By Dan Ambrose: Newly crowned WBC welterweight champion Danny Garcia (32-0, 18 KOs) is expected to face the winner of the March 12 fight between WBA welterweight champ Keith “One Time” Thurman (26-0, 22 KOs) and Shawn Porter (26-1-1, 16 KOs), according to Dan Rafael.
The fight is likely part of the Premier Boxing Champions plan. It makes sense for PBC to put Garcia in with the winner of the Thurman-Porter fight because it will create a bigger star than if Al Haymon, the creator of the PBC, lets the champions stay apart.
It’s pretty important that a unification fight is made because Garcia is pretty flawed and he likely will be beaten sooner or later anyway, even if Haymon doesn’t match him against the winner of the Thurman vs. Porter fight. At least if Haymon puts Garcia in with Thurman or Porter, he’ll be able to get a big payday.
“The PBC plan, from what I am told, is to make Garcia vs. the winner later in the year. Hopefully, it will happen,” Rafael said during his chat at ESPN.com.
The Thurman vs. Porter fight be televised on Premier Boxing Champions on CBS and will be taking place at the Mohegan Sun Casino, in Uncasville, Connecticut.
Garcia, 27, recently won the vacant WBC welterweight title with a close 12 round unanimous decision win over #6 WBC Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero last month. It was not an impressive performance from Garcia, and he was fortunate that he was fighting an aging weak puncher like Guerrero rather than Porter, who was ranked #3 by the WBC or the #1 WBC Amir Khan. Those would have been tougher fights for Garcia and he might not have won them.
Haymon has a tough job if he wants to Danny Garcia unbeaten because he’s clearly not the same dominating force at 147 that he was at 140. We saw that immediately in the first round in his fight against Guerrero. You can make an argument that Garcia wasn’t even the second best light welterweight. He moved out of that division without facing unbeaten Viktor Postol and Terence Crawford. I think both of those guys are better fighters than Garcia, and he was smart to move up in weight rather than fight Postol.
I think Garcia would have lost that fight. But in moving up to 147, Garcia and Haymon are going to find it even more difficult to stay unbeaten. I see Garcia as a Jurgen Braehmer type champion. In other words, a guy that is matched carefully against beatable fighters and steered around the good ones.
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