Which Boxer is the Most Avoided of the Year?
Because boxing is a sport of (theoretically) individual sportsmen, each operating as something like an entrepreneur, it’s only natural that fighters and their management are reluctant to make high risk, low return matches.
Thus, dangerous but not famous boxers are avoided. Beyond this simple logic, some boxers are established names and can bring some capital to the negotiating table, but still seem so formidable that the opponents continue to skeddadle, lucrative payday or no. The most avoided fighter of any year always falls into the latter, more threatening category.
Most Avoided Fighter of 2014: Gennady Golovkin
Also See: Future Super Fight – Andre Ward vs. Gennady Golovkin
Quick, skilled and frightfully powerful, at times it seems GGG is so widely ducked that even a guy like Wladimir Klitschko would make himself scarce rather than fight him. Sergio Martinez, Felix Sturm, Peter Quillin, Julio Cesar Chavez, Jr. and Miguel Cotto can all be accused of ducking Golovkin, with varying degrees of justice to support the allegation. Golovkin really is the kind of guy that anyone with better prospects or even the hope of better prospects makes a point of avoiding.
Unless, of course, you are a warrior before you are a businessman, which explains Golovkin’s only decent fight this year, against Australian Daniel Geale. The Real Deal went out on his shield in three rounds, but that doesn’t change the fact that Geale remained Golovkin’s only top-level fight this year because no one wanted to get in the ring with him.
Runners Up
Guillermo Rigondeaux: The slick Cuban is the kind of guy other world class boxers avoid like the plague. Nobody has answered the question: “how do you beat a guy like that?” As a result he has had to get by on a diet of your basic nobodies this year. Classic case of “too good for your own good.”
Sergey Kovalev: It would be hard to call The Krusher a truly avoided fighter, since he had his big win over Bernard Hopkins this year. Even so, it’s not every day that we see a boxer jump networks just to stay away from a guy, the way Adonis Stevenson did to avoid being forced into a fight with Kovalev. That counts for something.
