By Dan Ambrose: Former IBF welterweight champion Shawn Porter and his trainer/father Kenny Porter are in a holding pattern right now waiting to see if/when WBA welterweight champion Keith “One Time’ Thurman is able to come back from his automobile accident in order to face them. Kenny Porter says they’ll wait until early June.
If Thurman still isn’t recovered from the whiplash injury he received, then they’ll look to move on and fight WBC welterweight champion Danny Garcia for his title. Porter is ranked #4 with the WBA and #6 with the WBO.
However, he shares the same manager as Garcia in Al Haymon. It’s possible that Haymon could put a fight together between Porter and Garcia in the near future, as long as there isn’t any resistance from Garcia and his father/trainer Angel Garcia.
Unfortunately, that’s always a possibility, because Garcia hasn’t exactly been setting the world on fire with his match-ups in the last three years. Garcia had the one fight against Lucas Matthysse in 2013, and ever since then, it’s been downhill for Garcia with him winning controversial fights and taking on less than impressive opposition.
“Late May, early June is what I’d be hoping for,” said Kenny to ringtv.com. “We don’t want to be into the summer; we don’t want to be into July. No, we got to really take a look at if he’s not healthy enough to go we have to look at fighting someone else at this point.”
It definitely makes sense for Porter and Kenny to move on, because a whiplash injury is something that could linger on and on. With an injury like that, it could take a long time to heal, and there’s no way of telling if it ever will. When you’re talking about the spinal cord, it’s serious when you suffer injuries to that part of your body.
For an athlete, it’s extremely important that they don’t have any lingering injuries to their back, neck and shoulder area. Thurman’s shoulders and back reportedly stiffened up on him when he tried to work out after his car accident. That definitely isn’t good. Porter can’t wait around forever because he’s already been of the ring since last June.
Porter is going to be taking part in an exhibition bout on March 12th against Lanardo Tyner (30-10-2, 19 KOs), but that’s not the same thing as a real fight. Tyner isn’t a major player at 147, and the exhibition bout will be nothing like a real fight.
Both fighters will be wearing headgear and 16oz gloves. The last time Porter fought was in June 2015, when he beat Adrien Broner. June is right around the corner now, and obviously Porter won’t have a real fight until then. He’s thrown a way of his career by waiting around for a fight, and then getting the bad luck of Thurman suffering an injury.
“I think we have to, at some point look, at the dynamics of sitting out that long,” said Kenny. “Even though the process that we’re doing right now is going to keep (us sharp). We have to look at some point in time, ‘OK, it becomes a diminishing return.’ So hopefully, we hear something this week and we can make a decision based on that.”
Kenny says he would like to see proof that Thurman’s injury is authentic. What would be sad is if Porter gives up on the Thurman fight in June, and then we see Thurman emerging to fight someone else immediately after that. It would look to some boxing fans like Thurman waited Porter out until he had given up interest in the fight. That’s the bad thing for Porter. You have to possess a lot of trust in Thurman to be willing to put your career on hold, waiting and hoping that he’ll be able to comeback in a timely fashion. I don’t know if it’s a smart thing for Porter to do this because he’s already been out of the ring for the past nine months. If this stretches out further, Porter will easily been out of the ring for one year. A lot of fighters are never able to regain their prior form when they stay out of the ring for that long.
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