Ryan Garcia’s dominating victory over Devin Haney on Saturday created a tricky situation here.
On one hand, Garcia turned in arguably the best performance of the year so far, putting his No. 10-ranked pound-for-pound opponent down three times and winning a majority decision to stun the favored Haney and the boxing world.
Garcia deserves credit for executing a good game plan to perfection, which certainly raised his stock.
On the other hand, he weighed in a whopping 3.2 pounds over the 140-pound limit for the fight, a failure that detracts from his accomplishment to a good degree.
That had to be taken into consideration when we were deciding whether he deserves to climb onto our pound-for-pound list.
Then there’s Haney. Yes, he lost in conclusive, even embarrassing fashion, which, under normal circumstances, would require us to remove him from our rankings or least drop him from No. 10 to Honorable Mention.
However, there’s the weight issue. Garcia was effectively a welterweight fighting a junior welterweight, which one could argue is an unfair advantage.
The fact is Haney agreed – for whatever reason – to go through with the fight even though Garcia missed weight by a mile, though. The chips fall where they may in that scenario.
Complicated, right?
Here’s what we decided to do. Garcia can’t be rewarded for such a lack of professionalism, one that we can presume played a role in the outcome. Plus, the fact he was stopped by Gervonta Davis only two fights ago can’t be ignored.
So Garcia will have to wait to become a Boxing Junkie pound-for-pounder.
Haney? He has to go.
Again, he chose to fight an overweight Garcia, evidently believing that his perceived superiority in terms of skill could compensate for any physical edge Garcia might have. The result was ugly for him. He didn’t look anything like a pound-for-pounder.
As a result, Haney was removed from the list, which lifted Nos. 11-15 Bam Rodriguez, Artur Beterbiev, Errol Spence Jr., Vasiliy Lomachenko and Shakur Stevenson up one notch each.
Also, two-time 168-pound titleholder David Benavidez, an Honorable Mention going into the week, moves up to No. 15. And Junto Nakatani, the unbeaten 118-pound beltholder from Japan, enters for the first time as an Honorable Mention.
Next pound-for-pounder up: No. 6 Canelo Alvarez is scheduled to defend his undisputed 168-pound championship against Jaime Munguia on May 4 in Las Vegas.
Here’s what the list looks like at the moment:
BOXING JUNKIE
POUND-FOR-POUND
Honorable mention (alphabetical order): Jermall Charlo (no fight scheduled); Roman Gonzalez (no fight scheduled); Kazuto Ioka (scheduled to face Fernando Martinez in a 115-pound title-unification bout in on July 7 in Tokyo); Teofimo Lopez (reportedly near a deal to defend his 140-pound title against Steve Claggett on June 29 in Miami); Junto Nakatani (no fight scheduled).
