What applies to one must apply to the other, without exceptions or selective standards. Garcia shared the ring tonight with an opponent who deserves to be judged by the same criteria used to evaluate Ryan in the first place. Anything less would be intellectual dishonesty.
What we are trying to do is evaluate Ryan Garcia’s true qualities from a strict boxing standpoint under the scrutiny of fans and the media. This assessment is based on a simple premise: Garcia entered as the betting favorite and the presumptive winner, based on expert opinion and the perceived limitations of his opponent’s skills.
Another metric often used to project a fighter’s chances against an opponent is the presence of a common opponent, especially when that shared name carries real weight in boxing, like Gervonta Davis. The performances of both fighters against that opponent often shape expert and fan opinion. Garcia was stopped by Davis in seven rounds, while Mario Barrios lasted until the eleventh round in a scheduled twelve-round fight. Does it really provide a fair measure?
It’s sad and revealing to revisit what happened to a fighter like Canelo Álvarez when he faced Terence Crawford, the moment reality finally caught up. For months, an entire media machine insisted that Canelo, a natural 160 pounds and, in the eyes of many, technically superior and nearly untouchable within his division, was supposed to defeat a welterweight. So where were the ‘styles’ that supposedly make fights? Or did we simply see a boxer protected by the same shadow that followed Garcia, exposing the whole story for what it really was: a fantasy sold to inflate numbers and drive pay-per-view sales.
We’ve already seen the Garcia vs. Barrios fight, and the lingering question is simple: why did Garcia, who dropped Barrios at his absolute best in the opening round, fail to finish the job before the twelfth? There could be countless explanations, and I have no doubt that many will offer them. But in this era, boxing has ceased to be what it once was, largely because the fighter willing to give everything for a title has for too long been rewarded with something else: money.
I’ve been watching boxing for decades. Maybe I should be grateful to have witnessed it. In the 1980s and 1990s, very few of the figures we now idolize as modern stars would have been able to do anything meaningful against fighters who, even then, were not considered defining forces of their time.
It’s hard to imagine Napoles, Leonard or Hearns allowing an opponent to hit the canvas in the first round and not aggressively pursue the stoppage within the next three. Arguello, and more recently Román González, Bivol, Beterbiev, or even Canelo himself would likely have ended that fight long before the final bell ever rang.
We have to come to terms with the reality that this ‘sport’ is gradually no longer one. It has evolved into a blunt entertainment product, something much closer to spectacle than competition, one where the sanctioning approval of organizations like the WBC and WBA work together to preserve the illusion that what we once loved about boxing still exists in its original form.
In the boxing industry, everything now revolves around a single element: money. Events are designed to offer you half the product, wrapped in the hollow promise that what you’re looking at is something unique, something you can’t find anywhere else. The truth is simple. What’s hard is pretending you don’t see it
At some point we have to stop pretending. What we call boxing today is no longer driven by urgency, risk or the will to finish. It is driven by economics. The fight between Garcia and Barrios didn’t expose a lack of talent; it exposed a lack of necessity. In another era, the question would not be why the fight went the distance, but why it was ever allowed.
Boxing did not develop quietly. It has been repackaged. Wrapped in sanctions belts, protected by narratives, and sold as something irreplaceable. The business thrives on the illusion that what you’re looking at is rare, essential, historic. It is not. The truth is uncomfortable but inescapable: this is no longer a sport built to crown the best. It’s an entertainment product designed to maximize revenue, and the hardest part is not understanding it. It is to accept that we are still being asked to believe otherwise
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