By Dan Ambrose: WBO featherweight champion Mikey Garcia (31-0, 26 KO’s) is reportedly recovering from nose surgery that was performed last Friday to repair his broken nose from his January 19th fight against WBO featherweight champion Orlando Salido (39-12-2, 27 KOs).
Garcia broke his nose when Salido’s head accidently collided with him in the 8th round. Garcia didn’t want to continue fighting with his injured nose, and the fight was halted in between rounds. Garcia had a huge lead of 79-70, 79-69 and 79-69, on the scorecards at the time the fight was halted; otherwise he’d have likely continued to fight.
Garcia knocked Salido down four times in the fight with two of the knockdowns occurring in the 1st, one in the 3rd and another in the 4th. However, by the 7th, the fight was changing with Salido starting to get to Mikey more and more, and not bothered by his power any longer. Mikey looked like he was weakening, and he seemed more than a little stressed from the pressure that Salido was putting on him.
As things turned out, the injury might have saved Mikey from either getting knocked out late in the fight or taking a lot of punishment and not looking nearly as impressive as he had in the first six rounds of the fight. That suggests that there’s a conditioning problem for Mikey that he’s going to need to work on because he’s not going to go far if he can’t fight hard for more than six rounds without gassing.
Mikey was doing a lot of clinching and pushing down on Salido’s head when he would come forward looking to exchange. It was like a straight arm that you see in football where a running back reaches out with arm and pushes his opponent’s head to keep him from getting tackled. It’s fair to do that in football, but not in boxing, and the referee didn’t do a good job of keeping Mikey from using this move throughout the fight. Mikey should have lost points or been disqualified for the head pushing because it kept Salido from fighting. It might not seem like a big deal to push someone’s head when they’re coming at you but it is.
Mikey have four opponents that he’s looking at for his next fight and they are as follows: Yuriorkis Gamboa, Juan Manuel Lopez, Orlando Cruz, Salido and Javier Fortuna. I doubt Arum will put Lopez in with Mikey because Lopez is a more popular fighter than Mikey, and it won’t help Arum if he puts them together and Lopez losses.
At the same time, it won’t help Arum if Mikey loses, which is why we probably won’t see a Lopez-Mikey fight. Mike vs. Fortuna would be a decent fight because Fortuna has good boxing skills, but he looked really bad recently in his last fight. Boxing fans might like the fight if no other reason that Fortuna has an unbeaten record. He’s not well known in the U.S, and it’s not a fight that will do much in terms of increasing Mikey’s popularity. Gamboa vs. Mikey won’t happen, so Mikey can forget about that fight. The only fights I see available for Mikey next is Salido, Cruz or Fortuna. Obviously, Salido is the best fight of the bunch.
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