What works for one must work for the other, with no exceptions or standards chosen. Garcia shares the ring tonight with an opponent who deserves to be judged by the same method that was used to test Ryan in the first place. Anything less would be intellectual dishonesty.
What we are trying to do is examine, from a solid boxing perspective, the true qualities of Ryan Garcia under the scrutiny of the fans and the media. This assessment is based on a simple premise: Garcia came in as the betting favorite and the winner, based on expert opinion and the perceived limitations of his opponent’s skill set.
Another benchmark that is often used to project a fighter’s odds against an opponent is the presence of a common opponent, especially if that shared name has real weight in boxing, such as Gervonta Davis. The performance of both fighters against their opponent often greatly shapes professional and fan opinion. Garcia was stopped in seven rounds by Davis, while Mario Barrios lasted until the eleventh round of the scheduled twelve rounds. Does that really give a fair estimate?
It’s sad and sad to see the backlash that happened to a fighter like Canelo Álvarez when he faced Terence Crawford, which ended up stalling. For months, every media outlet insisted that Canelo, a natural 160-pounder and, in many people’s eyes, technically superior and virtually untouchable in his division, should beat the welterweight. So, where were the ‘styles’ that are said to be fighting? Or we just saw a boxer protected by the same shadow that followed Garcia, exposing the entire narrative for what it really was: a myth peddled to pad the numbers and drive pay-per-view sales.
We have seen the fight of Garcia vs. Barrios, and the question remains simple: why did Garcia, who dropped Barrios to his best in the opening round, fail to finish the job before the twelfth? There could be innumerable explanations, and I have no doubt that many will offer them. But in this era, boxing has ceased to be what it used to be, mainly because for a long time the fighter who was willing to sacrifice everything to get the title was finally rewarded with something else: money.
I have been watching boxing for decades. Perhaps I should be grateful for my own experience. In the 1980s and 1990s, very few of the figures we now idolize as modern stars could do anything meaningful against fighters who, even at the time, could not be considered defining powers of their time.
It’s hard to imagine Nápoles, Leonard, or Hearns letting an opponent hit the canvas in the first round and not aggressively chasing a stop within the next three. Arguello, and more recently Román González, Bivol, Beterbiev, or even Canelo himself would likely end that fight long before the final bell rang.
We have to come to terms with the fact that this ‘game’ is gradually ceasing to be one. It has become an obscure entertainment product, something much closer to a spectacle than a competition, where sanctioning bodies like the WBC and WBA work in tandem to maintain the illusion that what we love about boxing still exists in its form.
In the boxing industry, everything now revolves around one thing: money. Events are designed to give you a piece of the product, wrapped in the empty promise that what you’re looking at is something unique, something you won’t find anywhere else. The truth is simple. It’s hard to pretend you don’t see
At some point, we have to stop pretending. What we call boxing today is no longer driven by urgency, risk, or the desire to finish. It is driven by economics. The fight between Garcia and Barrios showed no lack of talent; it revealed a lack of need. In another era, the question would not be why the war went so far, but why it was ever allowed.
Boxing did not develop quietly. It was repackaged. It is bound by the belts of the law, protected by narratives, and sold as irreplaceable. Business thrives on the illusion that what you are watching is rare, important, historic. That’s not the case. The truth is uncomfortable, but inescapable: this is no longer a game designed to crown the best. It’s an entertainment product designed to increase revenue, and the hardest part is not understanding it. Accepting that we are still being asked to believe otherwise
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