Devin Haney bigger than Terence Crawford: Can he make 135 for Lomachenko on May 20th?

By Boxing News - 01/20/2023 - Comments

By Adam Baskin: Devin Haney was photographed in the gym this week with Terence Crawford, looking bigger than the unbeaten WBO welterweight champion, making it seem impossible that he’ll melt down to 135 to defend his undisputed lightweight championship against Vasyl Lomachenko on May 20th at Madison Square Garden in New York.

When it gets to the point where you’re dwarfing Crawford, as we see with Haney, it would be best for him to move up to welterweight on the double.

For the sake of fairness, Haney needs to move up to 140, if not 147, pronto because he’s much too big to be fighting against lightweights that appear to be much, much smaller than him.

Devin needs to vacate

There’s no shame in Haney vacating his four 135-lb titles now and telling the fans that he’s simply outgrown the lightweight division and wants to move up to 140 or 147 so that he doesn’t have to risk his health cutting massive amounts of water weight to compete in a division that is below what he should be competing at, given his welterweight-sized frame.

This writer thought Rolando ‘Rolly’ Romero and Teofimo Lopez looked colossal fighting at lightweight, but Haney is on another level regarding the size.

At 24, Haney (29-0, 15 KOs) appears to have hit his growth spurt because he’s now resembling a filled-out welterweight, making it seem impossible to envision him getting down to 135 one last time for his important title defense against the former three-division world champion Lomachenko (17-2, 11 KOs) on ESPN pay-per-view.

In Haney’s last fight against former unified lightweight champion George Kambosos Jr on October 16th, he looked gargantuan after rehydrating for the contest.

At the weigh-in the day before the fight, Haney looked like a skeleton, face drawn, eyes sunken in badly, giving the appearance that he’d had a terrible bout with COVID 19. The way Haney looked on the scales was like one of the cast members from the movie, ‘Night of the Living Dead.‘ He looked scary bad.

If you want to know why some boxing fans view Haney as a weight bully just look at this photo of him dwarfing 147-lb champion ‘Bud’ Crawford this week.

 

Hector Garcia wanted to help Haney

“They put their best version out there. There’s something they didn’t put out there,” said Hector Luis Garcia to Fight Hub TV about the sparring clip that was leaked of him training with Devin Haney.

“They know what to put out there. When I spar, I don’t spar to win. I spar to learn and to tweak little things here and there.

“Overall, I want to face him at 135 because I want to show everybody that sparring and fighting is two different things,” said Hector Garcia about his sparring with Haney.

YouTube video

“They invited me to help them.  I sparred with him in front of their team at their spot. They chose the sparring. Again, I went in, intending to help. You know, when you spar, they pay you.

“The first thing I told him was that I was going to give the best of me because sometimes some fighters try to show off their skills and try and make you look bad or run over you. But with the experience I carry, I went in there to put on a good sparring for him.

“The first spar was even. In the second one, they came in with a different type of mode to really try and put it down on me, and after that, they didn’t call me.

“From my understanding, they didn’t call me because I was kind of interfering with the way for the fight that they were going to have [Joseph ‘Jojo’ Diaz]. I was basically interfering with the style that they wanted,” said Hector Garcia.