Add becoming a unified lightweight titleholder to the rapidly growing list of accomplishments of Mikey Garcia. After a slow start, Garcia put on another masterclass performance on route to picking up a second lightweight belt by decision over Robert Easter Jr.
Round one in the main event was your typical feel it out opener. Robert Easter Jr (21-1, 14 KOs) was active, but inaccurate. Mikey Garcia (39-0, 30 KOs) took some time to get going but did land a stiff jab. There still wasn’t a lot clean landed in the second either. Mikey pressed and launched a few decent attacks and Easter got his jab going a bit, but mostly their two styles weren’t meshing yet. Things meshed in the third. The four weight titleholder worked hard to close the distance and it paid off in a big way. Towards the end of the round a right hand, left hook combination put Robert Easter Jr down on the seat of his pants. He recovered fine and finished the round, but Garcia had the momentum and used it to cruise through the fourth round as well.
Mikey’s momentum slowed a bit in the fifth. He still took the round on my card, but his Cincinnati foe re-stabilized himself behind his jab and combinations a bit. The sixth kept this tend intact. Robert Easter Jr put on a respectable, disciplined performance, but Garcia was just getting a little more done to win the round. It wasn’t a barnburner through its first half, but the fight was a nice, technical affair between two top fighters. I had Garcia up 4-2 at the halfway point. The seventh exaggerated the previous trends even further. Easter boxed very nicely for a long stretch. He worked jab after jab and left Mikey out of his comfort zone. Yet, he didn’t land much in terms of power and Garcia was finding his own power work by the end of the round. To me that is more meaningful work, but your mileage may vary. Scoring the eighth was easy though. For some reason, the IBF titleholder chose to borderline run for the round and Mikey Garcia clearly won it.
Easter didn’t run in the ninth. Maybe he should have though. Suddenly his discipline was gone as he fell back into his old habits and began fighting on the inside. In the opening phone booth exchanges, Easter did well. By the end of the round he was getting beat up though and his body language was bad to my eye. He didn’t look like he was taking it well. He continued to look like a beaten man in the tenth. At this point the seemingly soon to be former lightweight titleholder’s strategy was basically back to the ropes and try to block what Mikey was throwing at him. It wasn’t working. Not much worked for him in the championship rounds either. They were all Mikey Garcia.
I had the fight scored 118-109 for Miguel “Mikey” Garcia. Official scores came back 118-109, 117-110, and 116-111, making Mikey a unified lightweight titleholder. Post-fight he kept up the talk of wanting to go to welterweight to fight Errol Spence Jr too. That’s just crazy talk in my mind. I guess if anyone could pull off such a feat it would be Mikey though. Robert Easter Jr conceded defeat with class and thanked the fans for coming.
In the predictable mismatch of a co-main event, Luis “King King” Ortiz (29-1, 25 KOs) only took two rounds to dispose of no hope get well opponent Razvan Cojanu (16-4, 9 KOs) of Romania. A two punch combination sent the Romanian down and flopping around on the canvas. That’s about all there was to that. Heavily protected junior welterweight prospect Mario Barrios (21-0, 14 KOs) also picked up an eighth round stoppage in the opener, also against an obviously overmatched opponent in Jose Roman (24-3-1, 15 KOs). Roman was coming off a one sided loss to a journeyman and had no business being on Showtime, but for whatever reason PBC insists on showing us that Barrios can win at a journeyman level over and over. This undercard was stupid.
