Devin Haney’s promoter, Eddie Hearn, believes that Ryan Garcia’s weight advantage aided him in his 12-round majority decision win last Saturday night.
Hearn says the 3.2 lbs of extra weight that Ryan (25-1, 20 KOs) weighed in at last Friday helped him defeat Haney (31-1, 15 KOs).
Missed Weight and Its Consequences
The British promoter paints a picture of Ryan having an unfair advantage due to his extra weight.
Eddie states that he would have liked to have seen Ryan be made to weigh in on the morning of the fight to keep his weight below a certain level. However, he’s not sure that Ryan would have agreed to a rehydration limit, given that he’d already paid Haney $1.2 million for coming in overweight.
A rehydration limit would also have impacted Haney, who has a reputation for rehydrating massive amounts of weight after weighing in.
“When I saw him in the ring, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s massive,'” said promoter Eddie Hearn to BoxNation, talking about Ryan Garcia looking big inside the ring for his fight against Devin Haney last Saturday night at the Barclays Center.
“Look at the pictures of him and the Tank fight [last year in April 2023]. It’s a different person. I think he [Ryan] had a huge physical advantage [against Haney], but it doesn’t matter because you accepted those terms.
“I don’t think you should go back now and say, ‘You should have.’ That’s what I should have said to Henry Garcia. ‘Your son didn’t honor the agreement of the fight.’ 3 1/2 pounds is a huge amount of weight.
Hearn’s Round-by-Round Assessment
“Only the rounds with the knockdowns,” said Hearn when asked how many rounds he gave Ryan Garcia in the fight. I squeezed Devin the [first] round to have it very close. I know for a fact after five rounds, I had it 4-1 for Devin. There were knockdowns in the tenth and eleventh. Those two were game-changers.
Ryan definitely should have won the first after hurting Haney, and he had his way from the seventh round one, landing the bigger punches and dropping Haney three times.
Hearn failed to point out that Haney was down four times in the seventh round, and the referee gave him a huge break by only counting one of them. He was dropped by shots while falling forward while trying to hold Ryan. Those should have been scored as knockdowns, but the referee viewed them as slips.
“At the end of the ninth round, I thought Devin’s legs started to look really weak. I was screaming at Devin, ‘All you need to do is box,’ because even if you stay on your feet and lose the last three rounds, you win the fight,” said Hearn.
