Ouma knocked out in the 10th round

Ouma knocked out in the 10th round

Ouma lost the encounter on TKO in the 10th round

Gennady Golovkin didn't get it easy, but he got it. The 29-year-old Kazakh middleweight remains on the rise tonight after a hard-fought 10th round TKO of Kassim Ouma in Panama City.

Golovkin (21-0, 18 KO) and Ouma (27-8-1, 17 KO) traded a lot of punches throughout the fight, and through seven rounds, it had been a back-and-forth war of attrition. Bad Left Hook had Golovkin comfortably ahead on the unofficial scorecard, but Ouma had been hanging with Golovkin, and it seemed like it was coming down to two things: Whether or not Ouma could keep taking Golovkin's hard punches, and whether or not Golovkin's stamina would hold up to the pace of the battle.

Well, Golovkin's stamina held up, and so did the power that broke down Ouma over the next three rounds. In the eighth and ninth, Golovkin began to physically dominate his older opponent, and hurt the Ugandan-born New Yorker repeatedly. His shots to the body piled up, and his right hands to the head were replaced by brutal uppercuts as his most dangerous weapon. In the 10th round, with Ouma again reeling, Golovkin closed the show, forcing referee Guillermo Perez Pineda to step in.

Doctors took a long look at Ouma after round eight. Golovkin punished Ouma in a one-sided round nine. The beatdown continued in round ten and the bout was finally waved off. Time was 1:25

While it's a solid win for Golovkin and was a very good fight worth tracking down for those who missed it, there were some negatives learned in the fight for the rising star. Golovkin is a wonderful talent, but defensively he has a ton of holes, and better fighters than Ouma, with bigger punches, could really take advantage of that. He has to tighten up, but tonight he made it a battle of who buckles first, and came out the winner.