LAS VEGAS – After all they’ve been through in losing to Gervonta “Tank” Davis and Rolando “Rolly” Romero while falling off the rails by coming in overweight and testing positive for PEDs when he fought Devin Haney, Ryan Garcia and his new-and-former head trainer Henry Garcia have found inspiration in a shared, dated moment.
When Ryan Garcia was 17, fighting as an amateur in Mexico, that nation’s top amateur in their weight class was next up for a bout in Mexico.
Henry Garcia wanted no part of letting the bout go to the judges, telling his son: “Ryan, you’re going to have to make a statement right here.”
“That’s all I had to say,” Henry Garcia recalled. “He said, ‘All right, Dad,’ and it was, third round, boom! That’s when I knew, and said, ‘We’re ready to go to the pros’.”
Saturday night, in the pay-per-view main event at T-Mobile Arena, the father’s push for his son’s convincing finish versus WBC welterweight champion Mario Barrios remains – not because of skepticism for the judges, but rather the urgency of the situation.
“Absolutely,” Henry Garcia told BoxingScene. The elder Garcia said his son will not engage in any pleasantries with Barrios – including hand-shaking – on fight night.
Instead, perhaps as early as the Mexico fight as a teenager, trainer Garcia flashed a finishing combination led by a left hook and said: “It’ll be this. You watch. He’ll be dangerous.”
That’s the vision, anyway, after Ryan Garcia, 24-2 (20KOs), has worked this camp to set aside the volatility connected to drug and alcohol use and trainer turnover in an effort to gain a world title exactly one decade after that superb amateur triumph.
Asked what he has gotten from his son that Barrios’ new trainer Joe Goossen and Garcia’s former cornermen Derrick James and Eddy Reynoso couldn’t, Henry Garcia said: “Mindset.”
“The way he’s been working out,” he continued. “His condition. The way he thinks. That’s where you want your fighter to be: where he’s very level-headed, and his mindset is 100 per cent.
“If you don’t have that, it can be very dangerous. He has to be all there, complete. If not, it’s like going into the pool and you only know how to float. You don’t know how to swim. You’re going to sink.”
Ryan Garcia has witnessed that in suffering that body-shot TKO to the unbeaten Davis in 2023, getting knocked down in the May scorecard defeat by Romero and acting so erratically before the three-knockdown victory over Haney that was converted to a no-contest.
“So you’ve got to be careful,” Henry Garcia said. “In this sport, you better know what you’re doing. I’m making sure my son is ready and good to go.”
There’s no doubt this is a watershed moment for Ryan Garcia. A fourth title-fight failure would brand him a guy who falls short with everything at stake. A victory puts him in position for a slew of major bouts: Conor Benn; a Haney rematch; even a possible move to the stacked junior-middleweight division.
Henry Garcia says his son is serene and secure as the defining hour nears.
“You see me calm, right?” he said. “That’s the first [person] he gets it from. You’ve got to have that. That’s your foundation. From that point, you can build to be fierce, vicious, all of the above. The foundation has to be calm. You’ve got to be ready, focused, looking, thinking. And then you’ve got to crack.”
To fulfill a destiny that the Victorville, California pair foresaw together after Henry took full control of the corner for this bout would mean everything.
“It’s a dream come true – something we thought about since he was 17,” Henry Garcia said.
