By Dan Ambrose: Mikey Garcia (37-0, 30 KOs) says he’s not upset at the postponement of his fight against IBF light welterweight champion Sergey Lipinets (13-0, 10 KOs) that has caused their fight to be delayed until March 10.
Garcia, 30, has continued to train to get ready for the fight with Lipinets at the Freeman Coliseum in San Antonio, Texas. The 28-year-old Lipinet’s injured hand has healed and he’s ready to defend his belt against Mikey. This is Lipinet’s opportunity to put himself on the map in the sport by beating a popular fighter that is straying outside of his normal weight class in hopes becoming a 4-belt division champion.
This fight is about Mikey padding his resume with a statistic rather than him going after someone that the boxing fans want to see him fight. There is zero demand for Mikey vs. Lipinets. Mikey would have been better off waiting for the March 17th fight between Amir Imam and Jose Carlos Ramirez to have concluded and gone after the winner for the WBC World light welterweight title. Fighting the winner of that fight could gain a lot of attention for Mikey. But there would be a lot of risk for him fighting one of those guys, and he could very well lose. Lipinets is the safer choice for Mikey, which is probably why he picked him instead of facing the Imam-Ramirez winner. Mikey is being careful.
Mikey wants to beat Lipinets, and move back down to 135 to face Jorge Linares for his WBA lightweight title. It would be a unification fight, as Mikey still holds the WBC lightweight title. However, Top Rank is trying to put together a fight between their fighter Vasyl Lomachenko and Linares for May 12th. That fight might not happen though, because Golden Boy is using that date for the replay of the Saul Canelo Alvarez vs. Gennady Golovkin fight, and they don’t want to let Linares take away interest in the replay by fighting Lomachenko on the same night. Mikey is in a good position to get the Linares fight as long as he beats Lipinets.
Mikey is moving up to 140 after spotting a vulnerable champion that he feels he can beat to win his 4th division world title. Mikey believes that he’ll soon by a top pound-for-pound fighter and pay-per-view guys. With Mikey targeting weaker champions like Lipinets, it’s going to be a hard road for him to try and become a star.
Mikey needs to face the best for him to become the star he wants to. Lipinets is not considered the best fighter at 140 or even the second or third best. He’s just a belt holder, who took advantage of Terence Crawford vacating his IBF title. Once Crawford had moved up to 147, Lipinets fought Akhiro Kondo for the belt in November of last year.
“Even though it was pushed back a few weeks, it didn’t really affect us at all,” said Garcia to ESPN.com. “We continued to train, we continued our sparring. We work hard; we have great sparring partners for this match as well. So, I couldn’t be happier.”
This isn’t the first fight for Mikey at 140. He beat Adrien Broner by a 12 round unanimous decision last July on Showtime. That’s the fight that made Mikey believe that he can compete with fighters at 140 and 147. Broner looked weight drained and poorly trained for the Garcia fight. Mikey could find out the hard way that the 140 lb. weight class is a lot tougher than what he originally thought. Broner is a former super featherweight, who has moved up in weight