By Carlos Boogs
Teddy Atlas, veteran trainer and expert analyst for ESPN, is wondering if IBF welterweight champion Kell Brook (36-1, 25KOs) had a pre-existing eye injury when stepped in the ring with IBF/WBA/IBO/WBC middleweight champion Gennady 'GGG' Golovkin (36-0, 33KOs).
Two weeks ago, Golovkin traveled over to the UK to defend his titles against IBF welterweight champion Brook at the O2 Arena in London.
Brook, who competes at 147, moved up by thirteen pounds to challenge Golovkin at the full middleweight limit of 160-pounds.
Brook put in a very solid performance and didn't embarrass himself in the fight. The fight was stopped in the fifth round when Brook's trainer Dominic Ingle threw in the towel, as Golovkin was starting to dominate the action.
After the fight, it was revealed that Brook had a fractured right eye socket. Ingle explained that he threw in the towel because Brook had been complaining about the eye for several rounds.
Before the fight took place, Atlas received a phone call from a well-known Las Vegas bookmaker who detailed some very odd activity with the Golovkin-Brook betting line in Vegas.
"He said 'the strangest move just happened and I've never seen it before in my life.' He said the total, the under/over... the line that they put out on whether it's going go a certain amount of rounds... it was 9 and a half. And in the last couple of minutes it just went down to 7 and a half. He said 'I've never seen a move like that in my life.' The one thing that makes you think is that somebody thought that they had some information that they thought they can act on," Atlas told At The Fights: Monday and Friday 6-8pm EST on SiriusXM Rush 93.
"So then when you see the fight get stopped and some people thought it was stopped quickly. Look, there is no doubt that Golovkin was starting to take over that fight. I agree with that. But still you can make an argument that when Kell Brook got hit with that last punch he put his arms out like 'what are you doing, I'm okay.' He wasn't really greatly affected, although he was starting to be dominated."
"The fight got stopped really quick, but the thing that I found really curious, to be honest, is that almost immediately they said 'oh his eye, his eye.' And then from what I heard, if it's accurate, somebody said in the ring that he had a broken orbital bone. How do you know that your fighter has a broken orbital bone until you get to an x-ray machine? It's impossible to know that."
"So it makes you wonder did they have that injury in camp and then were they prepared because they had that injury to stop the fight as soon as it got perilous. That would speak for a move in the line, that someone got that information."
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