Erik Morales expected to fight once more before retiring

By Boxing News - 03/25/2012 - Comments

Image: Erik Morales expected to fight once more before retiringBy Jason Kim: 35-year-old Erik Morales (52-8, 36 KO’s) gave it his best shot on Saturday night but was overcome by the youth, speed, energy and power of the 24-year-old Danny Garcia (23-0, 14 KO’s) in a lopsided 12 round unanimous decision loss at the Reliant Arena in Houston, Texas.

Morales lost by the scores of 117-110, 116-112 and 118-109. Morales may fight once more possibly in Tijuana, Mexico before he retires. He already lost his WBC light welterweight title on Friday when he came in two pounds over the 140 pound limit for the division at 142. He had nothing to lose in the fight other than a position to get a much better fight against bigger names. It’s obviously going to be a tough ask for Morales to get a big named star to fight him now because he’s lost two out of his last three fights and there’s a big question mark whether Morales can even make the 140 pound weight division anymore. At this point it hardly matters because if he’s only going to fight once more he’s not going to lose out on anything if his final fight takes place at 147 rather than 140.

Morales said this after the fight as quoted by RingTV “I should have thrown more punches. I probably could have done more. I thought I was capable of doing more, but maybe I’m getting old…Toward the end of the fight, yeah, I felt like I was losing. But with all due respect, Danny is a good, strong, young fighter, but he’s not a great fighter. [They] were laughing at me at the weigh-in because I was a little bit chubby. But whew I was his age, the old veterans weren’t competitive with me. I was competitive with him. He didn’t dominate me.”

It was sad to see Morales being made fun of at the weigh-in given how great he was. I could understand it maybe if Morales was a nobody and Garcia was the best fighter in the division but he’s clearly now. There’s perhaps a half dozen fighters in the division that would beat him.

No doubt Garcia didn’t dominate Morales, because that’s a hallmark of Morales being a great fighter in his prime and Garcia merely being a good fighter at 140. Morales is fighting four divisions above his old fighting weight and his at least 10 years past his best. If there was a way of matching Morales in his prime against this version of Garcia, you’d obviously have seen the opposite what took place last night. Morales fought as well as he could with his aging body, but it wasn’t good enough. Garcia’s youth and natural size advantage was the crucial thing in the fight.

Morales fought well enough to win the 4th, 5th and 10th rounds on my scorecard and appeared to break Garcia’s nose in the 10th.



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