Last night's (Sat., Sept. 1, 2012) episode of HBO's Boxing After Dark lacked any big names, but featured a pair of bouts that, on paper, looked to be highly entertaining.

One was, at least.

After fighting his whole career in Europe, Kazakhstani bruiser Gennady Golovkin looked to test the waters of the middleweight elite in his North American debut, taking on hard-hitting Pole Grzegorz Proksa. While Golovkin had demonstrated huge power throughout his career, it was expected that Proksa would give him a stern test.

Not so much.

From the get-go, it was obvious Proksa simply couldn't handle Golovkin's power, going down in the first round on what may have been a slip but which was prompted by a brutal left hook. He went down again, harder this time, in the fourth after spending the two rounds in between getting slowly whittled down. He managed to somehow survive the round, but a hard uppercut and chopping right from "GGG" in the fifth took his legs out and he faceplanted during the subsequent flurry. He managed to get to his feet, but the referee wisely called the bout before he could get hurt any more.

Golovkin will now almost certainly be in the running for a crack at either the winner of this month's Chavez vs. Martinez bout or Daniel Geale, who established himself as the division's number two man earlier this evening against Felix Sturm.

Welcome to America, Gennady.

The opening bout of the evening was a junior middleweight affair between division stalwart Sergiy Dzinziruk and rising Puerto Rican prospect Jonathan Gonzalez, which had the potential to be a solid fight.

It wasn't.

Things went off the rails the day before when Gonzalez weighed in a ridiculous nine pounds over the division limit of 154, and things just went downhill from. There are a lot of horrible things I could say about the fight, but I'll just say that there was no passion or urgency on either side and neither man deserved a win. Thankfully, the judges agreed and ruled the fight a split draw.

For the sake of my blood pressure, I'll leave it at that.

For full results and play-by-play of the fights click here.