By Dan Ambrose: While WBA /WBC light welterweight champion Danny Garcia (30-0, 17 KOs) is busy congratulating himself and saying how he thinks he deserved the decision last Saturday night over IBF light welterweight champion Lamont Peterson (33-3-1, 17 KOs), trainer Barry Hunter says that he saw doubt in Garcia’s eyes when the going got tough in the 2nd half of the fight when Peterson began walking Garcia down and battering him with punches.
Hunter feels that Garcia was broken by Peterson mentally or physically in the second half of the fight. From that point on, Garcia was running for safety in pure survival mode and not pushing the fight like he had in the first part of the fight.
“Lamont hit him somewhere around in the 4th or the 5th round and I saw doubt in his eyes,” Hunter said at the post-fight press conference last Saturday. “I cannot agree with the judges. I think [Mauricio] Herrera did [expose Garcia]. Lamont was a better overall fighter. Moving forward I think there are some things that Danny needs to work on, especially if he’s going to move up to 147. The judges need to be better overall. The more telling blows in the fight were landed by Lamont Peterson. Who would I like him [Peterson] to fight next? Danny Garcia, then Lucas Matthysse and then move up to 147. I knew Lamont would be better on the inside [against Garcia]. Once they traded blows, I don’t know if it was body shot of whatever, his [Garcia] eyes told me all I needed to know; I saw doubt in his eyes.”
This was definitely not a good performance from Garcia, who was supposed to be looking to impress the new boxing fans that were seeing him for the first time on Premier Boxing Champions on NBC. It was not the fight that you wanted to see from him. Peterson took control over the fight and finished in a strong fashion despite coming up short on the scorecards. There’s a good way and a bad of losing a fight.
The way Peterson lost the fight was clearly the good way. By the same token there’s a good and bad of winning. Garcia definitely won the bad way, and his stock clearly has sunk from this fight. That’s not Garcia’s trainer Angel Garcia or his adviser Al Haymon’s fault that Garcia didn’t shine. It was his own. He just looked like he broke from the fire the pressure that Peterson put on him. But it’s not as if there wasn’t a pre-warning that this kind of thing would happen. We saw Garcia win a questionable decision last year against Mauricio Herrera in a fight that Garcia appeared to lose. We also saw Garcia struggle to defeat a shot Zab Judah in 2013, and a shot Kendall Holt in 2011. Those were very close fights. It’s true that those fights took place two to four years ago, but Garcia hasn’t improved since those fights in my view. If he couldn’t dominate the likes of Judah and Holt, then it’s no surprise that he struggled last night against Peterson. The writing was already on the wall bout Garcia’s talent level.
Middleweight contender Tureano Johnson had this to say on his twitter about Danny Garcia and Peter Quillin: “What I took fights tonight is both Quillin and DSG [Garcia] need to spend less time trying to be [billionaire] Warren Buffett and more time being prize fighters.”
I don’t agree that Garcia struggled because he’d been not working on his craft. I think it’s just a case of him fighting a guy that was better than him in almost every facet of the game except for in the power department. Peterson was faster, bigger, more mobile, and the better inside fighter. He also had better stamina, and his skin held together a lot better. Garcia simply wasn’t at the same level as Peterson, and it looked like it wasn’t something that had anything to do with training aside from the inside fighting. Garcia isn’t a mobile guy, and I don’t think he would ever be a mobile guy no matter who trained him. He’s not fast and he doesn’t have the skills to get the better of someone like Peterson. The only reason Garcia got the win was because Peterson didn’t take the fight to him in the early rounds like he could have and should have.
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