By Rob Smith: WBA/WBC light welterweight champion Danny Garcia suffered a rib injury while sparring with journeyman DeMarcus Corley a little over a week ago, and the injury isn’t healing quick enough for the 24-year-old Garcia to defend his titles against Zab Judah in their previously scheduled fight on Showtime on February 9th at the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, New York.
So instead of fighting Judah on February 9th, the fight has now been pushed back to April 27th in the same venue with the same undercard fights.
Other than the injury and the change of date, nothing has changed. Garcia is still fighting Judah, and he’s still going to be heavily favored to win the fight. The only way Garcia loses this fight is if he’s not as good as he looked in his previous fights with Amir Khan, Kendall Holt and Erik Morales. The Garcia that beat those fighters will make easy work with the aging Judah.
It’s too bad the Judah-Garcia undercard can’t be scrapped because there’s not a good fight among any of the scheduled undercard fights. The co main even is WBO middleweight champion Peter Quillin defending his title against Fernando Guerrero. That’s a mismatch. Quillin will easily win. There’s also Dmitri Salita vs. Hector Camacho Jr. These are fighters that are well known in the New York area and are popular in that area, but neither of them is relevant in terms of being ranked fighters. They appear to be added to sell tickets.
Garcia needs to step it up after this fight and face WBC interim welterweight champion Lucas Matthysse because it’s time that Golden Boy Promotions make that fight instead of having Garcia fight older guys like Morales and Judah. Boxing fans have to see if Garcia is hype or the real thing, and the only way they can find that out is for Golden Boy to finally put him in with Matthysse.
If Garcia can’t handle it then he can always go after one of the other titles. It’s not going to be the end of the road for him because he’s still young and he can go after the WBO strap.