SUPER SPENCE
Mikey Garcia can’t handle ‘The Truth’ in clash of pound-for-pounders
‘I FOUGHT HARD AND I TRIED HARD BUT SPENCE IS THE BETTER FIGHTER’
THEY say the boxing ring is where the truth will out. They say it’s the place where fighters discover what they’re made of and, in the process, become either contenders or pretenders. They say it’s where arguments are settled, respect is gained, and clarity is provided.
However, while much of this is correct, sometimes a matchup appears so predictable going in, and the two fighters involved so far apart in terms of the tale of the tape, we could probably do without 12 rounds as proof. In the case of Saturday’s (March 16) IBF welterweight title fight between Errol Spence Jnr and
Mikey Garcia at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, everything we suspected – feared – to be true turned out to be true.
In a mismatch with few redeeming features, we had it confirmed that Spence is too big for Garcia and too good, at that weight, for Garcia. We received confirmation that Garcia, a world champion at featherweight, superfeatherweight, lightweight and super-lightweight, should never again appear at welterweight and should, despite the money involved, probably never have agreed to fight Errol Spence in the first place.
After 12 rounds, we also got confirmation that Spence had beaten Garcia by scores of 120-107 and 120-108 [twice] and was still the IBF welterweight champion of the world.
“People said I couldn’t box but you saw it today,” said the victor, who landed a total of 375 punches to Garcia’s 75. “I can box, I can move my head. I can do it if I want to.
“So many so-called experts were writing me off. Tonight, I just wanted to show that I do have boxing ability. I can box. I can use my jab. I do have a high boxing IQ. There was a reason I was an [2012] Olympian.”
Though it’s hard to imagine too many people doubted Spence’s ability to box going into his latest defence, one can forgive the American for trying to find something to take from a win so anticlimactic it almost feels inconsequential. The win alone won’t suffice. That it came against Mikey Garcia, easily the most skilled opponent of Spence’s career, hardly matters because it was not the version of Garcia we are accustomed to seeing. Instead, this welterweight version of Garcia was 0-0. He was unproven. He was thick in all the wrong places. He was plodding and uncharacteristically slow of hand and foot. If you squinted, especially late on, he could even be mistaken for Yori Boy Campas, or some other rugged Mexican whose short arms and slow feet require them to shuffle into range and soak up whatever comes their way in order to unload wild hooks from too far out. Essentially, Garcia, from as early as round one, was someone else. He neither looked nor functioned the same as before.
Because of this, Spence now comes away from the highest profile win of his career with only a modicum of the credit he probably expected to receive. Some will admire his performance, for there was a lot to like, yet others, the harsher critics, will argue he beat not Mikey Garcia but a Mikey Garcia tribute act. Neither viewpoint is incorrect.
Of course, if he had listened, Spence would have known this going in. Most people, after all, backed him to win handily the moment contracts were signed and the fight was announced. These forecasts were then firmed up when they went head-to-head for the first time at a press conference and the four-inch difference in height became apparent. Flawless fighters in a flawed fight, there was an air of inevitability about a Spence victory and it owed more to the size discrepancy than any perceived gulf in talent.
This rang true on Saturday night and the sinking feeling came early, too. In round one, in fact, it became
clear Spence was too tall, too long, and had a jab too good and persistent to let Garcia settle into his new role as a bloated welterweight. He was everything Garcia didn’t want him to be. He was fast, consistent and intelligent. He knew that defusing Garcia wouldn’t require anything too elaborate, not in terms of strategy nor movement, so simply used everything he had at his disposal – everything his challenger lacked – and stuck with it.
After a dull opening round, Spence started to let his left hand go more in the second and Garcia unveiled a cross of his own, throwing three on the spin. He also landed a left hook to the body which seemed to unsettle rather than hurt Spence. It was an innocuous shot in any other fight, but worth mentioning here because, for Garcia, it was about as good as it would get.
By round three, Spence had upped his intensity and was getting spiteful with left crosses. He rammed more and more of them towards Garcia’s face and loose midriff and any time they landed, particularly to the body, there was a visible effect. He backed off. He folded in half. They winded him.
Not only that, whenever these body shots connected, everybody at home felt them. They felt them because Garcia’s body, usually sculpted and tighter, was for this fight soft and relatable. They felt them because there was a sudden vulnerability to Garcia, this champion typically dominant, and because the sight of him being outboxed with ease was a difficult one to grasp.
Still, it was hardly surprising. Spence, the one with the physical advantages, dictated everything behind his longer levers, used the ring astutely, and had Garcia celebrating even the phoniest of victories. A burst of missed punches in the dying seconds of the fourth round, for instance, resulted in the 31-year-old then raising his hand on the bell. It was celebratory, no doubt, but also a sign he was worried about his lack of success and felt the need to remind three judges there were two fighters in the fight.
