Saturday in the little room at Madison Square Garden, Oxnard’s Mikey Garcia made another admirably professional showing, this time in the super featherweight division, against another wholly outmatched opponent, this time in the form of Mexican Juan Carlos “Miniburgos” Burgos, on HBO – a network quite supportive of Garcia. This match readied the table for a war in the summertime between Garcia, a technically flawless counterpuncher, and the Cuban chloroform dispenser named Yuriorkis Gamboa.
We’ve been here before, haven’t we? HBO is aflutter with the possibility of matching an undefeated marquee name from the Top Rank stable with the fantastically flawed but still undefeated Gamboa, a prizefighter whom the network has been building for some while now with enthusiasm irregular as Gamboa’s chin. It was four years ago, nearly to the day, on Jan. 23, 2010, that HBO’s “Boxing After Dark” program featured Gamboa on the same card as undefeated Puerto Rican Juan Manuel Lopez. Gamboa laid waste to Rogers Mtagwa, who’d brought “Juanma” within a sip of drowning in the deep waters of their title match four months prior, Lopez retired Steven Luevano, and HBO aroused its viewership with overtures of Gamboa-Lopez in the very near future.
Bob Arum, head of Top Rank, promoter of both men, addressed HBO’s anxious viewership thusly: “I know what people want, and they can go f–k themselves.”
Lopez and Gamboa continued to circle one another, recycling opponents. Then in March 2011, Gamboa solicited from poor Jorge Solis a concession no one, certainly not Manny Pacquiao, hit hard as Gamboa. The moment was ripe for Lopez-Gamboa to not-happen for a second year. What suspenseful bleating the non-event was about to incite, though, got muted 21 days later when Lopez got flattened by Orlando Salido and all thoughts of what Arum anticipated would be “the biggest featherweight fight of all time” instead moved inexorably toward a day when, in an attempt to make Gamboa’s 2012 match with someone named Michael Farenas enticing, rapper-cum-promoter Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson would chant unevenly over background vocals while being lowered from Top Rank’s video apparatus above an MGM Grand ring erected for what became Juan Manuel Marquez’s razing of Manny Pacquiao and Top Rank’s 2013 top line.
Since a Lopez fight with Gamboa by then made no sense, especially not after Juanma again got stopped in his 2012 rematch with Salido, Top Rank seasoned Lopez for a feeding to Mikey Garcia – a young fighter already supplanting his temperamental stablemate, Nonito Donaire, as the future of Top Rank, even before the flashy Filipino got undressed by a Cuban named Guillermo Rigondeaux who is much, much better than his fellow islander Gamboa. This brought things limping to Dallas in June where Juanma took the scale on a makeshift dais in American Airlines Center’s concourse and looked a perfect 125 1/4-pound feast for Garcia.
Ah, but Mikey’d been doing some off-menu grazing and missed the match’s contracted weight by a clean two pounds. For once Arum was sincerely irate. He sat silently in the middle seat of the first row of chairs, shoulders hunched and so tight – as John Updike once put it – if you’d have tapped him he’d have rung like a gong. One of Top Rank TV’s microphoned models filmed Father’s Day greetings onstage while Garcia ostensibly tried to make weight, and when she misread Arum’s first refusal to say something mirthfully paternal to her network’s viewers and asked again, she got a reply whose words and temperature were akin to Arum’s January 2010 greetings to HBO viewers.
Garcia came back a couple hours later, dry as he’d left, signed a piece of paper and left again. Arum announced the main event cancelled, and like that, much sheen came off the Garcia bust. Mikey stretched Juanma in four the following night – the fight back on! – then stopped Roman Martinez in Corpus Christi five months later.
Garcia is no longer held in the esteem he was previously, which is neither unfair nor particularly tragic, as more than a few aficionados looked askance at the bizarre stoppage of his fight against Orlando Salido a year ago – when the fight was called-off and sent cardsward because Mikey’s nose was broken, an occurrence more common in prizefights than goals in soccer games. Saturday’s dull decision over “Miniburgos,” now 0-1-2 in his last 18 months, did little to restore Garcia’s luster.
Enter Gamboa. There probably could not be a better opponent for Top Rank’s Garcia-restoration purposes than “El Ciclon de Guantanamo” – a guy with no discernible defense, reflexes not quite quick as he thinks they are, and hours of titillating knockout-reel footage for HBO’s documentarians to mine. By the time “Countdown to ‘Gamboa’s Guantanamo: Extraordinary Rendition’” completes its fifth replay and opening bell rings, casual fans, glancing with anticipatory horror through partially covered eyes, will be both admiring and surprised Little Mikey was courageous enough even to toe the line for a second round. And when Garcia starches Gamboa in the later rounds – and likely not late as we think – when he finishes a job most of Gamboa’s recent opponents have started, we’ll have little choice but to admit Garcia is what we secretly hoped he was, and begin accusing Floyd Mayweather Jr. of ducking him.
The serious folks in the room, meanwhile, will bite our tongues, knowing contemporary boxing could still do much worse for its face than Mikey Garcia.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
