Danny Garcia Escapes P.R. with Victory, Deontay Wilder Ousts a False King
Photo by Tom Casino for Showtime
By Craig Dowd
Junior-welterweight champion Danny Garcia will leave Puerto Rico this weekend with family photos, fond memories and an early birthday present from two judges. Thanks to their professional negligence, he gets to fly back to Philadelphia with all of his title belts in tow, just before he turns twenty-six on Thursday.
Garcia escaped the squared circle Saturday night with a majority decision victory over California’s Mauricio Herrera, on Showtime, but not without sullying his reputation first.
Herrera baffled Garcia with aggression, feints and a probing jab slung from all angles, and finally bloodied the champion’s nose late in the ninth round. Garcia offered little in reprisal for such pesky offensive displays, with his signature left hook dormant most of the night.
The few occasions Garcia managed to reprimand his challenger for deviating from the evening’s script, Herrera responded in kind, with insouciance, shrewd tactics and sharp overhand rights to Garcia’s chin.
Still, two judges found Herrera unfit to depose the 140-pound king, with each false arbiter donating eight rounds to Garcia, respectively, while the third judge scored the bout a draw, at 114–144. All three Showtime analysts deemed Herrera the clear victor.
Garcia came to Puerto Rico — where both his parents were born — on a roll, with convincing triumphs over multiple former champions, a Mexican legend, and a mythical knockout artist in Lucas Matthysse last September. A visit to the island was an unmistakable ploy to coat Garcia in its sheen of boxing mystique and rally its staunch fanbase behind him before he reenters the Floyd Mayweather sweepstakes this summer.
No doubt Golden Boy Promotions wanted to prove Garcia a marketable, if not yet capable, opponent for boxing’s brash monarch. Many pundits foresaw Herrera, a relative unknown, posing stylistic problems for Garcia. Only a handful actually believed they would go unanswered for twelve rounds.
Garcia stalked Herrera in the opening stanza, as Herrera slipped around the ring, in wide circles, feinting to the head before tagging Garcia’s stomach with irritable jabs. Garcia appeared to be the bigger, stronger man, with power and aesthetic beauty on his side. It seemed inevitable that he would walk his opponent down and batter his slight frame with a barrage of punitive blows. But that never happened.
Herrera, 33, maintained a restless rhythm in the early rounds. He lunged into the pocket with an artful variety of jabs, fell into a clinch, and repeated the process. The repetition visibly bothered Garcia, who intermittently connected with heavy shots but failed to establish dominance in the brief exchanges.
The middle rounds saw Garcia infused with a new urgency, throwing punches with a degree of violence only frustration can incite. He found success with a stiff jab but seldom was there an opportunity for further discourse. Herrera continued to roll with the shots, pepper Garcia with his own jab, and smother him.
Herrera was the aggressor in the final rounds, as Garcia repeatedly stepped straight back and absorbed clean punches. As each round came to a close exchanges broke out, with Garcia landing the more potent blows, while Herrera replied in sheer volume.
Many conservative writers will call this a close, competitive bout, in their own vanilla fashion. But there’s little justification for Garcia winning eight rounds on two scorecards. Herrera has spent most of his career proving himself worthy of facing, and occasionally beating, top-tier competition, but he’s awkward and scrappy and hardly the stuff of which Pay Per Views are made. Danny Garcia won Saturday night because he was supposed to win — that’s it. As they say in Baltimore: The king stays the king.
***
In the night’s co-feature, Deontay “The Bronze Bomber” Wilder destroyed the capable veteran Malik “King” Scott, dropping him with a left hook-right hand combination at 1:36 in the first round of their heavyweight title eliminator. Scott (36–2–1) was a legitimate step-up in competition for Wilder, the last American male to medal in the Olympics, but that scarcely mattered when he sampled Wilder’s renowned “Alabama power.”
“All the testing is done in the gym to come here and make it look easy,” Wilder said in a post-fight interview. “I don’t care if I don’t go past four rounds. I don’t care if I don’t solve all the questions people have on me. I’m not trying to prove nothin’.”
After notching his 31st knockout in as many fights, we are fast approaching the moment when we must concede that Wilder is for real. He will now face the winner of the May 10th bout between Bermane Stiverne and Chris Arreola.
***
On Showtime Extreme’s undercard, Puerto Rico’s Juan Manuel Lopez weathered a first round knockdown to drop Daniel Ponce de Leon with a crushing right hook in route to a second round stoppage in this do-or-die junior lightweight contest between two former champions. This is Lopez’s second victory over his Mexican rival. He improves to 34–3, 31 KOs; Ponce de Leon falls to 45–6, 35 KOs.
Daniel “The Miracle Man” Jacobs continued his comeback from cancer by scoring three knockdowns against Milton Nunez, stopping him in the first round of their middleweight bout. Jacobs improves his resume to 27–1, 24 KOs; Nunez drops to 26–10–1, 24 KOs.
