By Dan Ambrose: Freddie Roach thinks Mikey Garcia is taking too much of a step up weight in talking about wanting to move up two divisions to fight IBF welterweight champion Errol Spence Jr. later this year. Roach would prefer that Garcia (39-0, 30 KOs) move up slowly in weight rather than going up two weight classes to fight a guy with the size and punching power of unbeaten Spence (24-0, 21 KOs), who he feels might be the best fighter in the welterweight division today.
Garcia will be looking to gamble when/if he faces Spence later this year. This type of gamble is like what you see motorcycle daredevils take in jumping over buses or water fountain. If Garcia is willing to fight to the bitter end against Spence, then he would win over a lot of boxing fans. But if this is just a ploy to win fans, it’ll be a sad statement for Garcia’s career, because people will know what he’s doing.
Roach respects Garcia, 30, for taking on a dangerous fighter like Spence. He’s not moving up in weight to take on a lesser guy, which was one of the main criticisms boxing fans had of Mikey after he moved up to 140 last year. Instead of taking on the super talents in the light welterweight division like Regis Prograis and Terence Crawford, Garcia fought Adrien Broner and Sergey Lipinets. Those are good fighters, but not in the same class as Crawford or Prograis. If Garcia does fight Spence, it would be showing a lot in him.
“I think that it’s too much of a jump. I mean, let’s go one step at a time and then we’ll see how we do in those fights and then that’ll dictate what happens at that because ‘47 is big. I mean, and Spence is a great puncher. He can really hit,” Roach said to Fighthub. “I like Errol Spence, he was one of my favorite guys when I was training the Olympic team that year and he was on that team and he was a great puncher.”
Mikey is trying to gain fans the hard way by taking on the toughest fighter in Spence. It puts Mikey in the position where he’ll wind up looking good in the eyes of the boxing public even if he loses. Mikey just needs to put up a good fight, and go out on his shield. As long as Mikey’s trainer/brother Robert Garcia is ready to pull the plug on the fight when the going gets tough, he’ll not taking too much of a beating. Robert pulled Garcia out of his fight against Orlando Salido in round eight when things started getting tough for him. Garcia dominated the fight in the first six rounds, but Salido started taking over the fight in the 7th, and Robert then pulled Mikey out after the 8th when he suffered a broken nose. A lot of fighters compete with broken noses, but Robert said he didn’t want to leave Mikey out there in the Salido fight. It looked to some that Robert saw that the tide had turned and Salido had taken over the contest. Hopefully, we don’t see the same thing in the Spence vs. Garcia fight. We don’t need to see Robert pull Miley out of the fight after four or five rounds due to an injury. If that’s the case, then all Mikey needs to do is build a small lead in the first four or five rounds before the contest is halted due to an injury.
“Yes, definitely,” Roach said about him believing that Spence would someday become a world champion when he first saw him. ”Then he knocked out Broner at the Olympic training center and Broner didn’t go down, though, but the thing is he just didn’t know where he was for a little while,” Roach ”But the fight would’ve been stopped if was a real fight. He leads with his power hand so that’s his power hand. He is a very good fighter, Spence, and he might be the best fighter in the world today.”
