Arum: Mikey Garcia will soon be #1 pound-for-pound fighter in boxing

By Boxing News - 01/23/2014 - Comments

garcia4By Dan Ambrose: As most hardcore boxing fans know, Bob Arum of Top Rank is openly grooming WBO super featherweight champion Mikey Garcia (33-0, 28 KO’s) to be an opponent for Manny Pacquiao in either September of 2014 or sometime in 2015, if Pacquiao re-signs with Top Rank. Arum believes that Mikey is heading towards super star status in the future. Arum believes this because of how easily Mikey has been defeating his featherweight and super featherweight competition.

“I believe that he is a top 10 pound-for-pound fighter right now, and soon he will be universally accepted as the best pound-for-pound fighter in boxing,” Arum said via ESPN.

For Mikey to be the #1 pound-for-pound fighter, Floyd Mayweather Jr. would either have to retire or gotten so old that he’s lost his skills. The same for Andre Ward, the #2 pound-for-pound fighter. I’ve seen Mikey fight many times, and I’ve never seen the same kinds of skills from him that I see with Mayweather and Ward. Mikey gets by with his power more than his skills. In his toughest fight against Orlando Salido, Mikey looked to be gassing out in the 7th and 8th, and he quite fortunate that the fight was stopped after he broke his nose in the 8th. Had it gone another 4 rounds, we might have seen Salido coming back score a stoppage.

There are a lot of question marks about Mikey that will need to be answered starting when he moves up to the lightweight division for his next fight. I’m not sure if Arum will allow Mikey to answer them by putting him in with a good fighter or if he’ll match him weakly to make him look better than he actually is. It is telling that Arum didn’t put Mikey in with Guillermo Rigondeaux when he had the chance when Mikey was fighting at featherweight. Logically, that’s a fight that Arum should have made if he really believed in Mikey. Arum didn’t make that fight, and I would have to conclude that he didn’t believe Mikey would beat Rigondeaux.

The real question is can Mikey become the #1 pound-for-pound fighter in boxing by being matched up with the opposition that Arum has been feeding him? Mikey has a fight with Juan Carlos Burgos this Saturday night instead of Takashi Uchiyama. Why is Arum matching Mikey against Burgos instead of the guy recognized as the best fighter in the super featherweight division in Uchiyama?



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