By Dan Ambrose: Unbeaten WBC lightweight champion Mikey Garcia (38-0, 30 KOs) and IBF 135 lb. champion Robert Easter Jr. (21-0, 14 KOs) have a fight in the works for July 28 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California.
Easter Jr. is the best available fight for Mikey at 135 while he waits for the outcome of this month’s fight between WBA lightweight champion Jorge Linares and Vasyl Lomachenko. Mikey wants to fight the winner of that match. Easter Jr. is a good fight for Mikey while he waits to find out which of those two he’ll be facing later this year.
The lanky 5’11” Easter Jr. is no easy out for Mikey Garcia. With his long 76 inch reach, Easter Jr. is going to have an 8 inch reach advantage along with his 5 inch height advantage over Mikey. For the most part, Mikey has been fighting guys from 5’3” to 5’6” during his 12-year pro career.
On rare occasions, Mikey has fought 5’8” fighters, but he’s no come close to competing with anyone 5’11”, and definitely not anyone with an 8-inch reach advantage like Easter Jr. Mikey is going to have to earn every shot he lands in this fight, because he’s going to be getting hit a lot. Mikey’s bread and butter punch, his short left hook, likely be a factor in this fight, because Easter Jr. is going to be on the outside peppering him jabs.
Mikey is a good fighter, but he doesn’t handle adversity very well. He’s a front runner type of guy. When Mikey is ahead of a beleaguered opponent, he’s at his best. But when his opponents are coming after him and not giving up like in his fights with Orlando Salido, Adrien Broner and Sergey Lipinets, he gets worried and falls apart mentally. Mikey isn’t used to fighting guys that are persistent and powerful. For that reason if Easter Jr. brings the fight to Garcia, he could beat him. At the very least, he’ll make Garcia look bad like Lipinets did.
The 30-year-old Garcia surprised a lot of people recently in deciding to vacate his IBF light welterweight title after winning it last March in beating Sergey Lipinets by a 12 round unanimous decision. That fight was far from easy for the knockout artist Mikey, who has spent most of his career scoring easy knockout wins. Being forced to go the distance in a grueling fight against the powerful Lipinets might not have been Mikey’s cup of team. Let’s not kid ourselves. The fight was a lot closer than the scores handed in by the three judges. They scored it 116-111, 117-110 and 117-110. Mikey appeared to have just barely edged it, and his beaten up face showed the price he paid in winning. After the International Boxing Federation ordered Mikey to immediately start negotiations with the tough as nails Ivan Baranchyk, he opted to vacate the belt rather than go through another likely grueling fight. Did Mikey give up his IBF 140 lb. to duck the 25-year-old Baranchyk? You be the judge of that. Baranchyk is every bit as tough as Lipinets, but younger.
The 27-year-old Easter Jr. had a lot of trouble recently in beating former WBA super featherweight champion Javier Fortuna (33-21, 23 KOs) by a 12 round split decision last January at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. The judges scored it 114-113, 115-112 for Easter Jr. and 114-113 for Fortuna. The crowd at ringside booed the results loudly, letting the judges know what they thought of their decision. It was not the kind of performance that Easter Jr. needed to get ready for a tough fighter like Mikey.
“Staying sharp. I’ll have some news for you guys soon,” Mikey Garcia said on his Twitter.
I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if Mikey loses to Easter Jr. This is a fight that could very well go against Mikey unless he has the kind of judging that we saw in his last fight against Lipinets. Those judges were very kind to Mikey with their scoring. If the scoring is done more logical manner, Mikey could lose to Easter Jr. Hopefully, Mikey doesn’t build up a small lead and then bow out of the fight with an injury like he did against Orlando Salido when the going got tough in their fight in 2013. a lot of boxing fan thought Mikey quit in that fight after Salido weathered an early storm from him and began to take over the fight.