. Even with the 16oz gloves and protective headgear fighters wear when sparring, the intensity and ferocity involved in two determined and fit young men in their prime going toe to toe can be frightening to behold. The fact it is also exhilirating is evidence of the extent to which boxing taps into something primal in our make-up. It is a sport that exists closer to nature than any other, an honest yet brutal contest of courage, aggression, tenacity, and skill between two evenly matched opponents.

The revelation that Towell had been complaining of severe headaches in the lead-up to, this, his last fight, and that his sparring had been cut short as a result of those headaches, leaves no doubt that serious questions need to be answered over the specific circumstances surrounding his death. Plainly and simply, if he was unable to spar because of a headache the fight should never have been allowed to go ahead. But stopping a fight so close to the date takes a different kind of courage on the part of trainers, managers, and promoters, especially when we consider that ring fatalities are extremely rare relative to the sheer number of bouts that take place up and down the UK on any given weekend — amateur, professional, and white collar. Moreover, injuries in boxing are so common it is rare to come across a fighter who isn’t carrying one than one who is. Yet, even so, a severe headache should always automatically set alarm bells ringing, regardless of how tough, durable, or brave the fighter concerned may be.

Calls for boxing to be banned go back almost as far as the sport itself, and cannot be so easily dismissed. Yes, statistically, there are other sports in which fatalities are more likely than in boxing. This we know. But there is just no getting away from the fact that in professional boxing the primary objective is to render your opponent unfit to continue via repeated blows to the face, head, and body. With the brain the most sensitive and vulnerable inner organ we have, and with the medical evidence inarguable when it comes to the trauma involved in taking a hard blow to the head, there is an element of Russian roulette involved when any fighter gets into the ring. While improvements in the medical facilities and procedures within the sport have been enormous, they can never completely eradicate the danger and risk of a tragic outcome to any fight.

So the question of boxing’s legitimacy is not a medical but an ethical and moral one. The incompatibilty of boxing with the norms of polite society is both obvious and one of its main attractions. There is nowhere on earth more honest than a boxing ring, a place where the human condition is stripped bare of all pretense and distilled into three minute rounds. The sense personal accomplishment in managing to face and overcome the fear attached to walking facing another man in unarmed combat is so monumental the adrenalin rush garnered is addictive for those who do. Fighters exist to experience this rush, to enjoy the sense of glory and pride that accompanies them wherever they go. It is also why poverty and boxing walk hand in hand - why it has always been a sport of the working class, allowing those with nothing to transcend their material circumstances and be something more than those circumstances dictate they should be.
Fighters know and willingly take the risk that come with boxing in the belief it will never happen to them. The call for it to be banned, while it cannot be dismissed on medical grounds, is one that is and will continue to be answered by the laws of nature. For no matter the edifice of civilisation we construct, how far we attempt to raise ourselves above our natural instincts, we can and will never be able to completely escape them. And nor should we try beyond a certain point.

The truth is that as modernity increasingly renders our existence a sterile and sanitised affair, boxing fills a need-both actual and vicarious-far greater than most of us would like to admit.

Liam Smith learns that courage and heart is not enough

Twice in two weeks British world champions - Kell Brook and Liam Smith - have stepped up to the elite level and come up short. Of the two a case can be made that Kell Brook does belong at the elite level, just not at middleweight; and certainly not at middleweight against the machine that is Gennady Golovkin. The Sheffield welterweight world champion's next outing at light middle will prove beyond doubt if he's as good as many of us believe he is when up against the likes of Canelo Alvarez - assuming, of course, that the Mexican stays at 154lbs to defend the WBO belt he just won from Britain's Liam Smith, against whom he looked superb, securing a 9th round stoppage on the back of a vicious left uppercut to the body.

Liam Smith, everyone agrees, is a solid fighter - brave, durable, and tough. However at the elite level those qualities by themselves are not enough. And this is where we must be honest and acknowledge that the sport in Britain suffers from a training culture that places an emphasis on conditioning at the expense of craft, skill, and the finer points of a sport that when it comes down to it has more in common with chess than chequers.

Let's look at Smith's style, which mimics almost to a tee every one of Joe Gallagher's fighters. He carries a high, tight guard, wherein his hands never leave the side of his forehead apart from when he throws a shot, typically leading with a stiff, single jab, which he throws at the same speed and with the same force. He jabs to the body but normally to the head, and when he let's more than one shot go it is usually a left-right followed by a left hook to the body, perhaps finishing with a left hook to the head. There is very little variety - either in power, speed, or range, which makes him easy to read and anticipate. At the highest level a fighter needs to vary the positioning of his hands and feet in order to confuse his opponent by constantly changing the range and distance - i.e. holding his hands away from his face shortens the distance, while also enabling him to move easier from the waist, thus allowing him to generate more power and torque in his shots, and also to roll under and slip any incoming.

The point is that a tight guard is far too restrictive and inhibits a fighter's ability to relax and throw fluid and fast combinations. It also leaves the body exposed, something that Alvarez was able to take full advantage of against Liam Smith.

Ultimately, boxing involves the generation of kinetic energy throughout a given combination of punches, with each punch adding power to the next. Joe Gallagher is a trainer who believes in a very basic style that involves very little head movement, minimal use of angles, and ring craft. His fighters arrive in top condition and rely on their superior fitness and work rate to wear down their opponents. It is a style and ethos that while lacking finesse has proved successful over the years. But it is clearly lacking when it comes up against elite opposition such as Canelo Alvarez in the case of Liam Smith, or Carl Frampton in the case of Scott Quigg.

