WBA middleweight champion Erislandy Lara (31-3-3, 19 KOs) dominated Danny Garcia (37-4, 21 KOs) and took advantage of his inactivity and lack of size to stop him in the ninth round in the co-main event on Saturday night at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
In the final seconds of the ninth, the 41-year-old Cuban Lara reached out and tapped Garcia with a left on the jaw, sending him to the canvas as if he had been shot. Garcia immediately got back up as the round ended.
Between rounds, Garcia’s father told the referee, Thomas Taylor, that they wanted the fight to be stopped. the time of the stoppage was at 3:00 of round nine.
“It wasn’t my night. I tried to be great, but it wasn’t my night. I had a long layoff,” Danny Garcia said after the fight.
Garcia looked like he didn’t want to be there tonight as he stayed on the outside and didn’t throw punches the entire contest. He picked off Lara with single punches, mostly jabs, and tried not to get hit.
Both fighters landed in the single digits in every round, and it was clear that this was a poor job of matchmaking by the promoters for this event. Virtually the entire undercard was like that, with the A-side fighters dominating overmatched opposition that didn’t belong in the same ring as them.
The crowd was mostly patient and chose not to boo until the ninth round. The 36-year-old former two-division world champion Garcia has not fought in two years, and he has never fought at middleweight before.
Once the crowd started booing, they really let Danny and Lara know why they were thinking of them. Even after the fight, the crowd continued to boo when Garcia was questioned. They didn’t appreciate paying money and taking time to see this kind of performance in the main support game.
Lara has always been a low-output fighter with a Floyd Mayweather Jr. potshot type style, and he rarely had entertaining fights during his long career. It was when he was fighting opposition that relentlessly attacked him.
Tonight, Danny Garcia was not the type of opponent that would bring out the best in Lara. PBC must have known this because Danny has looked bored for at least seven years since his loss to Keith Thurman in 2017.
Garcia hasn’t said if he plans to retire after the fight, but he has to consider it. He doesn’t have enough left for him to compete at 154 and certainly not 160. The only weight class where Garcia excelled was at 140, and he hasn’t fought in that weight class in 10 years since 2014. He is too old to return to 140 at this point in his career.
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