Saturday night from Las Vegas, top welterweight Danny Garcia will return for the sport for the first time since his first career loss, a decision to divisional king Keith Thurman in March of last year. His opponent will be former top lightweight Brandon Rios attempting to resurrect his career at the world level. This fight will be the main event of a tripleheader also featuring a world title rematch and a title eliminator.
I am just going to get this out of the way. To me, this is a garbage fight. It isn’t as bad as I would have expected from a guy who once fought Rod Salka and is now coming off his first loss, but it still is not a good matchup at all.
Once upon a time, Brandon Rios (34-3-1, 24 KOs) was an extremely imposing lightweight. He was huge, durable, and hit like a truck down at 135 lbs. “Bam Bam” Rios first burst onto the world level scene when he battered Anthony Peterson around the ring in a world title eliminator on HBO. Peterson was a talented fighter and a rising contender, but the beating he took that night is seemingly something he has never recovered from. Anthony, brother to Lamont Peterson, rather blatantly got out of the fight by getting himself disqualified from repeated low blows. Even though that fight was nearly eight years ago now and Peterson still has not lost another fight, he has never stepped back up to world level. That is the kind of fear lightweight Brandon Rios could put into his opponents.
Two fights later Rios would pick up his world title thanks to a stoppage of Miguel Acosta. Two more fights later, however, were when things started to fall apart for the Hispanic brawler. Brandon Rios was supposed to defend his belt at the tail end of 2011 against British opponent John Murray. While the fight went on and Rios stopped him, it was not a title defense as Brandon Rios did not make weight. When he attempted to win his newly vacated title back four months later, Rios missed weight a second time by even more. Worse yet, awkward Cuban Richar Abril comfortably outboxed a lethargic looking Rios over the course of the fight. It took one of the worst judging decisions of the decade to keep Brandon Rios undefeated after that terrible performance.
Rios would go on to briefly revitalize his career at junior welterweight with an amazing two fight sequence with Mike Alvarado. Bam Bam won the first by a somewhat controversial stoppage and was narrowly outboxed in the second for his first official career loss. Despite the “L” on his record, however, these were both the kind of fights where both men come out winners in terms of the demand to see more of them. These were star making fights for both men, at least briefly.
Unfortunately, the shine from those fights were short lived. Rios moved to welterweight after the Alvarado rematch to be Filipino legend Manny Pacquiao’s comeback opponent following his surprising stoppage loss to Juan Manuel Marquez. It was clear very early in that fight that Brandon Rios does not bring a lot to the table at welterweight, especially against a fighter of Pacquiao’s caliber. The former lightweight titleholder narrowly escaped another loss against Diego Chaves in his next fight, receiving a very confusing disqualification win late in a really even, foul filled fight.
Brandon Rios and his team tried to recapture lightning in a bottle by completing their trilogy with Mike Alvarado next, but at that point in ring beatings and personal, addiction fueled demons had caused the formerly excellent Denver fighter to regress into a shell of his former self. Accordingly, Rios rolled over him quickly. Any top level fighter would have that night. That win did serve to get Brandon Rios his first welterweight title shot, however, but that certainly did not end well. Timothy Bradley beat up and stopped Brandon Rios so definitively in November of 2015 that Rios announced his retirement from the sport.
That lasted a year and a half before Bam Bam returned to pick up an easy win over PBC trial horse Aaron Herrera last summer. That win put Rios above .500 at welterweight with a 3-2 record, but anyone who has seen his fights at the weight knows who he is. Brandon Rios at lightweight had tremendous advantages over his opponent. He wasn’t particularly skilled or athletic, but he was huge, durable, powerful, and extremely persistent. Against larger men at 147 lbs, those advantages are almost completely absent. He isn’t capable of being a top welterweight.
Despite his penchant for taking garbage fights like this, Danny Garcia (33-1, 19 KOs) is a top welterweight. A known prospect basically since he turned pro, Garcia received his first real exposure fighting on Golden Boy’s now defunct Telefutura fight series. Unfortunately, a 2010 Friday Night Fights slot proved nearly disastrous for his unbeaten record when Garcia needed a somewhat generous decision to get a win over veteran Ashley Theophane.
Garcia stayed very active and rebounded a year later with dominant wins over former top junior welterweights Kendall Holt and Nate Campbell. Suddenly, the Theophane fight was largely forgotten. Those two wins launched Danny into the highest profile slot of his career, a title fight with Mexican legend Erik Morales. Now, Morales was faded and fighting at too high a weight then, but Garcia did get the win after a fun, competitive fight. He then cemented himself as a true top junior welterweight with a beautiful fourth round left hook knockout of Amir Khan four months later to become a unified titleholder.
