Los Angeles—Boxing champion Gennady Golovkin will face Kamil Szeremeta next month in Florida in a middleweight title bout originally scheduled for February but postponed due to the coronavirus.
IBF champ Golovkin and Polish challenger Szeremeta will meet on December 18 at the Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Florida, sports broadcaster DAZN announced on Tuesday.
The fight will take place one day before Mexico’s Canelo Alvarez makes his much-anticipated return to the ring against Britain’s Callum Smith. If Golovkin and Alvarez prevail it could set the stage for a trilogy battle between the two boxing superpowers in 2021.
The 38-year-old Golovkin, who has just one loss and one draw with 40 career wins, last fought on October 5, 2019 when he beat Sergiy Derevyanchenko in a middleweight title fight. Both the loss and the draw came against Alvarez.
The unbeaten Szeremeta is the mandatory challenger for Golovkin, of Kazakhstan. In his last fight, on the undercard of the Golovkin-Derevyanchenko bout, Szeremeta beat Oscar Cortes with a second-round TKO.
This will be Golovkin’s third fight as part of a three-year, six-fight deal with DAZN.
Meanwhile, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Argentine boxer Juan Domingo Roldan, who challenged the likes of Marvin Hagler and Thomas Hearns for the world middleweight title in the 1980s, has died of Covid-19 at the age of 63, medical sources said Wednesday.
Nickkamed ‘The Hammer’, Roldan was beaten by Hagler in 1984, lost to Hearns in 1987 before a third attempt to take the crown was ended by Michael Nunn in 1988.
That bout in Las Vegas was the last of career which had yielded 67 wins in 75 professional fights.
Born on March 6, 1957, Roldan had been hospitalised in Cordoba, his home province, since Thursday suffering initially from pneumonia.