Garcia beats Malignaggi; Jacobs defeats Mora by injury stoppage

By Boxing News - 08/01/2015 - Comments

EW5G6110(Photo credit: Lucas Noonan/Premier Boxing Champions) By Jim Dower: Unbeaten former light welterweight champion Danny Garcia (31-0, 18 KOs) stayed undefeated tonight in stopping a past his best 34-year-old Paulie Malignaggi (33-7, 7 KOs) in a 9th round stoppage in a tune-up fight at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.

Garcia hurt a bleeding Malignaggi with a big left hook in the 9th. Referee Artur Mercante Jr. then stopped in and halted the fight while Malignaggi was trying to defend himself against the ropes. The official time of the stoppage was at 2:22 of the round.

Malignaggi was cut over his right eye in the 3rd. In the 8th, Malignaggi suffered a cut under his right eye.

The fight was not particularly entertaining. Malignaggi had no power on his shots, and he was mostly moving around on the outside trying not to get hit. Garcia was stalking Malignaggi around the ring and missing badly with his shots. Every once in a while, Garcia would land something big, but for the most part he was just missing and looking uncoordinated.

Garcia’s adviser Al Haymon needs to do a better job of match-making for him if he’s going to be putting him in fan friendly fights. If Garcia doesn’t have the talent to compete in the 147lb division, then he needs to find that out sooner rather than later so that he doesn’t waste valuable time fighting 2nd tier fighters like Malignaggi and Rod Salka.

This was Garcia’s third fight at welterweight. In his last fight, he beat Lamont Peterson by a controversial decision. Before that, he defeated lightweight Rod Salka. Malignaggi was essentially a bigger version of Salka, and it was no competitive. Haymon needs to put Garcia in with the best like Shawn Porter, Amir Khan, Keith Thurman, Kell Brook or Marcos Maidana. If Garcia can’t beat those guys, then he should move back down to 140 and continue fighting light welterweights.

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WBA “regular” middleweight champion Daniel Jacobs (30-1, 27 KOs) got up off the canvas in the 1st round to come back and stop former WBA junior middleweight champion Sergio “Latin Snake” Mora (28-4-2, 9 KOs) by a 2nd round injury stoppage.

Mora, 34, injured his right ankle in the 2nd round when his leg slipped out from under him while he was avoiding a right hand from Jacobs. The punch missed, but Mora went down anyway when his foot slipped on the canvas. The referee Gary Rosato blew the call, thinking that Mora had been hit when in fact Jacobs’ right hand had missed.

The referee was going to let Mora resume fighting after the bogus knockdown in the 2nd, but Mora’s right ankle was too injured for him to resume fighting.

In the 1st round, Jacobs dropped Mora with a right to the head. However, while going after Mora to try and finish him off, Jacobs was dropped hard by a left hook to the head by Mora. Jacobs was hurt a lot worse than Mora was in his knockdown. Mora tried to finish Jacobs off, but he wasn’t able to catch him with anything big enough to end it.

With this win, Jacobs will either fight another voluntary defense, which would be his third straight voluntary, or he’ll fight his No.1 mandatory. Chris Eubank Jr. is currently ranked No.1 by the WBA at 160. However, it’s likely that Jacobs will face former WBO middleweight champion Peter Quillin next. Both are with Al Haymon, and it’s a fight that makes a lot of sense for both guys.

Jacobs looks pretty flawed, and I can’t imagine him getting past Quillin, and definitely not WBA Super World middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin.

Other boxing results on the card:

Rafael Vasquez TKO 1 Mario Macias
Thomas Velasquez KO 5 Gabriel Braxton
Titus Williams UD 4 Micah Branch
Adam Kownacki KO 2 Maurenzo Smith
Heather Hardy TKO 7 Renata Domsodi



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