Triple G - Half-Korean new Tyson
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By Yang Dong-hee
Gennady Gennadyevich Golovkin, 34, the world’s middleweight champion from Kazakhstan, also known as “Triple G,” has won all 35 professional fights in his 10 year career and 32 of them were early round knockouts. Most recently, a victory came two weeks ago when Golovkin finished off Dominic Wade (18-0, 12 K0s) of the U.S. in the second round of his 22nd straight stoppage victory. It was his 16th consecutive title defense.
As the current unified middleweight champion of four major boxing organizations ― WBA, WBC(interim), IBF and IBO ― Golovkin holds the highest knockout percentage (91.2 percent) in middleweight championship history. Boxing fans love to call him the “God of War” or “Knockout Machine.” The Daily Mail of the U.K. dubbed him the “New Mike Tyson.”
The Ring magazine ranks Golovkin as the third best pound-for-pound boxer in the world and named him the “Fighter of the Year” in 2013.
An aggressive, counterpunching pressure fighter, Triple G is highly skilled in taking away his opponent’s jab and cutting off the ring. He is said to have one of the hardest chins in modern boxing history, having never been knocked down or knocked out in over 375 fights, as a professional nor amateur. ESPN last month named Triple G as the undisputable successor to legend Manny Pacquiao, saying “Golovkin is the most threatening boxer in this planet.”
It’s a happy surprise that Golovkin’s mother is Korean named Elizabeth Park, whose father left Pohang, North Gyeongsang Province, for Russia about a century ago when Korea was under Japanese colonial rule. Golovkin had a chance to visit his mother’s homeland in 2002 Busan Asian Games, where he won a gold medal in the light middleweight division and received warm receptions from Koreans.
It’s quite natural that Korean boxing fans feel the same kind of brotherly love for him as Thai people do for Tiger Woods. As a matter of fact, Western media have introduced Golovkin as a half-Korean boxer, having a Korean mother and Kazakhstani father.
Like many others in my age group, I was an ardent fan of Kim Ki-soo, Korea’s first professional boxing champion (WBA junior middleweight) and Hong Soo-hwan (WBA super bantamweight champion) whose dramatic upset victory against Panamanian champion Hector Carrasquilla is still talked about among many Koreans.
My passion for professional boxing revived in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the late 1980s when I was working as a show promoter licensed by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission (CCC).
The two decades of l980s and l990s were the golden years of Atlantic City. Casino hotels like Trump Plaza, Bally’s and Ceasar’s A.C. hosted big boxers like Mike Tyson, Sugar Ray Leonard, Robert Duran and Thomas Hearns every year.
In September, l989, I got involved in the WBC welterweight title match between champion Marlon Starling and No. 1 contender Chung Yung-kil as a member of the challenger’s team. Chung was knocked down as he was hit below the belt, which was an obvious foul play. Korean promoter, the late Chun Ho-yon of Kukdong Promotions, asked me to speak on his behalf in front of over some 100 reporters.
It was a doubleheader at the 20,000 seat Atlantic City Convention Center. In the second event following the WBC title match, the WBA welterweight champion was knocked down after being hit with a right to the chin by the challenger almost simultaneously with the bell.
A WBA-WBC joint press conference was held right after the controversial events for nearly two hours at the Trump Plaza Hotel, but it was of no use. The headline of the next morning newspaper was “Double Trouble in the Doubleheader.”
In the early evening party thrown by Donald Trump, I met many celebrities and legends such as Sugar Ray Leonard, Thomas Hearns, Trump and Trump’s first wife Ivana. Trump proudly distributed free copies of his best-selling autobiography “The Art of the Deal” to all attendants of the party.
Leonard came towards me and talked about the disputed boxing matches between Korean and American boxers in the Seoul Olympic Games. Several months later, Trump hosted friendly boxing matches between Korean and American boxers who were in the Seoul Olympic Games at the newly opened Trump Castle Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City.
Thomas “Hitman” Hearns invited me to his home in century city in L.A., saying he wants to talk about his next match hopefully in Korea.
I flew to his Los Angeles home two weeks later. He wanted to fight a Korean boxer. The only Korean middleweight boxer I could offer to him was Park Jong-pal, a WBA super-middleweight champion in 1987-1988, but Hearns showed me no interest for this match after all.
In December that year, I was invited to attend the general meeting of WBC in Mexico City, Mexico, by the late WBC Chairman Hose Sulaiman. The annual meeting’s hottest star was Mike Tyson. Mingling in the late night private party thrown by the invincible heavyweight champion, I thought to myself, “How good it would be if Korea could produce a boxer like Tyson.”
Now more than two decades passed, we have Triple G, though he maybe a half-Korean.
The writer worked as a reporter for The Korea Times and the Hankook Ilbo-New York, as a stringer correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. He was the first managing director in Korea of the U.S.-based
International Management Group (IMG).