By Chris Williams: Oscar De La Hoya thinks lightweight champion Mikey Garcia is barking up the wrong tree by thinking about moving up o welterweight o challenge IBF champion Errol Spence Jr. for later this year in December.
De La Hoya thinks the 5’9” Spence’s size advantage over the 5’6” Mikey will be too much for him to handle. De La Hoya sees Mikey as being doomed to his first loss of his career when he gets inside the ring with Spence. Mikey sees something in Spence that makes him think that he can beat him, but the boxing public doesn’t believe that he has any chance against him.
Mikey’s hand speed and mobility is better than Spence’s. but his punching power didn’t look impressive in his fight against former IBF 140 pound champion Sergey Lipinets last March. Mikey won the fight by a 12 round unanimous decision, but he was unable to hurt Lipinets with his punches. Lipinets’ face was unmarked at the end of the fight despite having taken Mikey’s best shots for 12 rounds. In contrast, Mikey’s face was badly swollen and bloody. Lipinets doesn’t have the same kind of punching power that Spence possesses. If Lipinets was able to lump up Mikey, then a fighter like Spence will do much more damage. Mikey has good timing, but he’s still going to have a hard time trying to keep Spence off him.
De La Hoya’s thoughts about the fight are the same as what many boxing fans have about the match. They think Mikey is too small to beat Spence. There are a lot of fans who doubt Mikey could beat interim WBC light welterweight champion Regis Prograis as well. That would be the logical progression for Mikey to take before facing a knockout artist like Spence, but Mikey’s shown no interest in fighting Prograis.
“It’s a very brave move and I give Mikey all the credit in the world, but Spence is the real deal, and if you’re going to move up two weight classes to fight Spence, who I believe is a huge threat to anybody. I’ve always said I would love to promote Spence. I believe I can make him a pay-per-view star, but I guess he’s happy making his money where he’s at. I strongly feel Spence would be too big for him,” De La Hoya said about Mikey Garcia.
Mikey, 30, has a lot of courage to want to fight a dangerous puncher like Spence instead of taking on a lesser threat like Danny Garcia or Shawn Porter. Spence has arguably been avoided by the top welterweights Danny Garcia, Porter and Thurman. For Mikey to step up to face him from two divisions below him, it says a lot about his courage.
Mikey hasn’t even cleaned out the lightweight division yet. He’s not faced Vasyl Lomachenko, Jorge Linares, Raymundo Beltran, Yvan Mendy or Luke Campbell. Before Mikey should be thinking of facing Spence, he should clean out the lightweight division, and then clean out the 140 pound weight class so that he can prove that he’s the best fighter in those weight classes and deserves a fight against Spence, because right now he doesn’t rate a fight against him. The contest is perceived as too much of a mismatch for it to be worthwhile.
”I’ve never seen a good little man beat a good big man,” De La Hoya said in talking about Mikey vs. Spence. ”Those guys are in their primes. It’s impossible.”
You can argue that De La Hoya lost to a good little man in Manny Pacquiao in his last fight of his career in
2008. However, the difference is De La Hoya was 34-years-old at the time, weight drained and no longer anywhere near his prime. De La Hoya had been a part time boxer in the last three years prior to that fight.
Trainer Virgil Hunter thinks it’s a bad idea for Mikey to move up two weight classes to fight Spence. Hunter admires Mikey’s courage in wanting to move up to 147 to challenge Spence, but he doesn’t think it’s going to work out in his favor.
”Logic would say that he shouldn’t move like that, but at the same time you have to respect his ambition,” trainer Virgil Hunter said to Fighthype. ”Sometimes the fighter can’t see what you can see. Obviously something in him that he sees in Errol that makes him think he can win the fight. Bu I would be concerned if I was his coach, and I think [trainer] Robert [Garcia] is against it. I think his dad is against it,” Hunter said.
Of course, Mikey’s brother and father are both against the idea of him moving up two weight classes to fight Spence. Mikey could get seriously hurt in facing Spence and have his career shortened if he loses too badly. Mikey has never fought anyone that has had the size, power and talent to walk him down and demolish him the way that Spence would. In Mikey’s toughest fight of his career against Orlando Salido, his trainer Robert Garcia pulled him out in the 8th round when the tide of the fight had started to turn against him. The official excuse was that Mikey had suffered a broken nose from a head-butt from Salido. The reality is that Salido was starting to walk a tired looking Garcia down by that point in the fight, and he was starting to wear him down. When Mikey suffered a broken nose in the 8th, Robert quickly pulled him out of the fight rather than keeping him inside the ring to battle Salido. If Mikey fights Spence, there’s a very good chance that Robert will pull him out within the first six rounds once he suffers his first injury or if he gets stunned. There’s very little chance that Mikey will be allowed to go out on his shield the way warriors do.
Hunter says he doesn’t like the concern the boxing media is showing Mikey by saying he shouldn’t take on Spence, as they didn’t show the same concern for former super bantamweight champion Guillermo Rigondeaux when he moved up two weight classes to challenge former World Boxing Organization super featherweight champion Vasyl Lomachenko last December. The fans and media were quiet about previously unbeaten Rigondeaux taking a tremendous risk with his pro career by moving up twow eight divisions without the benefit of a catch-weight for the Lomachenko fight.
”The thing that gets me more than anything is the media concern about the position Mikey is putting himself in,” Hunter said. ”The concern is can you get it [Spence fight] at a catch-weight, and they’re telling that he should do this. But the same concern wasn’t there for [Guillermo] Rigondeaux. They pushed the fight justified by him [Rigondeaux] being a two-time gold medalist, but never giving him the kind of attention that he shouldn’t do it, and that he’s going up two weight classes. So I thought that was kind of weird. They’re looking out for Mikey’s welfare, and not looking out for Rigongdeaux’s [welfare],” Hunter said. ”If Errol beats Mikey, will he get credit that Lomachenko got? Will he get credit or [perceived as only winning due to him] being the bigger man. He was supposed to do this. Will he get credit for beating Mikey that Lomo got [for beating Lomachenko]? That’s not to take anything away from Lomachenko. I just see a double standard of it all. You can’t knock Mikey Garcia for taking the challenge,” Virgil Hunter said.
I think it goes without saying that Spence won’t get credit for beating Mikey. It doesn’t matter if Spence stops Mikey I the 1st round, he’s not going to get credit from the boxing fans because of his huge size advantage over him. Garcia has never fought at welterweight before, which is going to make it even tougher for Spence to be given credit afterwards for beating him.
