By Jeff Aranow: WBA World lightweight champion Jorge Linares (43-3, 27 KOs) will be defending his title in less than 2 weeks against the southpaw Mercito ‘No Mercy’ Gesta (31-1-2, 17 KOs) on January 27th at The Forum in Inglewood, California.
This is a tune-up that Linares shouldn’t be losing. He’s got big money unification match against WBC lightweight champion Mikey Garcia that will be taking place this year, so he can’t have any slip ups against the 30-year-old Gesta. The main reason that Linares has picked Gesta from the bottom of the WBA’s rankings is because he doesn’t want to risk getting beaten before his fight with Mikey Garcia.
Linares wasn’t willing to take a risk in his January 27th fight by fighting a good opponent like Luke Campbell in a rematch. Linares barely beat Campbell by a 12 round split decision last year on September 23 on HBO Championship Boxing. Campbell maintains that he should have been given the nod by the 3 judges. Campbell’s promoter Eddie Hearn was hoping to lure Linares over to the UK for the rematch, but he wanted no part of that.
Linares likely would have gotten a lot more money facing the 30-year-old Campbell (17-2, 14 KOs) in the UK than what he’ll be getting in facing bottom dweller #15 WBA Gesta on January 27. Linares wasn’t willing to take that chance. Mikey Garcia (37-0, 30 KOs) is taking a risk with his career in moving up to 140 to challenge IBF World light welterweight champion Sergey Lipinets (13-0, 10 KOs) on February 10 at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas. That’s a real fight that Mikey can potentially lose. Mikey is showing courage in taking on Lipinets. Mikey could have played it safe like Linares by looking to face a bottom dweller as well for his February 10 fight.
Linares, 32, isn’t looking past Gesta despite the that he’s lowly ranked by the World Boxing Association at number 15 right now, and he’s done little with his 15-year pro career in recent years.
Linares trained with Gesta 8 years ago in 2010, and he got to see what he’s like up close and he respects him. Gesta has been taking things slow with his career since his loss to IBF World lightweight champion Miguel Vazquuez on December 8, 2012. Gesta hasn’t lost since then, but he also hasn’t fought a good opponent during the last 6 years. That’s a problem obviously for Gesta. He would have been rated higher by the WBA if he’d have taken more chances with his career. It’s hard to say though. If Gesta had taken on better fighters during the last five years, he might have been beaten and then he wouldn’t be getting this title shot at all against Linares.
“The truth is that I respect Gesta. He’s hungry and he’s worked hard to get the opportunity and he came in,” said Linares to ESPN Deportes. ”I’ve seen him a lot. I had the opportunity to train with him in 2010 when we were with Freddie Roach on the Wild Card. We made a couple of sparring rounds, he’s good, left-handed, strong,” said Linares.
Linares wants to fight 3 times in 2018. It might not be easy for Linares to accomplish that goal due to the time requirements involved in negotiating the bigger fights. Linares needs to take one fight at a time rather than looking past fighters towards a set number of fights in the year. If Linares gets knocked out by Gesta, he’ll need to think about taking a long rest break to recover from the stoppage. It’s not unheard of for Linares to get knocked out. He’s already been stopped in the past by Antonio DeMarco, Sergio Thompson and Juan Carlos Salgado. Those are 3 fighters that Linares would normally have had no problems beating, but he was caught by big shots in each of those fights and taken out. Gesta has similar punching power to all 3 of those guys. Indeed, you can argue that Gesta has better power than Thompson, DeMarco and Salgado. If Gesta is able to land his heavy shot on the chin if Linares, he very well could get him out of there.
Also on January 27 on the same card as Linares-Gesta, welterweight Lucas Matthysse (38-4, 35 KOs) will be fighting unbeaten Thailand fighter Tewa Kiram (38-0, 38 KOs) for the vacant WBA ‘regular’ 147 lb. title. The winner of that fight will be in line for a match against WBA Super World welterweight champion Keith ‘One Time’ Thurman in the future. There would also be potential unification fights for the Matthysse-Kiram winner against IBF champion Errol Spence Jr. and the winner of the April 21 fight between WBO welterweight champion Jeff Horn and Terence Crawford.
There’s big money available for the winner of the January 27 fight. Matthysse is getting up there in age at 35, but he still looks very good. He destroyed Emmanuel Taylor in 5 rounds last May. That’s the positive news about Matthysse. The negative aspect is Matthysse has been out of the ring ever since his loss to Postol, and he’s coming off of an 8 month layoff in facing the much more active 25-year-old Kiram, who fought 2 times in 2017.
Matthysse didn’t fight at all in 2016 due an eye injury from his 10th round stoppage loss to Victor Postol in October 2015. Matthysse’s fight with Taylor wasn’t an adequate test to tell whether he has anything left at this point in his career. Kiram might not be a good test either. There’s not a lot known about Kiram due to him having fought most of his career in Thailand against obscure fighters that few boxing fans have ever heard of. We might not see what Matthysse has left until he gets inside the ring with the likes of Thurman, Errol Spence Jr., Shawn Porter, Danny Garcia or Terence Crawford. Those fighters will tell us whether Matthysse is still fighting at a high level or not.