Kell Brook Admits He Should Have Withdrew From Errol Spence Jr. Fight

Kell Brook admits the Gennady Golovkin loss changed his career and he should have never fought Errol Spence Jr. after that.

Brook suffered a decision loss to Golovkin in 2016 which was his first career loss and seven months later returned to the ring to box Spence Jr., which he lost by KO. Speaking to William Hill, Brook admits he doubted himself heavily against Golovkin.

“That was the first time that someone got in my head before a fight,” said Brook. “I remember being in the hotel room thinking, ‘I’m fighting Golovkin…tonight.’ I honestly started to doubt myself, I remember me and my nutritionist were in a hotel room at the time and I didn’t say I’d lose, but I said to him, ‘I can win this fight, can’t I?’. That was me straight away saying it out loud and it was negative, I was doubting myself.

“In the weeks leading up to the fight, all I’d seen were videos of Golovkin knocking everyone out, and they were all middleweights. It then dawned on me that I was fighting him in a few hours,” Brook continued. “A lot of it is in the mind – it’s the law of attraction – if you really believe something like I’m going to win the title with everything I’ve got, you can go out and do it – and I did. But for the first time [in my career], I was negative and subsequently was handed my first defeat.”

In the fight against GGG, Kell Brook took a big shot to the punch which nearly blinded him. He said going into the Errol Spence Jr. he was still thinking about that which wasn’t good for him.

“Looking back at it, Gennady Golovkin was an absolute monster, he was someone who was unbeaten and believed he could beat any man – even at middleweight. I always thought that I could box him and keep out of the way, and that I was better, but as we know, it didn’t go down like that. It damaged me and it changed me,” Brook said.

“When he broke my eye, the surgeon said to me that one more big shot and I could’ve been blind and could’ve lost my eye, and that hit home big time. Those same feelings resurfaced when I boxed Errol Spence Jr. I knew something terrible had happened with Golovkin, it was like a crab claw being crushed, I could hear it and I could feel it. The adrenaline was rushing but I knew something wasn’t right,” Brook added. “It wasn’t so much the pain, but it was what it did to my vision, it was frightening. It’s always frightening when you’ve got someone with that power against a wounded animal. It was scary.”

Ultimately, with going blind still in the back of his head, Kell Brook says that training camp was terrible and he wishes he pulled out of the fight.

“The training camp for the Spence Jnr. fight was terrible, I was carrying all of this extra weight. I wanted to be completely and utterly focused, but I was having problems with my trainer who was dealing with things at home. Everything was wrong going into that fight,” Brook said. “I got to the fight and my family were telling me I needed to pull out, but we’d sold all the tickets and I’d done my training. In my own mind I was thinking, ‘I’m going to make this weight, I’ve got a fight and I’m a fighter’. Looking back, it was one fight I wish I had pulled out of.

“I had to question myself after that fight, asking myself am I really good enough. I started thinking about retirement, I hit a really low point in my life and in my career. I was around 30 and I just thought, losing in my weight category against Spence was a tough pill to swallow especially when I believed in myself and I was a world champion – it was my lowest point,” Brook concluded.

Brook ended up losing by 11th-round KO. He did end up rallying three straight wins before losing to Terence Crawford. He ended his career with a TKO win over Amir Khan.