Maidana’s manager wants Danny Garcia fight, doubts it’ll happen

By Boxing News - 04/20/2015 - Comments

maidana44444By Dan Ambrose: #3 WBA, #3 WBC welterweight contender Marcos Maidana (35-5, 31 KOs) will be back in action in the fall against an opponent still to be determined.

Maidana wants to face WBA/WBC light welterweight champion Danny Garcia (30-0, 17 KOs) when he finally moves up in weight to the welterweight division, but Maidana’s manager Sebastian Contursi doubts that Garcia will take the fight after how badly he struggled against Lamont Peterson in their fight this month.

When Peterson stopped running and started fighting, he was able to walk Garcia down and batter him with heavy shots. It was pretty clear by the end of the fight that Peterson was the better fighter of the two, and would have won had he walked Garcia down the entire fight.

Now that there’s a blueprint in how to beat Garcia, you can expect a lot of the top fighters to use it if they can get him into the ring. Maidana smells blood in the water he wants to get Garcia in the ring so that he can hand him his first defeat of his career.

“We mentioned to Al Haymon that Marcos wanted Danny Garcia for the second half of the year, but that was three months ago,” Contursi said via Dan Rafael of ESPN.com. “After Peterson we don’t think Danny would take it.”

I don’t think Garcia will take it either. He was saying recently that he wants to move up to welterweight and take a couple of fights and then face Floyd Mayweather Jr. Those two fights that Garcia takes will likely be tune-up type bouts against fringe contenders or more likely 2nd tier fighters from the light welterweight division dragged up in weight to the welterweight division.

For some reason that seems to be the norm for some fighters when moving up to a new division. Instead of fighting guys from the division they’re moving to, they pick out a guy from the division below it, or in the case of Garcia, two divisions below the division he’s moving to when he fought little lightweight Rod Salka last year at a catch-weight of 142.

Maidana hasn’t fought since losing to Mayweather in a rematch last September. Maidana is currently taking some time off with his eye on some potential opponents. But he’s probably going to need to lower his sights and focus on someone else if he wants a big fight. WBA welterweight champion Keith Thurman might be interested in facing Maidana. That would be a good fight for Maidana, but he’d have to chase Thurman down because he’ll likely do a lot of running for that fight like he did against Leonard Bundu.

In Thurman’s last fight against Robert Guerrero, Thurman slugged with Guerrero for the first four rounds, but then he switched to moving a lot after he suffered a bad bump on his forehead from a head-butt. Maidana would still give Thurman a lot of problems even if Thurman chose to move for the entire 12 rounds. I think Maidana would be better off facing IBF welterweight champion Kell Brook. Getting Brook’s promoter Eddie Hearn to agree to put Brook in with Maidana might be difficult.



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