By Dan Ambrose: Mikey Garcia is in negotiations for a clash against former WBA 140-lb champion Regis ‘Rougarou’ Prograis for the fall on DAZN. Mikey has taken off a lot of weight that he packed on during his long layoff. Mike Coppinger of ESPN reporting the news of the fight.
With the amount of time that Mikey has been out of the ring, Prograis might be a little too good for him. It’s been years since Mikey has been an active two-fight a year fighter, and he may have lost too much from his game due to his inactivity.
Mikey had been trying to get a fight against Manny Pacquiao during the pandemic, but couldn’t get it done. Pacquiao chose to go in a different direction to face IBF/WBC welterweight champion Errol Spence Jr on August 21.
You can’t blame Pacquiao for taking that fight because, unlike Mikey, Spence has kept active with his career.
“I think it’s a great matchup for a few reasons being that he’s an aggressive fighter, he’s accomplished, former world champion and he’s also hungry to regain that position and have a big victory,” said Mikey Garcia to ESPN about him facing Prograis next.
“I’ve been off for a little over a year now, a year and a half,” Garcia said.
Mikey says he’s only been out of the ring for a year and a half, but what he’s not saying is that he was out of action for 2 1/2 years from 2014 to 2016. He’s missed a lot of time with his career since 2014, roughly four years.
It’s hard to know what Mikey has left at this point in his career. If Mikey had stayed active all these years, he would have accomplished so much more with his career, and his skills wouldn’t be eroded. The way Mikey looked last year against Jessie Vargas, he looked nothing like the fighter he once was.
Of course, Mikey was fighting at 147, and his power hasn’t carried up to that weight class. When Mikey was fighting at 126, he could get away with having a low work rate, but he can’t do that at 140 and 147.
To win those weight classes, Mikey must throw more punches, and thus far he hasn’t shown that he can do that. At 140, Mikey beat a past his prime Adrien Broner in 2017 and struggled to defeat Sergey Lipinets in 2018.
Mikey took a lot of punishment against Lipinets. He won, but his face was swollen up badly by Lipinets’ shots. When you look at the problems gave Mikey, it’s impossible to picture him beating Prograis. Lipinets is nowhere near as good as Prograis, and yet he had Mikey looking average.
Taking on Prograis (26-1, 22 KOs) is a huge step down in terms of money for Mikey, but it’s a match that will put him in a position to get lucrative fights against Gervonta ‘Tank’ Davis and Ryan Garcia.
This is a tough fight for the former four-division world champion Mikey (40-1, 30 KOs) because he hasn’t fought in a year and a half since his close 12 round majority decision over past his prime Jessie Vargas in February 2020.
Mikey, 33, didn’t look that great in the second half of that contest after dropping Vargas in the fifth round. Vargas took advantage of Mikey’s anemic work rate and was able to climb back into the fight.
Although two of the judges had it wide for Mikey, scoring it 116-111 x 2, the third judge scored it correctly with a 114-113 score. Mikey just barely won the fight, and that was against a completely washed-up Vargas.
Mikey may regret taking this fight with Prograis because this is a guy that likely would have beaten everyone that he’s ever fought before apart from Spence. There’s literally no one on Mikey’s resume that Prograis wouldn’t beat once you take Spence out of the equation.
Spence beat Mikey with ease, blanking him by an embarrassingly one-sided 12 round unanimous decision in March 2019.
You can argue that Spence would have stopped Mikey if he hadn’t chosen to box him the retire fight.
Spence later said he wanted to prove a point that he could outbox Mikey because so many boxing fans were raving about his technical skills in the lead-up to the clash.
The only round in that fight in which Spence took it to Mikey was in the ninth, and he had him looking like he ready to be knocked out. That round showed that Spence could have knocked Mikey out if he’d chosen to.
“I think it’s the biggest fight at 140,” said Prograis to ESPN. “He has a big name.
“I think it’s going to be a huge, huge fight. I do want to fight the best; I’ve been telling you I want to be a champion again. If I can’t get Josh Taylor, I think Mikey is bigger than anybody right now.”