After a pointless rematch of Morales in which he dominated and a comfortable win over a faded Zab Judah, Danny Garcia took on the biggest challenge of his career on the undercard of Floyd Mayweather’s huge pay-per-view fight with young Mexican star Canelo Alvarez. That night Garcia met Lucas Matthysse. The Argentinian by this point had built up a reputation as one of the most fearsome fighters in all of boxing. In his previous fight, Matthysse had completely walked through Lamont Peterson over three rounds in a way no one else had ever come close to doing before. Accordingly, Garcia was an underdog in this one. Despite this, he went on to largely control a pretty intense fight on his way to a decision victory.
If that night finally cemented Danny Garcia as a star in the sport, he nearly blew it with his following tune up with tricky fringe contender Mauricio Herrera. To my eye Garcia had clearly looked past Herrera and I didn’t think he deserved the win that the majority decision gave him. This caused Garcia and his team to step even further down. The end result of his next fight against Rod Salka was one of the biggest mismatches in recent memory. That matchup was nothing short of a joke that has haunted Garcia’s reputation ever since.
It didn’t matter that Danny Garcia got a decision over Lamont Peterson in his next fight. Of course, the fact that Garcia banked the boring early rounds while Peterson dominated the exciting last few rounds didn’t help either. In a round by round scoring system, however, the result was fair. Three straight fights against subpar opposition cemented the Salka-lite reputation Garcia was suddenly developing. Fights against badly faded versions of Paulie Malignaggi and Robert Guerrero weren’t received well. A showdown with never-was Canadian Samuel Vargas was even worse.
Danny had won a vacant welterweight title in the Guerrero fight and he brought it to meet fellow titleholder Keith Thurman in March. This was a really, really big fight that main evented a rare CBS show. After a slow start to the tactical fight, Garcia re-affirmed his standing as a top welterweight with his late rally that nearly stole the win. It didn’t and he took his first official loss via a narrow split decision, but those last few rounds were a reminder that he is an elite fighter.
Brandon Rios isn’t an elite welterweight. Danny Garcia is and he is fighting him. This is what Garcia and his team do. Sometimes they are blatant about the mismatches with fights against the likes of Rod Salka and Samuel Vargas, but more often they take the shape of this sort of fight. They take a faded fighter like a Paulie Malignaggi or, in this case, a Brandon Rios, and try to market him as a real opponent. He isn’t. Some might also point out that Garcia has unexpectedly struggled in the past, but those opponents were much trickier fights than Brandon Rios. Bam Bam is going to get bam bammed in this one. Probably for twelve rounds, but maybe not even that.
The chief support for the main event is an excellent rematch between 21 year old WBC super middleweight titleholder David Benavidez (19-0, 17 KOs) and Romanian contender Ronald Gavril (18-2, 14 KOs). The two first met in September for the then vacant belt. Benavidez was viewed as something of a prodigy of violence coming into the fight. His absolute destruction of durable contender Rogelio “Porky” Medina had left the boxing public awed one fight prior. Gavril, on the other hand, was largely unknown and already had a loss. On paper the fight had the look of an all too tradition boxing match in which the a-side promoter gets his hot young prospect an easy belt, but Ronald Gavril did not cooperate with that narrative. He fought tooth and nail with the then 20 year old, dropping him in the twelfth and final round. The fight was exciting throughout and razor close on everyone’s scorecards. The judge’s came back split in David Benavidez’s favor.
The thing I like most about the fight is that it is happening at all. Ronald Gavril gave everything to David Benavidez that he could handle, but the young champion survived still emerged as such. The WBC did not order this rematch. Instead, PBC is for some reason choosing to stick their youngest star back in with a man who nearly took him out late, a man who proved largely his equal. This isn’t typical matchmaking. Normally in a case like this, Benavidez and his team would take the title and run as far away as they could for a soft defense. Instead, PBC and David Benavidez are jumping right back into the fire under the hope that the still improving young titleholder will have made the leap he needs to dominate Gavril this time. I suspect he probably will, but it is a risk for sure. If all fights were booked without concern for this kind of risk, we’d be in love with an even better sport.
Finally, the card will be opened with an IBF welterweight title eliminator between surging Cuban Yordenis Ugas (20-3, 9 KOs) and the quietly resurgent “New” Ray Robinson (24-2, 12 KOs). Both these men were considered busted prospects at one point and both have gone on to resurrect their standings. Ugas, a former Olympic medalist, has done so by beating solid competition repeatedly on PBC’s smaller Fox Sports 1 shows while Ray Robinson has done it off the radar with thirteen straight wins on the sport’s smaller circuits. This is a really matched fight and I am please that Showtime is airing it. The winner will become Errol Spence Jr’s mandatory challenger.
The show is schedule to air at 10 PM Eastern on Showtime. PBC is running another show at 8 PM on FOX leading into this one, so don’t surprised if this show ends up starting with a lot of talking. They won’t start any fights until the FOX show has concluded.
