The Golovkin hype train has gained steam (justifiably, in my opinion) with each successive bout since the Proksa fight, which drew a TV audience of 685,000, HBO’s lowest of 2012. Mostly, this is because he keeps knocking out his opponents, but each event has also contributed some new nugget of gruesome or quirky lore to Golovkin’s snowballing stardom. 

When he beat Gabriel Rosado in January, the violence was so one-sided and gory that it led to Rosado’s trainer yelling, “Your son’s gonna die, man!" at the boxer’s father before stopping the fight. It’s also when Golovkin, smeared from his collarbone to his knees in Rosado’s blood, first described a vanquished challenger as a “good boy" on HBO. Golovkin fans have since latched on to the term and popularized it on boxing websites. (Typical usage: “100 percent GGG will make a good boy out of Sergio Martinez.") 

Next, he nearly beheaded an overmatched Nobuhiro Ishida on an independent pay-per-view card in March, and while the spectacular third-round knockout told us precisely zero about how Golovkin would fare against elite competition, it did deliver perhaps the best boxing TV graphic of 2013 — a bit of trivia at the bottom of the screen during Golovkin’s introduction that read: “FAVORITE FOOD: MEAT." Then, in June, his body-punch knockout of Matthew Macklin produced arguably the most painful moment in boxing this year, leaving Macklin whelping and writhing on the canvas as evidence.