By Allan Fox: WBC light welterweight champion Erik Morales (52-7, 36 KO’s) was a little annoyed by some of the bold talk coming from his opponent Danny Garcia (22-0, 14 KO’s) ahead of their fight this Saturday night at the Reliant Arena in Houston, Texas. This will be the 35-year-old Morales’ first title defense of his World Boxing Council title he won last September in a fight against Pablo Cesar Cano.
Morales said this as quoted by RingTV “I’ve heard it all before. Can they be that stupid> I am changing my name to ‘The Professor.’ I’m giving classes.”
To be sure, Morales would definitely be the one giving classes if this fight had taken place seven to ten years ago, but he’s been through a lot of hard wars, he’s older and he’s fighting four divisions above his best weight class of super bantamweight. It’s only 18 pounds above his old weight but that’s a significant among when you’re facing a bigger and faster fighter like 23-year-old Garcia. It remains to be seen whether Morales’ experience, talent and heart can get him through this fight. Garcia is a good fighter, but he’s arguably not in the class of the better fighters at 140 like Timothy Bradley, Lamont Peterson, Amir Khan, Marcos Maidana, Lucas Mattysse, Humberto Soto, Ajose Olusgun, Mike Alvarado, and Andriy Kotelnik. But Garcia is at least at the 10 spot.
However, that may be still good enough to beat Morales unless Morales can find another gear to shift into to step away from Garcia on Saturday night. Morales didn’t look good in having to fight really hard to beat Cano in his last fight. It was good that Morales was able to turn it on to eventually stop him but in a 10th round retirement but it was bad that Morales took a lot of punishment from a pretty average fighter.
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