By Dan Ambrose: WBA/WBC light welterweight champion Danny Garcia (28-0, 16 KOs) won’t have to worry about making weight for his fight against little known lightweight Rod Salka (19-3, 3 KO’s) because their August 9th fight will now have a catch-weight 142 pound catch-weight for this Showtime televised fight.
Garcia’s management decided on picking out the non-top 15 ranked Salka for Garcia to defend his titles against instead of a top tier contender for some reason. But due to the huge firestorm of criticism that came from that, the WBA and WBC chose to make this a non-title fight.
The word is that with the titles not being on the line, Garcia opted to make the fight at 142 instead of at the normal weight of 140 for the division. That makes things even tougher for Salka, who was found in the lightweight division for Garcia to fight instead of at 140. It’s not a problem for Salka to move up in weight, but given that he’s a lightweight with a small frame, he’s probably not going to do well at all in this fight, especially if Garcia rehydrates into the 150-160 region.
Only Garcia and his management know why they decided to pick out a lightweight for him to fight instead of a good light welterweight ranked in the top 15. It could be that Garcia felt that he’d gone through a lot in his fights against Mauricio Herrera, Lucas Matthysse and Zab Judah in his last three fights, so he might have needed a nice easy fight. You can’t blame Garcia for wanting to take it easy, especially if Showtime was going to televise the fight regardless.
If you want to blame anyone, you blame Showtime for agreeing to televise the fight, because they could have said no to Garcia and his management and told them that they had standards that they wanted to keep up for their fans. If that had happened, we likely would have seen Garcia facing someone like Viktor Postol or whoever Showtime was in favor of. But if Showtime is just going to let Garcia fight whoever he wants on their network, then you can’t really blame Garcia for taking on a lower level guy like Salka.
The guy obviously wants to make his career last as long as possible, and with him facing guys like Salka, he can increase his chances of a long, long career. But I think Garcia and his adviser Al Haymon didn’t realize the kind of public backlash there would be over him fighting an obscure 2nd tier fighter that few fans have ever heard of.
Where you have to worry is if Danny continues to take easy marks for his fights on Showtime. If that happens then you would have to hope that Showtime would be the one to step in and give Garcia a reality check that he needs to put on fights that boxing fans actually care about instead ones involving opposition pooled from the 2nd and 3rd tiers.
Garcia is already looking bad now because fans think he lost his last fight against Mauricio Herrera from last March. Garcia disagrees with the fans, so he chose not to give Herrera a rematch. But the move only made Garcia look bad because he’s seen by a lot of fans as an illegitimate paper champion now. And now he tops that off by fighting an unranked opponent named Salka at a catch-weight of a 142.
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