Alvarez is a counter puncher for whom Liam Smith was tailor-made. It was staggering to see Smith throwing single jabs most of the fight while standing still, thus reducing him to stationery target against whom his opponent couldn't miss. When fighting a counter-puncher you either have to double and triple up the jab in order to deny them the space to counter while forcing them onto the back foot, or you counter the counter. What you never do is throw single jabs while standing still.

When it comes to Joe Gallagher, there's an argument to be made that his stable is too big to allow him to spend enough time on any one fighter imparting anything more than the aforementioned basics. While he is able to get them fit - and let's be honest, getting a fighter in shape is a prerequisite and a given - they all come in at the lowest common denominator in terms of style. Maybe Gallagher is incapable of teaching his fighters the finer aspects of the craft. If so it is no criticism, as he merely joins a long line of British and European trainers for whom boxing is more bludgeon than ballet.

What we saw play out when Liam Smith met Canelo Alvarez was more than a clash of styles, it was a clash of cultures. The fact that Britain currently boasts more world champions than at any other time in the history of the sport, this is not so much a testament to the quality of British boxing as an indictment of a sport that has become to so stacked with organizations and belts that the title of world champion has become increasingly devalued.

While the heart and courage Liam Smith showed against Canelo was commendable, his lack of ring craft and style was exposed. It is why he lost and lost handsomely against a fighter who himself was exposed against Floyd Mayweather Jr.

It's true what they say. In this sport it's about levels.

Brook makes epic attempt against GGG but size matters

If ever a national anthem was suited to a fighter it is the Kazakh anthem that booms out before a Gennady Golovkin fight. It conjurs up the image of a column of tanks coming over the hill, guns blazing as they sweep all before them. The fighter known as GGG has a style redolent of said column of tanks on the offensive - merciless, relentless, and unstoppable.

Kell Brook did everything he could to withstand the middlewight champion's assault, but apart from a tremendous second round he spent the fight backpedaling like a man trying but failing to ward off a swarm of angry bees. GGG is every bit as fearsome and machine-like as his astonishing KO percentage suggests, a fighter who combines ferocious intensity with the ability to generate truly frightening torque behind his shots. Even though Brook peppered his opponent with the kind of fast and accurate combinations Golovkin hadn't encountered since he fought Willie Monroe, there was an inevitability about the result from as early as the opening salvoes of the first round, when the bigger man maneuvered Brook onto the ropes and rocked him with a thunderous left hook upstairs. It was probably this punch that fractured Brook's right eye socket, the injury which forced Dominic Ingle to throw in the towel in the second half of the fifth to prevent his fighter taking any more punishment. In doing so, Ingle's courage and compassion outside the ring matched Brook's courage inside, given the chorus of boos that greeted his intervention.

From the moment this fight was announced we knew that Brook's chance of climbing the mountain that lay in front of him would come down to his ability to hurt Golovkin with his shots while being deal with the Kazakh's incoming. Despite GGG's dismissal of Brook's power in his post-fight interviews, the IBF welterweight world champion undoubtedly rocked him with an uppercut in a second round that has to count as one of the most superb comeback rounds ever staged by a fighter given the torrid time Brook endured in the first round, previously described. It even allowed us to believe that, yes, maybe we were about to witness one of the most outstanding achievements in the ring boxing has ever produced, up there with a young Cassius Clay impetuously taking on and defeating Sonny Liston in Miami to shake up the world and claim his first world title in 1964; up there with Sugar Ray Leonard's comeback after three years out of the ring to bamboozle Mavellous Marvin Hagler in 1987; and up there, of course, with Ken Buchanan's epic performance to take the world lightweight title from Panama's Ismael Laguna over fifteen brutal rounds in the crippling heat of Puerto Rico in 1970.

But when it came to Brook's attempt to join this illustrious company the simple but iron logic implicit in the mantra that a good big man will always beat a good smaller man prevailed. Golovkin simply had too much artillery for Brook to cope with, and though immediately after the fight he was clearly upset with Dominic Ingle's decision to end the fight, in time he will surely come round to accepting that his trainer did the right thing at the right time.

Many fans, and not a few commentators, trainers and other fighters, had from the outset dismissed the fight as a mismatch due to the weight difference involved. But any criticism in this regard should not fall on the shoulders of Brook, Golovkin, or their respective teams. It should fall on the shoulders of the so-called elite fighters in and around their respective weight divisions who have steadfastly refused to take on the challenge posed by both men in the ring. It reflects the inherent weakness of the business-side of the sport, especially when compared to MMA, the fact that in too many instances fighters and their managers and promoters have sought to over-protect their assets rather than risk them. There is no shame in losing in the ring, none whatsoever, so why this consistent reluctance to risk defeat for the sake of both the sport and your own reputation as an athlete willing to test yourself against the very best?

That being said, the courage required to stand in front of the steam train that is Gennady 'GGG' Golovkin is of the uncommon kind, which is why the plaudits that have fallen on Kell Brook in both the run-up and aftermath of the fight are entirely justified. He risked all in order to win all and his failure to succeed, given the manner of his performance, has increased rather than diminished his stature. Clearly he will not be fighting at welterweight again, which immediately opens up the tantalising prospect of future fights against the likes of Canelo Alvarez, Miguel Cotto, and Britain's Liam Smith.

As for Golovkin, he says that he wants Billy Joe Saunders' WBO middleweight belt in order to unify the title. There is also the possibility of finally making a fight against Chris Eubank Jr happen. However it has to be said, after watching him take apart a previously undefeated Kell Brook, that neither Saunders nor Eubank Jr will be entitled to feel confident of doing what 36 others have thus far failed to when it comes to put a dent in the Kazakh's armour.

Sheffield's Kell Brook proved against GGG that in boxing courage and skill isn't everything. Size really does matter.