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"Yeah, I can [wrestle]," he recently told FightHubTV
"A lot of my friends wrestled. [I trained grappling for] five, seven years. Just a little bit of practice. I just went with my friends to the gym -- grappling, just wrestling.
"I love judo, I love grappling, I love jiu-jitsu."
As an elite boxer with an appreciation for grappling, Golovkin's choice of a favorite UFC fighter seems fitting.
Cain Velasquez, he said, when asked to name some of his favorite MMA athletes. "He is a good puncher. He is very compact. He's strong. He's very smart. He's a good fighter. He's a warrior."
Gennady Golovkin is 36-0, 33 KOs, legit ninja shit
That's the thing with A-level boxing fighters. They have been under state-sponsored programs since a very young age and have done it all. Truth is, there is a huge selection bias towards boxing - since it is the highest paying sport that's where most talented combat athletes tend to go. That's what most MMA fans don't get, the UFC is ROBBING you of watching the top combat athletes by being greedy and not paying fighters what they deserve. With as little as one year of pure MMA training a lot of these boxers would easily become UFC champ - where the talent pool is shallow. Conor McGregor, a lackluster amateur Irish boxer has completely embarrassed two divisions with very basic boxing skills and some grappling here and there. Now to think that an elite boxer like GGG with SEVEN years of grappling training would do any different is extremely naive. In fact I'm willing to bet GGG would OUTWRESTLE lots of fighters in top 20 if the fight took place tomorrow, just by having the right muscle memory and being the superior athlete
If the UFC started to pay their fighters properly, maybe that could change, and A-level talent from the likes of Gennady and Vasyl Lomachenko could be attracted. Terence Crawford, another top boxer who has also grappled as a kid, said that he wouldnt fight at MMA because "fighters don't even get paid enough".
Right now only Yoel Romero(14-1) and Khabib Nurmagomedov(24-0) are at this level. They were literally bred to be fighters, training under state-sponsored programs their whole lives. Yet, all they get is hate from casual fans who bash them for speaking broken English. Yes the UFC revenue-splitting model is broken, but so is the MMA community
"A lot of my friends wrestled. [I trained grappling for] five, seven years. Just a little bit of practice. I just went with my friends to the gym -- grappling, just wrestling.
"I love judo, I love grappling, I love jiu-jitsu."
As an elite boxer with an appreciation for grappling, Golovkin's choice of a favorite UFC fighter seems fitting.
Cain Velasquez, he said, when asked to name some of his favorite MMA athletes. "He is a good puncher. He is very compact. He's strong. He's very smart. He's a good fighter. He's a warrior."
Gennady Golovkin is 36-0, 33 KOs, legit ninja shit
That's the thing with A-level boxing fighters. They have been under state-sponsored programs since a very young age and have done it all. Truth is, there is a huge selection bias towards boxing - since it is the highest paying sport that's where most talented combat athletes tend to go. That's what most MMA fans don't get, the UFC is ROBBING you of watching the top combat athletes by being greedy and not paying fighters what they deserve. With as little as one year of pure MMA training a lot of these boxers would easily become UFC champ - where the talent pool is shallow. Conor McGregor, a lackluster amateur Irish boxer has completely embarrassed two divisions with very basic boxing skills and some grappling here and there. Now to think that an elite boxer like GGG with SEVEN years of grappling training would do any different is extremely naive. In fact I'm willing to bet GGG would OUTWRESTLE lots of fighters in top 20 if the fight took place tomorrow, just by having the right muscle memory and being the superior athlete
If the UFC started to pay their fighters properly, maybe that could change, and A-level talent from the likes of Gennady and Vasyl Lomachenko could be attracted. Terence Crawford, another top boxer who has also grappled as a kid, said that he wouldnt fight at MMA because "fighters don't even get paid enough".
Right now only Yoel Romero(14-1) and Khabib Nurmagomedov(24-0) are at this level. They were literally bred to be fighters, training under state-sponsored programs their whole lives. Yet, all they get is hate from casual fans who bash them for speaking broken English. Yes the UFC revenue-splitting model is broken, but so is the MMA community