At last Saturday night’s post-fight press conference after his eighth round KO victory over the flawed-looking Oscar Duarte, light welterweight Ryan Garcia said he would “beat Shakur Stevenson.”
There’s a lot of doubt on social media in the aftermath of Ryan’s poor performance against Duarte last night that he would last more than two or three rounds against a talented fighter like Shakur Stevenson.
The difference in skill levels would be too much for Ryan to hang with Shakur unless he treated it like a sparring match like Gervonta Davis did for the most part in his fight with the influencer last April.
Is Shakur too talented for Ryan Garcia?
As bad as the 26-year-old Shakur looked in his last fight against Edwin De Los Santos on November 16th, he’s still world’s better than Ryan Garcia and makes easy work of him. Golden Boy will try their best to ensure Ryan gets nowhere near Shakur.
“He’s been a hater since the amateurs, and I will fight him. I will beat his a**, I promise you that,” said Ryan Garcia at the post-fight press conference, taking a verbal shot at Shakur Stevenson in response to his failing to praise his performance against his hand-picked lower-tier opponent Oscar Duarte.
If Ryan is going to fight Shakur (21-0, 10 KOs), he’ll need to do it soon for it to be a match-up that interests the boxing world.
Waiting to make that bout would be a mistake on Ryan’s part because the chances are high that he’ll lose to WBA light welterweight champion Rolando ‘Rolly’ Romero next if that’s the fight he takes.
Rolly is obviously a terrible fighter and the weakest of the current champions at 140, but he can punch, and he’s better than Ryan. The sparring video of the two on YouTube shows that Rolly was dominating Ryan, making him look bad.
Unfortunately, Ryan has shown little improvement since the time he sparred with Rolly, and he’d get beaten if they fight next.
Ryan Garcia still badly flawed
What we learned from watching the performance of the 25-year-old Ryan Garcia last night is that he’s still essentially just a prospect, definitely NOT a contender-level fighter at 140, someone that must be carefully maneuvered by Golden Boy to keep him from losing.
The way that Ryan looked against Duarte (26-2-1, 21 KOs), a fighter vetted by his coach Derrick James, he would lose badly to Shakur, as well as many of the lightweights and, of course, most of the top 15 light welterweights.
Ryan lacks the athleticism, defense, boxing skills, or foot speed to defeat a fighter like Shakur. We saw how Ryan was turning his back on Duarte the entire fight in an awkward, submissive move that almost seemed like he giving up when attacked.
If Ryan fought like that against Shakur, or any quality fighter at 135 or 140, he’d be brained in the back of the head and knocked out on the spot.
The referee who worked the Garcia-Duarte fight last night, James Green, was warning Duarte for hitting Ryan in the back. He wasn’t telling Ryan to stop turning his back on him, which was very weird. How does a referee not tell a fighter not to turn their back to an opponent?
Green should have warned Ryan, but he didn’t. He also didn’t warn Ryan about the illegal straight arm he used all night to keep Duarte from getting close. Ryan was extending his left arm out to prevent Duarte from closing the distance, and that’s a move that the referee, Green, should have warned him about.
You can’t put a fighter like Ryan in with guys like Shakur because he’d be massacred and humiliated to the point where his career would be over.
Ryan (24-1, 20 KOs) obviously won’t be put anywhere near the 2016 Olympic silver medalist by his promoters at Golden Boy, and the ONLY way that fight happens is if he ignores what his promoters are telling him. It wouldn’t be the first time Ryan did that, which is why he has a loss on his record.
