Key events
Tale of the tape
Here’s a look at how Haney and Garcia measure up ahead of tonight’s main event. Garcia, who has a half-inch edge in height, has more experience around 140lbs, with Haney having only fought once above lightweight before tonight. Yet Haney does enjoy a one-inch reach advantage.
It’s important to note that Garcia, by coming in so far over the limit, likely didn’t even attempt to make the weight, while Haney’s sunken features during fight week suggested that getting down to 140lbs wasn’t easy for him. Still, it wasn’t enough to deter Haney’s camp, who agreed to go forward with a non-title fight after an undisclosed financial agreement redirecting a portion of Garcia’s purse to the champion.
Bektemir Melikuziev has just defeated Pierre Dibombe by a technical unanimous decision. The 2016 Olympic silver medalist was having his way of things before an accidental clash of heads opened a gigantic gash over his left eye beneath the eyebrow. The ring doctor put a stop to things early in the eighth round the fight went to the scorecards. All three had Melikuziev winning comfortably by scores of 79-73 (twice) and 78-73.
That leaves one more undercard fight: Arnold Barboza Jr and Sean McComb in a scheduled 10-round junior welterweight bout. After that, Haney and Garcia will make their ringwalks.
Why tonight’s main event is not for the title
If you’re wondering why tonight’s main event has been downgraded to a non-title fight, that’s because Ryan Garcia failed to make the super lightweight division limit of 140lbs. And he didn’t just miss it by a little.
The challenger came in an eye-popping 3.2lbs over behind closed doors on Friday morning, prompting a series of last-minute negotiations between the camps to enable tonight’s fight to go forward.
That means Garcia will no longer be eligible to win Haney’s WBC title. If Haney does lose, the title will become vacant.
Garcia leaned further into the chaos at the public weigh-in, appearing to chug from a beer bottle as he stepped on to the scale in the Barclays Center atrium, confirming his 143.2lbs weight. Haney tipped the scales at 140lbs on the nose.
“I was drinking a nice ass beer, that shit was fire,” Garcia said shortly after the fighters came together for a tense staredown. “I did my best to make this weight. I put myself through hell.”
Said Haney: “He’s very unprofessional. I told him yesterday his antics would betray him and this is just the start.”
Preamble
Hello and welcome to Barclays Center for tonight’s fight between Devin Haney and Ryan Garcia. We’re ringside in Brooklyn for what, at least on paper, is a top-drawer matchup between two of America’s brightest young boxing stars, both 25 years old and at the front of their athletic primes. But following one of the most unusual build-ups to a major fight in recent memory, defined by Garcia’s highly erratic behavior and questions over his mental fitness, it’s left many asking whether it should even be taking place.
Haney (31-0, 15 KOs) unified all four major titles at 135lbs with a career-best win over Vasiliy Lomachenko nearly a year ago, before climbing to 140lbs and becoming a two-weight champion with an impressive shutout of Regis Prograis to win the WBC’s version of the super lightweight title.
Garcia (24-1, 20 KOs), a social-media superstar with upwards of 10.5m Instagram followers with 7.5m more on TikTok, was supposed to be fighting for that strap tonight. But he came in an eye-popping 3.2lbs over at yesterday’s weigh-in, making him ineligible to win the title. (Should Haney lose, the belt will become vacant.)
The weight debacle was the culmination of a months-long pattern of unsettling behavior by Garcia, both in person and on social media. Since the bicoastal press tour announcing the fight where Haney claimed to smell alcohol on his rival’s breath, Garcia’s once-polished presence on social media has descended into a disturbing blur of conspiracy theories and apparent cries for help, not least an X Spaces stream with Andrew Tate (and subsequent tweetstorm) where he claimed he was kidnapped by “the elites” at Bohemian Grove, the secretive Sonoma County club for the rich, and “forced to watch kids getting raped”.
Owing to Garcia’s volatile comportment, there were many points over the past few months where it didn’t seem like we’d ever make it to fight night. But here we are. And we the fighters should be making their ringwalks for the main event in a little more than an hour’s time.
Bryan will be here shortly. In the meantime here’s his lookahead to tonight’s main event.
