Golovkin versus Lemieux: Two Kinds of Puncher

Fights like Gennady Golovkin versus David Lemieux do wonders for the sport of boxing. They aren't the household names that Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao are but they are fighters so prone to scoring knockouts that a highlight reel of either will give most fans more than enough reason to be interested.

Of course, Lemieux is a massive underdog here. Next to Guillermo Rigondeaux, Gennady Golovkin is considered to be one of the most avoided fighters in the world. Both Rigo and Golovkin have missed out on the mega fights in their youth and are leaving what is generally considered their athletic prime. A thoughtful, plodding puncher excelling in set ups and picking his mark more than volume and speed, Golovkin has stopped his last twenty opponents and is working at a ninety percent knockout rate. In a just world, any fight with Golovkin in it should be a license to print money.

David Lemieux meanwhile holds the IBF middleweight title but is considered by many to have achieved beyond what his boxing ability should grant him. Lemieux is undeniably a thunderous puncher and his host of early knockouts has naturally made him a fan favourite but his ring smarts have been found lacking on occasion. Lemieux's most famous loss was in a WBC middleweight title eliminator against Marco Antonio Rubio. Lemieux was putting in the work and winning the rounds, but he was slowing down and moving his feet less. His punches got longer and wider, and suddenly he was eating straight right hands down the pipe each time he set himself to swing. After hurting Lemieux in the sixth, Rubio stopped the Canadian in the seventh.

Lemieux's right hand is highly touted, but his work with his left hook has impressed me more. The left hook—the most difficult punch to master—is the king of counter punches. The angles it comes from, the speed and power it achieves in a short distance, it is simply the perfect weapon for so many situations. To the point where trading punches with a good left hooker becomes a very dangerous prospect. Lemieux has scored knockdown blows by left hooking with his opponent, as they jab, as they hook, as they throw the right, as they attempt to clinch, as he turns them. The man has left handed power and isn't afraid to throw it.

While to many Golovkin would seem to be in the same mold, a crowding puncher, the ringcraft he has shown has been miles ahead of anything Lemieux has of the same. In his most recent bout with Willie Monroe Jr., Golovkin gave a lesson in cutting the ring.

Being involved with MMA for so long has left me writing "10/10, world class" about any fighter who remembers to change direction and fake his man out along the ropes but Monroe was doing it all night—especially with that cross step that Jersey Joe Walcott played with and Guillermo Rigondeux turned into an art form—and Golovkin wasn't thrown off for a moment. The pressure continued, he never fell for the feints, and with his first meaningful punch—that usual wide left hook—Golovkin sent Monroe to the canvas. It was only when Monroe abandoned his movement and stood toe-to-toe with Golovkin that the latter saw more trouble.

Golovkin's punching is part of what makes him popular as he is far from a traditional boxer. It is always dangerous to get into generalizations about regional or national styles, because fighters and coaches move around so much in the modern era and in any region you will have both polished boxers and hard nosed brawlers. However, boxing is still a poor man's sport and fighters' formative years are spent in their homeland. Traditionally while the U.S boxing team worked on lateral movement and straight hitting, the USSR boxing team favored long, arcing blows.

One of the reasons for fighters to prefer the palm down or even thumb downwards style of hook is to lengthen a circular blow while making it easier to land with the scoring area of the glove. Sometimes the turning of the wrist with the hook is called a "Russian hook". But Golovkin throws all kinds of long, arcing blows from strange angles. The downward left hook with which he felled Rubio through the top of the guard is a favorite example, and a punch he has caught other fighters out with before.

Something you will notice about Golovkin generally is that most of his punches seem to be long and loopy, even the close range ones. It makes him seem slow and occasionally clumsy, but the variety and angles in his punches—rather than ones created on the four basic punches through his footwork—make him a tremendously difficult fighter to predict.

Take, for instance, this left hook to the body. It's almost a straight armed punch, you don't see fighters punch behind the elbow—the furthest possible target for the left hand—from that distance. Clearly it came as a shock to Rubio too.

A second nice feature of Golovkin's game is his shifting—that is stepping with punches from stance to stance. I made a video discussing the concept of shifting through examination of T.J. Dillashaw's use of the drop shift a while back:

But a chap on youtube named Rusalka Afterglow has made a video about shifting focused on Gennady Golovkin. I highly recommend watching this one because it's one of those rare gems you will find on YouTube which is both a boxing lesson and a history lesson.

Shifting seems to have been a favourite of the USSR boxing team, and K.V. Gradapolov—head coach for some time—featured shifts in his textbook Boks, and wrote glowing praise for Robert Fitzsimmons and the Fitzsimmons shift.

But putting aside the individual techniques each fighter frequents, what served to separate Golovkin from Lemieux until lately was the art of ringcraft. Technique and ability to build combinations is brilliant—but everyone is a killer on the heavy bag. It is convincing another man to stand and let you hit him which is the difficult part.

Lemieux will often find himself following opponents around the ring and trying to sprint in with right hands to the body, rather than methodically cutting them off and leaving them with no choice but to cover up or return fire. His bout with Rubio was the most obvious example of this and it really cost him the fight as he went from pressuring to pressured, from stalking to chasing. Golovkin hasn't seen this problem so much, though when fighters step up and brawl with him he will often forget himself and end up getting hit much more than he would ordinarily.

One of the great watershed moments for any fantastic banger coming up through the ranks is when they meet someone who ties them up. Each time Rubio tied Lemieux up, he seemed to immediately give up the fight. The fight doesn't stop while the referee breaks the fighters, it just gets more conceited. Roy Jones Jr. would use the break to walk behind the referee and get back to center ring from anywhere he'd been put. Roberto Duran would stand so firm that when the referee broke him and his opponent, the referee pushed Duran's opponent back into the ropes for him.

When Lemieux was putting his hands all over Rubio in the early going of their bout, Rubio grabbed a hold, Lemieux stopped doing anything, and Rubio waltzed him around so that Lemieux was in the corner instead. That's how you let a fighter off the hook easily. While Rubio didn't clinch with much frequency, Lemieux didn't seem to have an answer or a prevention for it, and that's never good to see in an early round fighter.

Meanwhile, when Golovkin has his man hurt, or just looking for a break, he does a far better job denying the clinch. A hurt Willie Monroe attempted to cling on and Golovkin made sure that his head was always underneath Monroe's, maintaining space between his body and Monroe's and allowing him to squirm his arms free. Exactly the same technique that Rocky Marciano used round after round against Ezzard Charles to deny the better scientific boxer any break from the pace and the punches.

Now credit must be given to Lemieux for his efforts to improve this. In his most recent bout, against Hassan N'Dam N'Jikam, he actually looked to understand the importance of his head position in avoiding tie ups, and managed to keep the pressure on with more success in the later rounds than he often does. With that said, most assume he is another lamb to the slaughter for Golovkin.

Golovkin has knocked men out on the lead, on the counter, to the body, to the head, in the middle of the ring and along the ropes. He really is a brilliant, all around fighter. But a terrific puncher has to punch—Golovkin has never been the kind to jog for a few rounds and let his man slow a bit. For that reason alone this bout should be exciting and Lemieux is in with a decent chance in the early going.