During an interview with Yahoo’s Kevin Iole on Wednesday, Gennady Golovkin’s trainer Abel Sanchez made the “startling” claim that certain fighters get preferential treatment by certain commissions.
Really? And water is wet.
“It just seems there are certain commissions in this game that are very lenient toward certain fighters, Texas being one of them, Nevada being the other,” Sanchez said. “Certain fighters get relaxed rules, I guess you could say, and everyone else has to follow certain rules.”
Golovkin’s head trainer was talking about Alvarez recently testing positive for a trace amount of the banned substance, clenbuterol, but he backed up his claim of favoritism by pointing to an incident regarding his fighter’s big Vegas showdown with Alvarez last September and the way the Mexican star was having his hands wrapped. To cut to the chase, Sanchez claims that Alvarez’s hands were being wrapped, using an illegal method and that the commission pretty much ran him from Alvarez’s locker room for trying to cry foul. The Nevada State Athletic Commission, however, claims that there was nothing illegal with Alvarez’s wrapping method and that Sanchez was simply unfamiliar that the method in question had been permitted in Nevada “for decades” already.
Sanchez has been around the block a few times, so it can only be assumed that his whistle blower routine is one born of convenient and tactical rage. “Money” fighters ALWAYS get the benefit of the doubt.
As much as we’d like to pretend that boxing is a “real” sport, operated and governed like other “real” sports, the reality screams otherwise. From the size of the ring to the pre-fight accommodations to the very scoring of the fight, itself—the “money” fighter is going to get the shiny side of the penny. This has always been the case in this sport and, most likely, it’ll always be the way things work.
Sanchez, of all people, should know this reality, just from the benefits of the doubt Triple G has received when he’s the “money” fighter in the main event.
Golovkin got the benefit of the doubt on the scorecards for pretty much every close round in his bout with Daniel Jacobs.
And then, of course, there’s the Golovkin glove issue that is seldom mentioned by the G-lovin’ boxing media. Specifically, there was Gabriel Rosado’s claim in 2013 that a pre-fight inspection of Golovkin’s custom-made gloves showed them to be “different” than any other gloves he’d seen before and that they were “missing a little more cushion on the knuckles.”
“We tried [to protest],” Rosado told RingTV, “but the fight was the next day and so much bull** was going on…”
The New York State Athletic Commission essentially blew off Team Rosado’s protests, in much the same way the Nevada commission blew off Sanchez’s hand wrap protests before the Alvarez fight.
Even if everything is on the up and up and the commission’s hearts and minds are in the right place, business dictates, even on a subconscious level, that it’s smart to err on the side of the money.
Again, this is just boxing being boxing.
If we’re being fair and even-handed about things, we can just as easily point to how the HBO-backed Golovkin has had every milestone accomplishment, up until the Canelo fight, practically gift wrapped for him and laid at his feet. The smooth ride to his first mega-fight created more than a bit of complacency in him and a sense of entitlement in the way he’s been conducting ring business lately.
But when you’re no longer the A-side of the equation and the money you can deliver is miniscule in comparison with what the other guy can generate, then you just have to crank things up. You have to make it so that there’s no doubt from which the “money” fighter can benefit. In Golovkin’s first stab at Canelo, he failed to truly separate himself from his opponent, failed to make a clear and decisive case for himself. The fight was very close and, frankly, it was a failure on his part and the part of his team not to understand that you can’t take a close fight to the judges in the “money” fighter’s preferred commission and simply hope for things to go your way.
2023-10-20 14:39:28
