By Dan Ambrose: Last Saturday’s unification fight between WBA welterweight champion Keith Thurman and WBC champ Danny Garcia brought in big, big ratings on Showtime Championship Boxing on CBS, as presented by Premier Boxing Champions. It was a good fight with lots of two-way action.
The casual fans that saw the contest on CBS had a real treat. The Garcia vs. Thurman fight pulled in a big 2.2 ratings during the broadcast. Thurman won the fight by a 12 round split decision to become the unified WBA/WBC welterweight champion at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.
16,533 fans attended the Thurman-Garcia fight last Saturday.
The ratings for the Thurman-Garcia fight was a large increase in viewers from Thurman’s previous fight against Shawn Porter last June, which brought in a rating of 1.8.
Thurman got the nod from the judge with the scores 116-112, 115-113 for Thurman and 115-113 Garcia. There weren’t too many complaints from the boxing fans about the decision for the fight.
Thurman outworked Garcia during most of the match. Garcia came on a little late but he had too much ground to make up for him to pull out a decision. He would have needed to knock Thurman down multiple times for him to get the win short of scoring a knockout.
If there’s any criticism you can level at the 28-year-old Thurman for his performance against Garcia it’s the fact that he didn’t finish strong. Thurman started to playing it safe by the 9th round in moving and not mixing it up like he had earlier in the fight. It just looked like Thurman knew he had a big lead, so he decided to milk it by coating the last four rounds by staying in constant motion.
The fans at the Barclays Center realized what Thurman was doing, and they loudly booed him. Thurman’s decision to play it safe in the last four rounds is the opposite of that the New York fans usually see when middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin fights in New York. Golovkin wants to please the fans by turning his fights into “drama shows” with him looking to knockout his opponent.
That style of fighting is not what we were seeing from Thurman in the last 4 rounds. He just coasting and not willing to mix it up with Garcia in a real way. Thurman wants to be a big star like Floyd Mayweather Jr., but he’s not quite ready to adopt the fighting style that he needs to for him to become a big star.
It was fortunate for Thurman that he had done enough in the early part of the fight to build up a big enough lead for him to stall out the fight in the last 4 rounds. When you cut it close the way Thurman did, it doesn’t always work for you. Thurman was lucky that he didn’t lose the fight against Garcia for his lazy coasting that he was doing.
“This is my dream coming true,” Thurman said. “[Late trainer and mentor] Ben Getty believed in me before I knew that I had the ability to become a champion. He said that I was destined for greatness. He made me dedicate myself to the sport of boxing.”
Thurman rocked Garcia with some big shots in the opening round. He tried to finish Garcia off with a flurry of punches, but Garcia countered Thurman with a big left to the head that caused him to back off. It was clearly the best round of the fight for Thurman, as he was fresh at the time and still willing to mix it up.
Thurman didn’t attack Garcia in the same way after the 1st, but he was still able to land hard right hands to the head in rounds 2-6. The mistake that Garcia made was he waiting too long to attack Thurman, and this enabled him commit to his shots with maximum power. Thurman isn’t nearly the same puncher when he’s under attack the way he was against Shawn Porter.
Thurman was sloppy in that fight, and form wasn’t nearly as good. When Thurman has to punch on the move, he doesn’t possess the same power. Garcia was letting Thurman measure him and load up on single shots for most of the fight. Garcia’s fighting style is built around him sitting back and waiting for his opponents to throw their shots so that he can counter them with his left hook. That style was never going to work against Thurman because he had too much hand speed and mobility. Garcia failed to adapt until the mid-point of the fight. By the time that Garcia did start to attack Thurman, he had already let him build up a wide lead.
Thurman likes to fight hard in the first 8 rounds to build big leads. He then coasts in the last part of his fights. Garcia didn’t realize that Thurman was going to try and build up a big lead early. Moreover, Garcia failed to recognize that Thurman was looking to steal rounds in the last 20 seconds of every round by attacking fiercely. Thurman would do very little in through most of the 3 minute rounds, but then he would attack Garcia all out in the last seconds of the round to impress the judges. Garcia should have understood what Thurman was trying to do, and attacked him. Garcia lost rounds because of him not seeing the tactics that Thurman was using in stealing the rounds.
Thurman is going to need to change his style of fighting in the future when he eventually faces Errol Spence Jr., because he’s going to be forcing him to fight the full 3 minutes of every round, and he’s not going to stand and wait for him to come forward the way that Garcia was foolishly doing. If Thurman goes into shutdown mode after 6 rounds against Spence, he’ll lose the fight and might end up getting knocked out.
“The judges are judges. I thought I out-boxed him,” Thurman said. “I thought it was a clear victory, but Danny came to fight. I knew when it was [announced as a] split, and I had that wide spread, I knew it had to go to me. I was not giving the fight away. I felt like we had a nice lead, [and] we could cool down. I felt like we were controlling the three-minute intervals every round. My defense was effective. He wasn’t landing.”
Garcia was landing. Thurman was getting despite his movement that he was using in the last four rounds. It was a mistake on Thurman’s part to assume that he had a wide enough lead to win the fight. One judge scored the fight for Garcia. It’s only matter of time before Thurman loses his first fight. If he keeps stalling out fights that haven’t been decided, he’ll lose sooner or later.
For Thurman to cement himself in as the best fighter in the welterweight division, he’s going to have to prove that he can fight hard and not get lazy in the last portions of his fight. He’s not a great finisher despite his self proclaimed moniker “One-Time.” For Thurman to walk the walk, he’s going to need to be less lazy and more courageous in his fights and not become a 6-round fighter, which you can argue what he basically is. Thurman fights hard for 6 rounds and then goes into the running mode.