Papi_swav wrote:It is a duck if theres nowhere to go but up, at the time people wanted a GGG vs. Ward fight because there was nobody else for GGG to fight at 160 at that particular time. GGG knocked everybody out besides Sergio Martinez, he was the one that really ducked GGG.
Well that's a pretty warped way of looking at things. First of all, Andre Ward was never really an option because he was too busy ducking his old promoter Dan Goosen to actually fight regularly. And when he did fight it wasn't at 168. He hadn't made 168 since 2013. At that point GGG hadn't cleaned out 160. He had only just finished beating Curtis Stevens by that point. It was still very early in his run. Cotto won the middleweight belt in 2015. That means GGG knew Cotto was moving up to middleweight by early 2014. Cotto is a big name and big money opponent and he was now in GGG's weight class. Moreover, GGG was owed an eventual title shot for the belt that Martinez lost to Cotto. Also, bear in mind that this was 2014, GGG still hadn't fought David Lemieux and Andy Lee still had a title belt. It wasn't until the end of that 2015 that Peter Quillin got destroyed by the resurgent Daniel Jacobs and Andy Lee lost his belt to Billy Joe Saunders. Then within a year of winning the belt from Martinez Miguel Cotto lost the belt to Canelo who then owed GGG a title shot.
So sorry. But this whole idea that there weren't opponents for GGG to fight at 160 and so he should have jumped up to 168 to fight Ward has no basis in reality. There was a short window where it might have been possible but Ward was distracted by promotional issues. And despite the perception that there weren't good opponents for Golovkin from 2014 to now there were a whole bunch of top guys GGG to pursue.
See how Ward had to move up to 175 to fight Kovalev because there was nobody else for him to fight in the 168 division. Why couldn't GGG move up to 168? That was a couple years ago but right now theres a few 160s that moved up from 154 like Canelo, Charlo, Lara etc so now GGG has more options...
As I explained above:
1. there were plenty of good options available at 160
2. Some of those options were much bigger fights than one with Ward
3. Ward hadn't made 168 since 2013.
The reason Cotto fought one of the guys GGG defeated is because he wanted to make sure he was built enough to fight in the 160 division which was a good choice.
I understand the need to get acclimated to the division but it looks really bad when you say GGG hasn't earned the fight just before you fight GGG's sloppy seconds.
You might want to call it a duck but I think he made the right decision for taking his time. He stood toe to toe with Canelo who is just as big or maybe even bigger than GGG.
A duck is a duck regardless of whether or not the reason for the duck was understandable.