Is Brook Up For This Special Task?

A few months ago, if you had asked who the best welterweight was, the general consensus among boxing fans would be that Kell Brook was the cream of the welterweight division’s deeply talented crop. A big welterweight for the division, Brook has all of the tools, a good defense, speed, a varied attack, counter punching ability and punching power. Having bested Shawn Porter by majority decision (in what seemed to be much easier fashion than Keith Thurman did this past June) Brook was considered by many the favorite to beat the top fighters in his division.

So it is with some surprise that Brook, who goes by the nickname “Special K,” was almost immediately written off when his fight with current middleweight kingpin, Gennady Gennadyevich Golovkin was announced to take place at the O2 Arena in London. Make no mistake, for any fighter at 160 pounds, let alone below, fighting Golovkin would prove to be a daunting task. Heralded for his knockout power and technical prowess, Golovkin is currently riding a 22 fight knockout streak, has yet to be defeated and has the most middleweight title defenses since Bernard Hopkins’ legendary reign from 1995 to 2002. Given all of that, you might ask, why would anyone find it surprising that Brook is a decidedly heavy underdog? That’s because what Brook is attempting to do is not without precedent.

Throughout boxing history many fighters have jumped up multiple weight divisions to conquer champions who were thought to be too big and too good. Fighters like Bob Fitzsimmons, Henry Armstrong, Barney Ross, Roberto Duran, Sugar Ray Leonard, Shane Mosely, Oscar De La Hoya, Roy Jones Jr., Floyd Mayweather, and Manny Pacquiao plastered their names on the walls of boxing history with career defining victories in weight classes far from the weights where they began their careers.  It is true, some of these fighters were more methodical with their rise in weight (Mayweather and De La Hoya come to mind) while others skipped whole weight classes altogether. 

There are of course many more fighters that have tried to accomplish this same feat and failed. What separated those that were successful from those that were not was plain and simple; those fighters were special.  And that is all that Kell Brook is basically saying. He believes he is a special fighter. His belief is so strong that he aims to prove this versus the best middleweight we have seen in over a decade. Is Brook as special as he thinks he is? Can he beat the odds and do what only a select group of fighters have been able to accomplish?  No one will know for sure until September 10th, but what we do know is that it has been done before. And that is why they fight the fights.