Robert Garcia was suffering a bit of the hard luck that Freddie Roach was suffering in the past, where he has been the losing trainer in a few big fights. The losses of Brandon Rios, Nonito Donaire, and on a smaller scale John Molina had some people questions exactly how good Robert Garcia is, especially after being named 2012 Trainer of The Year. Those questions seemed to fade away after the big victory Marcos Maidana had over Josesito Lopez this past weekend. Tomorrow, Garcia will look to continue his win streak when his younger brother Mikey Garcia defends his featherweight title against Juan Manuel Lopez, in a fight where Garcia is the favorite.
“Both great camps, training Maidana 10 am and train my brother at 2pm, doing that for about 2 months. We’d like to continue the momentum we built with Maidana to Mikey,” Garcia told ThaBoxingVoice.com.
If there was any improvement in Maidana, it was more vivid in the fight this past weekend. Maidana was throwing more jabs, clinching when he was in trouble, but at the end when push came to shove, it was Maidana’s power that proved to be just as big a difference.
“He already hit very hard. We had to work on different things. We worked on his jab and more footwork. This fight showed a little of what he’s learned but it also brought us back to fighting as well. Maidana can fight inside and brawl but we can also fight on the outside and jab, and counterpunch.”
During the interview, the question was posed to Garcia if the improvements to Maidana would lead to possibly having more Golden Boy fighters to his stable. Garcia laughed and responded by saying, “Both great organizations (Top Rank and Golden Boy) . I have most of my fighters with Top Rank. I wish I could have more with Golden Boy. We’ve already talking about more. They’ve seen my results here with Maidana and I tell them whenever there are fighters to prepare to consider me. A lot of people think I’m exclusive to top rank and I’m not.”
One of his Top Rank fighters, Brandon Rios will be in mega showdown with Manny Pacquiao come this November in China. With the time difference, Garcia is already preparing Rios to have about a 10 week camp and possibly arriving in China 2 weeks before the fight to get accustomed to the change. Garcia took a quick peek into the future regarding this fight. “Rios-Pacquiao is a very good fight. We’re coming off a loss with Brandon and it was a close fight. At the end of the day we didn’t really lose much because we got the Pacquiao fight. Pacquiao is coming off a knockout loss and comes to fight, it could have affected him and it could have not, I think we’ll see that early.”
That fight will be contested at a full 147 lbs and not at a catch weight. The questions was posed to Garcia if he had a problem with catch weights being that Pacquiao has been synonymous with them and the criticism behind the Mayweather-Canelo fight is the catch weight of 152 lbs, instead of the full 154 lb weight limit. Catch weights why not? If it’s a fight with different weight classes, sure. Mayweather could have said Canelo come down, but he’s going up, I know it’s a catch weight but he’s still taking a risk by going up because Canelo is still the bigger, stronger, younger guy.”
