[dropcap size=big]T[/dropcap]he moon was high and luminous, the energy of the record-breaking crowd was too, and Triple G — Gennady Gennadyevich Golovkin — was taking a victory lap, saluting hordes of fans with his four world boxing championship belts raised behind him as he strutted around the StubHub Center ring on Cinco de Mayo in the South Bay city of Carson.
Triple G hadn’t even stepped in the ring yet and he was already the undisputed king of Los Angeles, where champions like Kobe Bryant, Magic Johnson, Fernando Valenzuela and Marcus Allen once reigned. To many in the worlds where sports and Los Angeles intersect, Triple G sits on that throne now.
This was moments before the half-Korean, so-called “honorary Mexican” and Kazakhstani immigrant would step into the ring and dismantle his Armenian-American opponent Vanes “The Nightmare” Martirosyan. It happened in less than two rounds and 36 punches. This was minutes before he would tell HBO’s Max Kellerman to bring on Mexican superstar Saul “Canelo” Alvarez. And it was an hour before his celebratory press conference where he would tell L.A. Taco that fighting before the mostly Mexican-American crowd on the mostly Mexican-American holiday was like fighting in front of his family.
But in order to fully capture the impact and embrace of Triple G by Latino Los Angeles, we have to go back two weeks earlier, when there wasn’t even supposed to be a fight and the drama that only the Sport of Kings can provide that led up to that.