By Dan Ambrose: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum has wisely chosen the perfect fighter for Mikey Garcia (32-0, 27 KO’s) to be facing in his first fight in the 130 lb. division by matching him against WBO super featherweight champion Roman “Rocky” Martinez (27-1-2, 16 KO’s) tonight at the American Bank Center in Corpus Christi, Texas.
Martinez is a fighter that should make Mikey look good, and probably a lot better than he is. Roman is arguably the weakest of the four super featherweight champions, and the most beatable one for Mikey to pick up a title against. It’s not that Mikey isn’t a good fighter, because he’s definitely a quality fighter. But there are major question marks about him after his performance against Orlando Salido from last January.
What we saw specifically in that fight was that Mikey was good for 5 rounds, but then he lost a lot of his power after those rounds, and he didn’t look good when Salido began to take the fight to him. Mikey’s corner quickly pulled the trigger in having the fight stopped once he suffered a nose injury in the 8th round, and it coincided with Salido starting to really get to Mikey.
Salido was at a handicap for much of the fight due to Mikey being able to hod his left hand way out in front of him in an exaggerated manner to keep Salido from getting close to him. The referee should have stopped Mikey from doing that, but he let him get away with it for the entire fight. Mikey also used his left hand to pull down on Salido’s head when he would come in for an attack, and Mikey was able to get with this move as well for most of the fight.
The referee should have taken points off because a fighter isn’t supposed to pull down on his opponents heal while they’re coming forward. Salido pointed out afterwards that he wasn’t happy with the way that Mikey was getting away with pulling his head down when he would go on the attack, but there was nothing he could do about it because the referee let Mikey get away with this move.
It would have been interesting to see how the fight would have gone had the referee prevented Mikey from pulling down on Salido’s head and prevented him from holding his left how far out in front of him to use as a stick to keep Salido from getting close. It also would have been interesting to see how the fight would have gone had Mikey’s corner not pulled him out of the fight in the 8th round right when Salido was taking command of the fight.
Martinez is a little taller than Mikey, so we might not see Mikey being able to use his left hand as a tool to keep Martinez from getting close to him. But I’m hoping that we don’t see Mikey pulling down on Martinez’s head all night long. As it is, Mikey has the speed and power advantages over Martinez. Pulling down on his head each time he comes in for an attack would give Mikey all the advantages, and hopefully the referee does his job and stops this from occurring early in the fight so we don’t see a totally one-sided fight.
Comments are closed.