Fighting a prime Gennady Golovkin was a tough enough job for a middleweight, so imagine how extra-tough the job must have been for a welterweight. Kell Brook, who famously, and bravely, stepped in to fight “Triple G” back in September of 2016 (this when Chris Eubank Junior was supposed to fight Golovkin but didn’t go through with the fight) recently recalled the fight when speaking with Simon Jordan.
And Brook, who is still jostling with the idea of fighting again, has no pleasant memories of the fight he lost by way of fifth round stoppage. In fact, Brook says the fight “damaged him,” and he says that in hindsight he would not have fought Errol Spence when he did, this just eight months after the loss to GGG.
The most frightening thing about the Golovkin fight, Brook explained, was the damage the Kazakh terror inflicted on his eye. In graphic detail, Brook, who ruled as IBF welterweight champion for three years, says Golovkin “crushed” his eye.
“In the weeks leading up to the fight, all I’d seen were videos of Golovkin knocking everyone out, and they were all middleweights. It then dawned on me that I was fighting him in a few hours,” Brook said. “Looking back at it, Gennady Golovkin was an absolute monster, he was someone who was unbeaten and believed he could beat any man – even at middleweight. I always thought that I could box him and keep out of the way, and that I was better, but it didn’t go down like that. It damaged me and it changed me.”
The eye injury Brook suffered was not so much painful, he says today, but “frightening.”
“When he broke my eye, the surgeon said to me that one more big shot and I could’ve been blind and could’ve lost my eye, and that hit home big time,” Brook said. “I knew something terrible had happened with Golovkin, it was like a crab claw being crushed, I could hear it and I could feel it. The adrenaline was rushing but I knew something wasn’t right. It wasn’t so much the pain, but it was what it did to my vision, it was frightening. It’s always frightening when you’ve got someone with that power against a wounded animal. It was scary.”
Brook, who deserves immense credit for being brave enough to fight Golovkin (some people would no doubt say Brook was foolish in taking the fight), would have been excused for retiring from the sport after the loss and after the close call he had with his eye. But Brook fought on, losing to Spence in another fight he says now he regrets having taken.
There was a time when Gennady Golovkin was indeed a real monster, with plenty of big names either avoiding him completely or waiting until they felt he had aged sufficiently to be taken. Kell Brook was no such fighter. And he wasn’t even a middleweight.
Brook may never go into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, but he had the heart and the courage of just about any fighter who is in there.
