By Dan Ambrose: Top Rank promoter Bob Arum has set up a fight between WBO super featherweight champion Mikey Garcia (33-0, 28 KO’s) and Juan Carlos Burgos (30-1-2, 20 KO’s) in a fight televised by HBO on January 25th at Madison Square Garden. Arum wasn’t interested in matching Mikey against Cuban Yuriorkis Gamboa, which would seem to have been a much better fight than this mismatch. Burgos is a fighter that has held to draws in his last two fights against Roman Martinez and Yakubu Amidu.
Arum said to RingTV “That [Garcia-Burgos] is done for Madison Square Garden. The contracts have been sent out today.”
With matchmaking like this, it may take years and years before Mikey is eventually beaten. This is a safe fight for Mikey because Burgos is incredibly easy to hit and he should have lost his fight to Roman Martinez. For Mikey, this is like a lateral move or even a step down from his last mismatch against Roman Martinez.
Burgos doesn’t bring anything to the table that would enable him to have a chance to beat Mikey, but I guess that’s the who point. If Arum had matched Mikey against Gamboa then there would have been a good chance that Mikey would lose that fight. But by putting him in with Burgos, a fighter that Roman Martinez handled pretty well, it gives Mikey a great chance of staying unbeaten.
If Mikey’s going to stay at super featherweight then we’re going to see a lot of mismatches like this against little known opposition because the division only has one good fighter and that’s Takashi Uchiyama, the WBA champion. The rest of the fighters are nothing special. Mikey’s going to need to move up quickly to the lightweight division if he wants to find good opposition.
Gamboa is the best fighter at lightweight, but if Arum won’t match him up against this guy then I guess we’ll see Mikey stay unbeaten for a long time. But there’s Terence Crawford at lightweight that would give Mikey huge headaches, but I have a feeling Arum won’t put those two with one another because he would be shooting himself in the foot because he promotes both of them. He might let that fight marinate for 2-3 years, and hopefully Arum doesn’t wait too long and ruin the broth by waiting until one of them gets beaten.
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