By Dan Ambrose: In a card filled with mismatches, WBA/WBC light welterweight champion Danny Garcia (28-0, 16 KO’s) will be facing little known lightweight fighter Rod Salka (19-3, 3 KO’s) on August 9th in a Showtime televised fight at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.
Why Garcia is being matched against a lightweight instead of a light welterweight contender is the big question. The other question is why isn’t Garcia being matched against a contender?
“This is my third fight at Barclays Center, and it feels like a second home to me,” said Danny Garcia, the undefeated Philadelphia native. “I’ll be ready for Rod Salka, and I’m going to give my Brooklyn fans another great show.”
In the co-feature bout, IBF light welterweight champion Lamont Peterson (32-2-1, 16 KO’s) will be defending his title against 35-year-old #11 WBA Edgar Santana (29-4, 20 KO’s).
The idea behind these two soft title defenses by Danny Garcia and Lamont Peterson is to make sure they both look good, and that they continue winning long enough for their unification match later this year. To make sure that fight takes place, the handlers for Garcia and Peterson decided on matching them soft so that there wouldn’t be any slip ups.
We already saw Garcia arguably beaten in his last fight by Mauricio Herrera last March. Two judges had Garcia winning that fight, while the rest of the boxing world invalidated the two judges by giving Herrera the win. Now instead of giving Herrera a badly needed rematch, Garcia is being matched against a non-top 15 ranked lightweight named Salka. Peterson has the better fighter of the two in 35-year-old Santana, but we’re still not talking a real quality fighter. Santana is a fringe contender at best.
It’s surprising that Showtime agreed to televise the Garcia-Salka and Peterson-Santana fights, because there are far better opponents that Garcia and Peterson could have fought. Garcia could have fought his #1 mandatory challenger Viktor Postol, who is worlds better than Salka, and a lot bigger. Garcia could have fought rematches with Herrera or Lucas Matthysse. Garcia could have fought Thomas Dulorme. Any one of those guys would have been a much better option than Salka.
I’m good with Garcia and Peterson fighting each other this year, but I think it’s sad that they had to be matched against weak opposition to make sure that they got to their unification fight in one piece.
In another fight on the card, Daniel Jacobs (27-1, 24 KO’s) will be taking on Jarrod Fletcher (18-1, 10 KO’s) for the vacant WBA middleweight title. Don’t be surprised if this is the best match on the card.
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