(Photo Credit: Stephanie Trapp/SHOWTIME) By Dan Ambrose: Last Saturday night #1 WBO, #2 WBC Lucas Matthysse (36-3, 34 KOs) defeated WBC Silver 140 pound champion Roberto Ortiz (31-1-1, 24 KOs) by an impressive 2nd round knockout at the U.S Bank Arena in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Immediately after the fight, Matthysse said he wanted to fight WBA/WBC light welterweight champion Danny Garcia next if he had the courage to take the fight. But if Garcia didn’t want the fight, Matthysse said he’d look to face Adrien Broner, who defeated Emmanuel Taylor on the same card last night in Cincinnati, but in a far less impressive fashion.
It didn’t take Garcia long to respond to what Matthysse said about him. Garcia took to twitter and made the following comments about Matthysse:
“I beat his [expletive] so bad the first time, he wanted to retire! He [Matthysse] don’t care about winning; he wants the money.”
Garcia defeated Matthysse by a 12 round unanimous decision last September on the Floyd Mayweather Jr vs. Marcos Maidana I card at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. However, Garcia’s victory over Matthysse was far from one-sided as Garcia would have you believe. He won by the scores of 114-112, 115-111, and 114-112.
Garcia got credit for a knockdown in the 11th in which he shoved Matthysse really hard into the ropes, causing him to get entangled. Then while he was defenseless, Garcia unloaded with a flurry of shots that sent Matthysse down. The referee decided to let the knockdown count despite the shove by Garcia and Matthysse being tangled in the ropes. The knockdown came in a round where Matthysse was winning.
If you take away the knockdown then you’ve got a Matthysse round. Instead of Garcia winning the fight, you’ve Matthysse winning. That one controversial knockdown gave Garcia the victory. Garcia got away with a great deal of low blows in the fight. He did eventually get docked a point in the 12th, but the referee Tony Weeks waited almost the entire fight before he finally made the point deduction.
Matthysse wants a chance to avenge the loss to Garcia, and prove that the defeat was just a fluke thing. Garcia really doesn’t have anyone else to fight right now since he’s not interested in fighting Mauricio Herrera again after beating him by a controversial last March.
There’s a possibility that Garcia could fight IBF light welterweight champion Lamont Peterson later this year, but Peterson is a guy that Matthysse knocked out in 3 rounds last year. It doesn’t prove anything for Garcia to fight fighting Peterson other than he can try and beat a fighter that Matthysse already defeated with ease.
In Garcia’s last fight, he defeated unranked lightweight Rod Salka by a 2nd round knockout. Showtime televised the mismatch for some reason, as well as Peterson’s mismatch against Edgar Santana.
It was thought at the time that Garcia and Peterson would then fight each other later this year, but it’s now looking like that’s not going to be the case. Just who Garcia will end up fighting is unknown. His WBC mandatory challenger Viktor Postol wants his title shot against Garcia, but it remains to be seen whether he’ll get the fight.
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