Half-Korean “Triple G” Gennady Gennadyevich vs. Canelo Alvarez: Finally, a mega-fight this Saturday in Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS — The journey that brought Gennady Gennadyevich Golovkin from Karagandy, Kazakhstan, to Saturday night’s middleweight unification championship bout with Canelo Alvarez is a road map studded with inner-city poverty, heartbreaking family tragedy and a frantic search for an identity that always seemed to be just a single broken promise away.

The Yellow Brick Road, it was not.

“Triple G” was born when Kazakhstan was part of the old Soviet union. His father was a coal miner, his mother was a lab assistant, and the country was on edge because the native population and the immigrant Russians were stretched by a frenetic nationalism vs. regionalism debate.

And when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in an ill-fated venture with an army heavily larded with conscripts, the two oldest of the four Golovkin brothers were drafted into the army of a country that soon wouldn’t be theirs. The family received no word from them. Four years later, before Kazakhstan seceded from the Soviet Union, separate phone calls informed them that both men were dead, with no explantion of where or how. They were no details.

The whole family still feels that pain. Time did not heal those wounds and they will not discuss their loss publicly even today.

Meanwhile, the twins, Max and Gennady learned to fight and learned well. Three times, they advanced to the country’s national finals, and three times they took turns in withdrawing so they would not fight each other. Max quit boxing, moved back home to help his aging parents. Gennady, older by 15 minutes, shouldered the financial burden. He would be the fighter — and what a fighter.

He fought 300 times as an amateur. Record keeping being what it is in the amateur boxing world, he lost between five and eight times. He is 37-0  as a pro.

It did not take long to establish himself as The Beast That Swallowed Kazakhstan. Nobody wanted to fight him. He moved to Germany and got better but didn’t get the fights he deserved. Frustrated and seeing no light at the end of the tunnel, his German mangers signed a contract with Tom Loeffler, an energetic promoter who is rarely mentioned in American media but who has done a masterful job.

When the fight comes off on Saturday night, it will be five years since Golovkin’s  debut on HBO. All this after Loeffler had been begging HBO and Showtime to give him a shot.

The big step forward came when the managers, the promotor and Triple G agreed it wouldn’t happen if he stayed in Germany. So they came to the United States, shopping for a gym and a trainer. They went right to the top.

They went to see Freddie Roach at the Wild Card Gym in Hollywood, Robert Garcia in his gym, and finally, Abel Sanchez  The meeting with Sanchez went well. For openers, the mountains around his training camp at Big Bear, Calif., reminded Golovkin of Kazakhstan. So did the snow. The gym was almost empty that day. He liked that, too. He did not say what he felt about Sanchez.

Instead, he just went home.

He and his people had been lied to and misled so much that this decision required a lot of thought. Three months later, Sanchez got a call telling him to pick up the fighter at LAX. Golovkin got off the plane carrying a single small bag.

“Where is your luggage?” Sanchez asked.

“I come here to train,” Triple G responded, “not to party.”

Of that drive to Big Bear, Sanchez recalls, “I studied his face and I thought to myself, ‘I went to the airport to pick up a fighter, but they sent me a choirboy who couldn’t hurt a fly.’ Boy, was I wrong. I was really wrong. It wasn’t the sparring. It wasn’t the heavy bag or the speed bag. I knew he was a fighter with special power the moment we worked with the mitts. I thought, ‘Lord, we really got something here.’

“So we worked. I didn’t try to change him. I wasn’t going to try to teach him how to fight. He knew how to fight. I wanted to work with what he already had because I knew right away he was so smart and adaptable.

“Fight after fight, his biggest asset is that he can get in the ring and set up what he wants to do. We might work on changes in the gym for a particular fight, but then he decides how to set him up in the first round. After that, one way or another, he thinks ahead to how he can make it easy,” Sanchez said.

He added: “I used to study Emanuel Steward and what he tried to bring out in his fighters. He taught them to make the opponent have to adapt because of what your guy shows him. Not the other way around. Triple G can do that.”

There has been so much talk about this fight and these two fighters for so long. Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather should have fought two years earlier. The noise of the buildup couldn’t alter the fact that they were two years too late and the magic was gone for both when it finally happened, leading to the disappointment the fight triggered.

But this is totally different. This is a rare and genuinely dramatic moment — two fighters at the right time. They understand that.

Listen to Golovkin, who has been disappointed enough times with broken promises to understand the business of boxing and the way promoters manipulate it:

“Yes, we have had delays but I look at Canelo’s face now and I see it is serious,” he said. “This was not Canelo not being ready to fight me. It was Golden Boy not being ready for Canelo to fight me. I don’t care about legacy. I don’t care about pound for pound. This is real. This is about being champion of the whole world. For so long, there has been too much talking.

This is old school. Belts don’t matter. This is what I like — only one champion. We will find out on Saturday who am I and who is Canelo.”

Source: Triple G vs. Canelo Alvarez: Finally, a mega-fight at the right time | NJ.com