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Trainer: Golovkin will have a ‘short night’ vs. Stevens

Fighters Network
22
Aug

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Trainer Abel Sanchez said that he expects WBA middleweight beltholder Gennady Golovkin to have a “short night” against hard-hitting standout Curtis “Showtime” Stevens should ongoing negotiations be completed potentially as early as Thursday for the duo to meet on Nov. 2 at New York’s Madison Square Garden on HBO.

A deal was said to be close but not signed for Golovkin (27-0, 24 knockouts) to face Stevens (25-3, 18 KOs), who caught the attention of Golovkin’s manager and promoter, Tom Loeffler.

Stevens called out Golovkin 10 days prior to his first-round stoppage of Saul Roman, after which Loeffler said Stevens “might get his wish.”



“Ain’t nobody scared of,” Golovkin, said Stevens, during a video interview with RingTV.com. “He’s overrated. I’m going to go in there and demolish his ass.”

Golovkin, meanwhile, scored his 14th-straight knockout in June against Matthew Macklin, and Sanchez expects similar results should he face Stevens.

“I expect Curtis to keep talking, and I expect him to keep talking in order to achieve more courage. I expect him to come to the week of the fight and to keep talking, and to be aggressive at the weigh in,” said Sanchez.

“I think that he will continue to taunt Gennady Golovkin, but I also expect that as soon as Curtis gets hit with the first jab, he’ll be more scared than Macklin was. I think that it’s a short night for Gennady. I think that Curtis has talked himself in to a bigger money fight by posturing.”

SANCHEZ RECALLS A DON KING CARD

In honor of promoter Don King, who turned 82 on Wednesday, Sanchez reminisced about a stacked, 12-bout fight card that took place on April 29, 1995 at the U.S. Air Arena in Landover, Md.

In the main event, Vincent Pettway stopped Simon Brown in the sixth-round for the IBF’s junior middleweight belt. In the co-main event, Bernard Hopkins dethroned IBF middleweight titleholder Segundo Mercado by seventh-round stoppage after having battled to a draw with Mercado in their previous bout in December of 1994.

Click here for a video of Pettway’s knockout of Brown

“I was working as a member of his traveling staff that organized his shows,” said Sanchez. “I was working with Dana Jamison and some of Don King’s other staffers, like Bobby Goodman, who, at the time, was a matchmaker.”

Sanchez also recalled that on the card were past or future beltholders William Joppy, Freddie Pendleton, Maurice Blocker and John David Jackson, as well as title challenger Oba Carr.

Pendleton knocked out Darryl Tyson in the 10th round, and both Blocker and Carr did the same in the fifth round against Bobby Butters and Alfredo Rojas, respectively.

Jackson unanimously decisioned James “Hard Rock” Green over eight rounds, and, in a swing bout that followed the Pettway-Brown fight, Joppy decisioned Joaquin Velasquez over 10 rounds.

Hopkins entered the ring wearing a black mask, led by former heavyweight champs Michael Spinks and the late Joe Frazier as well as the late famed promoter Butch Lewis. It was also a night on which Mike Tyson was ringside as a color commentator for the Showtime cable telecast.

“I remember that card, because that was the night that Vincent Pettway was able to stop Simon Brown in what was a really dramatic fight. I think that we had like 12 fights that night,” said Sanchez.

“So that was a dramatic ending to the fight and it was part of a very long weekend for us. The fights went from that night until 2 or 3 a.m. the next morning. It was a typical Don King Production, and one of the many shows that had over 10 fights in it.”

Photo by Naoki Fukuda

Photo by Emily Harney

Lem Satterfield can be reached at [email protected]

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