By Dan Ambrose: Mikey Garcia surprisingly blames his 1 1/2 year layoff on the COVID-19 pandemic that caused many boxers to sit on the sidelines inactive.
It’s a weak excuse for Mikey to blame the pandemic on his inactivity because motivated boxers have continued to work throughout.
There are many fighters, many of lesser guys like YouTubers Logan and Jake Paul, raking in millions during the pandemic with their boxing matches.
Mikey talks about his inactivity
“Maybe they forgot about the fight with Jessie Vargas [in February 2020], so they feel that my last fight was against Spence,” said Mikey to Fighthype about fans noting that he’s stopped fighting.
“So they didn’t find out about the Jessie fight, and so they haven’t heard and haven’t seen me. Last year, COVID happened, and almost every fighter was out the entire year,” said Mikey.
Even if you could agree with Mikey about many boxers not getting fights in 2020, that’s not an excuse for him not staying active this year in 2021. With Mikey’s popularity, it would have been EASY for him to have gotten a second fight in 2020, and he could have fought already in 2021.
One BIG problem that has kept Mikey out of the ring is the tunnel vision that he’s shown towards wanting to fight Manny Pacquiao. Mikey has talked incessantly about wanting to fight Pacquiao, making it know that he wanted to fight the Filipino fighter.
If Mikey had stayed busy in 2020 and 2021, he would have had a good chance of getting the fight with Pacquiao. In the end, what likely prevented Mikey from getting selected for the fight with Pacquiao was his inactivity.
Pacquiao had to have seen how fat Mikey had gotten during his time out of the ring, and the last thing he needed was to take on a guy that had let himself go physically.
Did the loss to Spence change Mikey?
“I don’t think it did,” said Mikey about his belief that the Spence fight didn’t change him. “I don’t know in what way. It’s just that people don’t see me on a daily, so they don’t know much about me as much as they think they know,” said Mikey.
Something about the loss to Spence changed Mikey, leaving him unmotivated and letting his career dwindle. No one knows for sure what the defeat did to Mikey.
Did he lose his self-confidence? Could it be the millions Mikey made from the Spence fight that robbed him of his hunger to keep fighting? Mikey got a big payday from the Spence fight, and he likely has been buying a lot of nice things with the money.
For fighters that suddenly come into a lot of money, they’re able to return to the gym to get back to work, but not all of them. For some, the money ruins their careers, causing them to get fat and rarely fight.
Pacquiao wasn’t going to fight someone that had stopped fighting and was looking for a big money-match-up.
Also, the weight Mikey put on during his year and a half out of the ring, letting himself get fat to the point where he no longer resembled a professional athlete.
Will Mikey ever fight again?
When you’d see Mikey being interviewed on YouTube, he looked like a chunky person who was talking a lot about cars. It looks like Mikey’s focus is no longer on boxing, and it’s quite possible he might not return to the ring.
We’ve seen Mikey talking about wanting to get a big fight against Pacquiao, but he’s not shown the same interest in fighting other boxers.
The overall impression many boxing fans have is Mikey is looking for exclusively cash-out fights, ones that he has almost no chance of winning.
It seems that Mikey reached a turning point in his career when he lost to Errol Spence Jr in March 2019.
Since that lopsided 12 round unanimous decision loss, the former four-division world champion Garcia has fought only once, and that was against an over-the-hill welterweight Jessie Vargas.
The 33-year-old Mikey is letting inactivity ruin what time he has left in his career, and he could regret it later for wasting all the time.