(Photo credit: Brett Ostrowski / Mario Serrano Team Guerrero) By Dan Ambrose: Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero (33-3-1, 18 KOs) is well aware that his opponent Danny Garcia (31-0, 18 KOs) has already predicted a fifth round knockout in their scheduled fight on January 23.
Guerrero will need to show the boxing world that they were wrong to see him as a washed up fighter that was only picked out for the 27-year-old Garcia in order to get a sure thing title. With the way that Guerrero has looked recently in his last four fights, it is hard to argue in his favor for not being an over-the-hill fighter.
Guerrero and Garcia will be fighting for the vacant WBC welterweight title in their fight on Premier Boxing Champions on Fox from the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California.
Guerrero is well aware that the oddsmakers have Garcia a heavy favorite by the line – 800 to Guerrero’s +500.
“Danny Garcia is very confident coming into this fight. He said he’s going to knock me out in five rounds,” Guerrero said. They both said it’s going to be the Danny Garcia show, so we’ll see. All I know is I’m coming to fight. I’m going to do all my talking in the ring with my fists.”
It is a good thing that Guerrero isn’t doing too much talking before the fight because it’ll help him avoid having egg on his face if things don’t work out for him on 1/23. The less Guerrero has to say the better, because right now he does not have much room to talk. Guerrero has looked bad in each of his last four fights, and he’s definitely no longer fighting at the level he was before his loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. back in 2013.
Before that fight, Guerrero had looked good in beating Andre Berto and Selcuk Aydin at welterweight. After the Mayweather fight, Guerrero stayed out of the ring for over a year before coming back in June of 2014 in struggling to beat fringe contender Yoshiro Kamegai by a 12 round decision. Guerrero took a lot of punishment in that fight.
Guerrero said afterwards that he had intentionally gone to war with the hard-hitting Kamegai, and that he could have made it an easy fight if he had wanted to by choosing to use his boxing skills. Guerrero elected to slug in his next fight against Keith Thurman, and it cost him the fight.
Thurman ended up winning a lopsided 12 round unanimous decision after knocking Guerrero down in the ninth. In Guerrero’s last fight, he won a questionable 10 round split decision over Aron Martinez last June. Once again, Guerrero was knocked own in being dropped in round four.
“I can’t wait to silence all the critics who are writing me off,” Guerrero said.
Guerrero’s poor performances in his last four fights could have been just something that happened because of him trying to be too aggressive in fighting in a style that was not suited for him in the welterweight division. When Guerrero fought at featherweight and super featherweight, he had a big size advantage over his smaller opponents.
This enabled him to slug with them because he was always the bigger guy, and could use his size to dominate them. However, at welterweight, Guerrero is no longer the bigger and stronger guy and he can’t dominate like he did before in the lower weight classes. As soon as Guerrero figures out that he needs to box more in the 147lb division and slug less, he’ll be a better fighter, Whether he gets that message by the time he faces Garcia on January 23rd is the big question.
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