Is he or isn’t he? That’s probably the first question we ask when we hear the name of Marcos Maidana.
“Chino” (35 – 5, 31 KO’s), the popular, hard-hitting former welterweight champion from Argentina, has been M.I.A from boxing since September of 2014 after losing back-to-back close decisions to pound for pound king Floyd Mayweather Jr. Other than a few pictures on social media that depicted a corpulent frame, not much is known regarding the guy.
In an attempt to figure out what might be Maidana’s status, Tha Boxing’s Voice own Anthony Rodriguez caught up with Robert Garcia, Maidana’s head trainer.
“Right now (Maidana) I haven’t talked to him, I don’t like to get into whether he’s retired” Garcia answered. “He’s resting, he’s got family, kids, so I let them do their own thing.”
At 32 years of age and so much accomplished in the ring, it’s hard to envision Maidana hanging up the gloves. Apparently retirement had been on Maidana’s mind for a while, though, in fact even before Maidana began working with Garcia, “Maidana is a fighter they brought to me when he was thinking about retiring, and we came back to turn his career around, we came back with nothing but wins”.
If you look at his past three appearances in the ring (Adrien Broner and Mayweather back to back), it’s safe to assume Maidana racked up a nice retirement stash in fight purses. And no one can argue Maidana didn’t deserve his pay, he beat a favorite (Broner) and fought two close fights against the best in the world (Mayweather).
Sometimes in life when we achieve our loftiest goals all the steam might be out of the engines, and in my book, and that’s just fine.
However, Maidana is just so damn entertaining in that ring; I would love to see him against another welterweight star like Shawn Porter or Keith Thurman or young prospects Errol Spence or Sammy Vasquez. I guess only time will answer that question for us.
Reflecting back, Garcia, like us boxing fans, has fond memories of Chino, “the way we did it after he wanted to retire is just unbelievable, and I’m so proud of Maidana”.
I second that coach.
