WBO super featherweight champion Mikey Garcia (34-0, 28 KO’s) failed to impress on Saturday night in defeating Juan Carlos Burgos (30-2-2, 20 KO’s) by a 12 round unanimous decision at the Madison Square Garden Theater, in New York, New York, USA. The judges had the fight scored at 118-110, 118-110, 119-109. Burgos hurt Mikey in the 2nd round with a left, and if he had a little more power and time left in the round, he might have finished Mikey off.
Burgos failed to go after Mikey when he had him hurt, and in the 3rd round he ended up getting hurt himself after taking a hard shot.
Mikey looked really uncomfortable with the size, and power of Burgos. When Mikey would come after Burgos, he’d get hit with a left hook and that would cause Mikey to freeze and then back up, as if he were being reeled in on a fishing line. It was not impressive stuff to see Mikey unable to walk though Burgos’ shots.
The fight became almost unwatchable after the 4th, as Burgos fought defensively in moving side to side along the ropes, using his jab and left hook to make Mikey respect him. Mikey would try to land big shots, but he was throwing only single shots for the most part, and that wasn’t going to get the job done against Burgos in this weight class. At featherweight, Mikey’s power seems to be a lot more impressive than at super featherweight. In this weight class, Mikey is just another pot shot fighter with good but not great power.
If this is the guy that Bob Arum of Top Rank envisions fighting Manny Pacquiao in September – or at anytime in the future – then I think Arum needs to go back to the drawing board, because Mikey just doesn’t have the game to compete with Pacquiao. Arum sees Mikey as the future #1 pound-for-pound fighter, but I didn’t see anything in Mikey’s performance against Burgos tonight that suggested that Mikey will be anywhere close to being the #1 pound-for-pound fighter. What I do think is that Mikey should think about moving back down to featherweight, because he doesn’t look nearly as impressive at 130 compared to how he looked at 126.
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#4 WBA, #4 WBC, heavyweight contender Bryant Jennings (18-0, 10 KO’s) stopped Artur Szpilka (16-1, 12 KO’s) in the 10 round in a mostly one-sided fight. Jennings knocked the 24-year-old Szpilka down in the 6th round from a left to the body, and then in the 10th round from a left hook to the head. After Szpilka got back to his feet, Jennings flurried on him in the corner until the referee John McKaie halted the fight with Szpilka still on his feet but badly hurt.
While it’s nice to get excited about Jennings and magnify this win and assume he can do this against better fighters, you’ve got to put things in perspective here. Szpilka twice went life and death with journeyman Mike Molla, so it’s not as if we were talking about someone truly dangerous. HBO was making a big deal out of Jennings tonight, but he still hasn’t beaten anyone of quality and I think he would have been knocked out if he had faced someone in the class of Bermane Stiverne, Chris Arreola or Deontay Wilder tonight instead of Szpilka.
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Other boxing results:
Francisco Vargas TKO 1 Eligio Lopez
Alberto Machado TKO 2 Nuwan Jayakody
Felix Verdejo KO 1 Lauro Alcantar
Jesse Hart UD 6 Derrick Findley
