Promoter Oscar De La Hoya told Ariel Helwani Wednesday on “The MMA Hour” that he expects Saturday’s bout between Devin Haney and Ryan Garcia for Haney’s WBC super lightweight title at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn to be a sellout. He also said he expected it would be a Top 10 pay-per-view of all-time.
I desperately wish he weren’t just completely bull-shitting and making something up, but all one has to do is to look at the ticket map at Barclays Center to realize that what De La Hoya said has no resemblance to reality. Good seats, as they say, are still available. And to reach Top 10 all-time pay-per-view status, it would need to sell around 1.5 million pay-per-views.
Yeah.
Ain’t happening.
And it’s a shame, for sure, because Haney versus Garcia on paper is an excellent fight. Haney is fourth on the KevinIole.com pound-for-pound list. And while Garcia is unranked, he’s got the physical talents to be a Top 10 fighter. He’s fast, he’s quick and he’s got knockout power, particularly with the left hook.
Garcia, whose work played a big role in a 1.2-million-sale fight against Gervonta “Tank” Davis a year ago, has basically melted down in the months since he signed to fight Haney. And given that his social media posts have been frequent and bizarre and little to do with the fight, interest has waned, not increased, as the fight approached.
Garcia was out in a nightclub, shirtless on Monday, singing and dancing and apparently having a great time. It’s extremely unusual for elite fighters in one of the biggest bouts of their lives to be in a club so close to fight night, and it makes one wonder how seriously Garcia is taking it.
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Kevin Cunningham, one of the elite trainers in the sport, shared the video on social media account. He’s trained numerous champions and has been dumbfounded by what he’s seen of Garcia in the build-up.
“In my whole 35-year boxing career, I have never seen a guy who looks to be as mentally unfocused for such a big fight the way Ryan Garcia is now,” Cunningham told KevinIole.com in a telephone interview. “I have never before seen anything like this. He’s a grown man. He’s his own man, but his team, it’s like no one on his team has any control to try to help him lock in. It’s like he’s not attempting to show any kind of mental focus for a fight of this magnitude. I have never seen anything like it.”
Garcia has consistently pooh-poohed the idea that he’s had any kind of mental breakdown, and he suggested at a media workout on Wednesday his approach was a part of a master plan. De La Hoya, who has been at odds with Garcia and sued him in a Nevada court, has gone along with it and suggested Garcia is playing chess while the rest of us are playing checkers.
That, though, hardly seems to be the case Promoters had to lower ticket prices last week because they weren’t selling, and there are still seats available in all price ranges.
Garcia, though, laughs it off.
“The social media is all just noise!” Garcia said “I post something and then people think I’m crazy. I know what I am doing, and I’m in the middle of a promotional fight.”
Look at the tickets available as of 1 p.m. ET on Thursday, as the final press conference was underway.
It’s not good. And that’s with a lot of tickets already being given away. In terms of people who actually put money down to purchase tickets, it’s very few.
I asked Cunningham if it was possible Garcia could win on Saturday given his behavior.
“Everybody has a puncher’s chance,” Cunningham said. “But there is no way I see Ryan, the way he is going into this fight, beating a guy like Devin Haney. Nobody who knows anything about boxing would tell you that a guy who is behaving like this would beat a young, talented and focused fighter like Devin Haney, who is right now just about at the top of his game. … No way I see him being competitive in this fight.”
He’s right. Haney is too good and too disciplined to lose to a guy who’s acting the way that Garcia is acting. No successful fighters comport themselves the way Garcia has, particularly in fight week being in a club. Now, Floyd Mayweather was doing interviews in his gentleman’s club at 3 in the morning the week of his 2017 fight with Conor McGregor, but Mayweather was drinking water. Plus, he was used to being up at night and sleeping in the day. And, Mayweather is one of the most talented fighters ever, and no one could possibly compare Garcia to Mayweather.
So that brought up the thought that what would happen if we were guaranteed that Haney was focused. The Westgate SuperBook in Las Vegas opened Haney at -500, and Cunningham said he’d have favored Haney to win even if Garcia was taking the fight seriously and 100 percent on point.
But in that case, it would have been a lot easier to make a case for Garcia winning.
“If it were guaranteed both guys were coming in 100 percent mentally focused, I’d still pick Devin Haney but we would have a solid, competitive fight,” Cunningham said. “Devin Haney, at the end of the day, has an edge from a talent standpoint. Ryan could have made it a good, hard fun fight. But with Ryan going off the rails and just being totally out of control against a guy in Devin who is totally focused, who lives clean and is dedicated to the sport, I don’t see how anyone could possibly give [Garcia] a chance.”
The bout is available for purchase on PPV.com and DAZN.