The evidence, however, said otherwise. With six rounds gone, Spence had outlanded Garcia 132 to 39, swollen his face and bloodied his nose, and yet still carried the look of someone in the feeling-out stages of a fight. Nothing suggested Garcia, ruler of smaller men, was going to win a round, much less turn his fortunes around.
Frankly, it would only get worse. Spence, having relied on the simple stuff to grab the ascendancy in the opening six rounds, was soon free to get creative. Rattling through his repertoire, he looked to take Garcia out from the ninth round onwards, by which point Garcia’s heavy legs were heavier, his slow hands slower, and his movements those of a journeyman in the presence of a bluechip prospect. In terms of a stoppage, it seemed more a case of when not if.
In the championship rounds, Spence, 29, simply mauled and manhandled Garcia. Gone were the single punches used to disrupt Garcia’s rhythm in the opening rounds. These had now been replaced by hard and hurtful combinations, some of which had Garcia scurrying around the ring and plenty on the outside wondering if the fight should be stopped.
In the end, Garcia got the moral victory he was looking for. He lasted the distance and became the first man Spence has been unable to stop since 2014 [a run stretching 11 fights]. He then celebrated with an arm in the air as the final bell tolled. It was a sigh of relief more than anything.
If survival was the aim, one questions what the effects will be. Pre-fight, of course, there was talk of Garcia daring to be great and the Californian knowing exactly what he was getting himself in for. There was also mention of a lot of money being on offer. Yet now, having been beaten up in a manner he had avoided for 39 previous fights, it’s difficult to picture Mikey Garcia ever being the same Mikey Garcia again. He will first have to drop the weight – never an easy task – and he must also shake the impact of a hard, punishing and potentially careershortening loss.
As for Spence, 25-0 (21), victory over
Garcia is the no-win scenario everybody warned him it would be. He has the breakout win of his career, sure, but it comes with myriad disclaimers and scant praise. He remains the IBF welterweight champion but is still to prove himself the number one welterweight in the world.
“He is the truth. He is for real,” said Garcia, 39-1 (30). “He came out with a game plan, kept his distance. I couldn’t make adjustments.
“I fought hard and I tried hard. It didn’t go my way. He showed me he was the better fighter. He showed great boxing and had great power, but I wasn’t hurt at any point.
“I’m still happy with my performance. Overall it was a great experience. This is what boxing needed: two pound-forpound fighters. It’s not often we get these fights.” Great experience or not, Garcia failed to land more than 10 punches in a single round in front of the 47,525 crowd at the AT&T Stadium. Some will attribute this to the cleverness of Errol Spence, while others will say the reason behind this paltry number has more to do with Mikey Garcia being Mikey Garcia in name only. But, certainly, if one boxer on Saturday night was ‘The Truth’, the other turned out to be a lie – a knock-off version of the real thing. Topping the Arlington undercard, former WBC super-middleweight champion David Benavidez returned from a year out to blitz J’leon Love inside two rounds.
Benavidez, known as ‘Red Flag’, surrendered his title last year after failing a random drug test [for benzoylecgonine, the key ingredient in cocaine], but seems to have lost little in the way of momentum or spite in the 12 months since he was last seen in a ring.
The 22-year-old rocked Love, 24-3-1 (13), with a hook in the opening round and then, in round two, backed up the American to the ropes and flurried away with both hands, forcing referee Laurence Cole to step in and stop the fight at the 1:14 mark. It was, given its swiftness and conclusiveness, exactly the comeback performance Benavidez, 21-0 (18), would have been hoping for.
In what was his US debut, Mexico’s former WBC bantamweight champion
Luis Nery, 29-0 (23), stopped Mcjoe Arroyo, 18-3 (8), of Puerto Rico in the fifth round of a very one-sided non-title fight.
Overwhelmed from the outset, Arroyo was knocked down in rounds two and three before being decked twice in the fourth. His corner, concerned by the amount of punishment he was taking, wouldn’t let him out for the fifth round and Nery was left to celebrate the 29th straight win of his pro career.
At heavyweight, meanwhile, there were victories for both Chris Arreola, 38-5-1 (33), and Charles Martin, 26-2-1 (23).
Mexican Arreola, a three-time world heavyweight title challenger, stopped Us-based Haitian Jean Pierre Augustin, 17-1-1 (12), inside three rounds, snapping his undefeated record in the process, while Martin, a former IBF heavyweight champion, got his win after Gregory
Corbin, an undefeated 38-year-old from Dallas, was disqualified for repeated low blows in round eight. Corbin falls to 15-1 (9).
THE VERDICT Spence dominates to such an extent that the Garcia of old could be gone forever.