By Dan Ambrose: If you were wondering why WBA/WBC light welterweight champion Danny Garcia (29-0, 17 KOs) agreed to fight a little unranked lightweight named Rod Salka (19-4, 3 KOs) in his last fight on Showtime this month, Garcia says that he’s thinking about his career. He says fighters have a short career, and it’s a business thing.
“Fans last forever; boxing is a short-term career,” Garcia said to Fighthype. “I got to do what’s best for my life and my career. You can be 70-years-old and a fan. I can only box for another 10 years. I got to do what’s best for me.”
In other words, take the most amount of money for the least amount of risk is what I believe Garcia is trying to say here. If Showtime is willing to purchase fights of this kind where he’s matched up against a guy that has no kind of chance, then it sounds like Garcia is going to take that fight in order to make his career last as long as possible.
I’m not sure that boxing fans want to hear that kind of stuff. Fans generally want their fighters to be warriors that take the best fights each time they fight. They don’t want to hear a fighter admitting that he’s looking to take the easy money with no risk in order to prolong his career.
Garcia green lights the match-ups that his adviser Al Haymon gives to him, but it comes down to Showtime as being the one to put a halt to it by choosing to pass on fights like Garcia vs. Salka in the future. If Showtime is the one that is looking out for the boxing fans, then they’re not going to empower Garcia and Haymon to make these kinds of fights in the future.
If you think about it as a job; if you had an employee that wanted to take it easy and go at only half speed because he didn’t want to tire himself out each day in order to have a longer career, you might not be too happy about it. You’d want your employee to be putting in maximum effort each day and not taking it easy because he’s trying to not wear himself out. If the employee is going to be half-stepping, then you need to let that employee go in order to find someone that will do the work at full speed at 100%.
If Showtime says no to Salka-like opponents for Garcia and for other fighters that are matched up in mismatches in high visible fights, then this kind of thing will stop. But I have my doubt that’s going to happen anytime soon.
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