BROOKLYN BRAWL
Garcia stays unbeaten, eyes Floyd, Manny
BEFORE THE start of the ninth round on Saturday night, Lamont Peterson hopped off his stool during his match with Danny Garcia and ran to a neutral corner, shaking his head and looking feverishly at the crowd.
He was pulsating with energy, his body nearly quivering. After a strong previous two rounds, Peterson was back in the fight after enduring boos for inactivity early on.
Peterson went on to punish Garcia late, nearly closing his right eye as the crowd roared. But despite injecting the 143-pound bout with a shot of excitement, Peterson saw Garcia walk away with a majority-decision victory that was met with patches of boos from the announced crowd of 12,300 at Barclays Center.
Garcia managed to outwork Peterson, throwing nearly one hundred more punches (although he didn’t necessarily connect with more) to remain undefeated and keep the dream alive of possibly facing the winner of the Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Manny Pacquiao superfight on May 2.
“I would love to fight one of them but I need a couple fights at 147 first,” said Garcia, who piled up the points early and won by scores of 114-114, 115-113 and 115-113 in the main event on NBC that was part of Al Haymon’s “Premier Boxing Champions” series.
“That was a war,” Garcia said. “That’s what fans want to see. He stuck to his game plan and moved a lot. He did a good job and I did a good job. I felt like it was getting edgy in the middle there. I thought it was close. I’m not going to lie but I felt like I did enough to win. I do think I have to go up in weight because I do think it’s affecting my performance.”
The bout was initially thought to be a junior welterweight unification match for Garcia’s WBC and WBA titles and Peterson’s IBF belt. But Garcia (30-0) realized he would have trouble whittling his body to 140 pounds and the bout was downgraded to a 143-pound non-title bout.
However, Peterson (33-3-1) was reportedly stripped of his IBF belt prior to the loss to Garcia in an odd decision by the sanctioning body.
“I did my part,” Peterson said afterward. “I’m not calling it a robbery. I fought a good fight and don’t expect an easy journey.”
The issue of weight also hung over the exciting co-feature between Peter Quillin and Andy Lee, and perhaps it was poetic justice that the two middleweights fought to a split draw.
Quillin dropped Lee in the first and third rounds and appeared to outwork Lee, who dropped Quillin in the seventh.
But Quillin’s failure to make weight (160 pounds) on Friday forced the bout to be a non-title affair. No matter the outcome, Lee would retain his WBO middleweight belt. In the end it didn’t matter. The judges scored it 115-112 (Lee), 113112 (Quillin) and 113-113 for a split draw in Lee’s first title defense after Quillin vacated the same title last year for what he described as personal reasons.
With Quillin tipping the scales of 160.6 pounds after his second attempt to make weight on Friday, the two camps reached an agreement, and Lee’s purse was increased from $500,000 to $625,000, to make sure the fight went on, a source told the Daily News. Quillin pocketed $500,000 on Saturday, the source said.
While the weigh-in debacle took some of the luster out of the bout, the opening rounds were waged savagely, seemingly making up for what took place.