The Big Drama Show

Gennady Golovkin has waited years for a career-defining superfight. On Sept. 16 against Canelo Alvarez, he finally gets one.

- Ramona Shelburne

It is, conservatively speaking, about 9 million degrees inside Abel Sanchez’s boxing gym in Big Bear Lake, California, and still his prized fighter, world middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin, is in the ring doing chin pushups— wearing a hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants.

Yes, chin pushups. Arms behind his back, his chin rests on a towel, bearing the full weight of his 170-pound frame. He dips within inches of the canvas and rises back up. At the end of the set, he turns on his back, wraps the towel around his head and face, loops a rope with a weight attached to the end of it around his neck and does a set of what can only be described as blind, hanging, weighted neck crunches. Golovkin conditions each part of his sinewy frame like this, in rigorous isolation drills. The chin must withstand pain. The neck must be strong enough to absorb punches. To give him strength to fight inside, he works his forearms—which he often has trouble fitting in the sleeves of a normal dress shirt—with resistance bands and a homemade contraption of steel and rope pulleys that his trainer affectionately calls “the machine.”

Decades of such rigorous training have seen Golovkin establish himself as one of the best fighters of his generation. He has defended his middleweight title 18 times over the past seven years, putting him within range of Bernard Hopkins’ record of 20 defenses in his division. So it’s not surprising that he’s had trouble persuading boxing’s biggest names to get into the ring with him.

“I understand,” Golovkin says. “It’s too dangerous. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much money [you offer]; people don’t want to lose reputation.”