That’s all for tonight. Thanks for following along with us and be sure to check out our full report.
Here's the official scorecard for tonight's #HaneyGarcia fight. pic.twitter.com/lZWTx8rHcG
— Bryan Armen Graham (@BryanAGraham) April 21, 2024
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Compubox’s punch statistics lend numerical context to tonight’s big shocker. Garcia landed 106 of 285 blows (37.2%), compared to 87 of 214 for Haney (40.7%).
Notably, Garcia landed nearly twice as many power shots (95) as Haney (45), landing at a 41% clip after Haney’s previous 10 opponents landed only 25%.
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Ryan Garcia wins by majority decision!
Garcia has handed Haney the first defeat of his professional career in stunning fashion. He’s just won a majority decision to score the seismic upset. The judges’ scores were 114-110 and 115-109 for Garcia with the third scoring it a 112-112 draw.
Round 12
Garcia mean-mugs to the finish line and we’re headed to the scorecards (amid technical difficulties at ringside!).
Guardian’s unofficial score: Haney 9-10 Garcia (Haney 111-113 Garcia)
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Haney down in 11th round!
Round 11
Haney dropped to the seat of his pants again! The third knockdown of the night! Surely the fight is Garcia’s to lose now, even with the point deduction. One of the crazier fights we can remember.
Guardian’s unofficial score: Haney 8-10 Garcia (Haney 102-103 Garcia)
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Haney down in 10th round!
Round 10
Garcia drops Haney with a left hook and Haney is in serious trouble! Garcia is all over Haney, who’s hanging on for dear life. Referee Harvey Dock is taking a very close look. Haney is getting away with excessive holding here.
Guardian’s unofficial score: Haney 8-10 Garcia (Haney 94-93 Garcia)
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Round 9
A strong ninth from Haney, who is scoring consistently with the right hand. It looks like he’s mostly recovered from that nasty seventh.
Guardian’s unofficial score: Haney 10-9 Garcia (Haney 86-83 Garcia)
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Round 8
Garcia looks fatigued after expending so much energy in the seventh but Haney does’t look like he’s fully recovered from that stunning battery. Haney slows things down and wins the round but he’s been hurt multiple times tonight and is far from out of the woods.
Guardian’s unofficial score: Haney 10-9 Garcia (Haney 76-74 Garcia)
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Haney down in seventh round!
Round 7
Garcia drops Haney early in the seventh and Haney is in huge trouble with two minutes left in the round. Haney badly hurt as Garcia tries to finish it. Garcia punches on the break and gets a point deducted, giving Haney precious seconds to recover. But Haney is still on rubbery legs! Will he make it? Haney is holding and hanging on for dear life. And he makes it to the bell!
Guardian’s unofficial score: Haney 8-9 Garcia (Haney 66-65 Garcia)
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Round 6
Garcia opens the sixth guns ablaze, meeting Haney in the center of the ring and reeling off no fewer than 20 uncontested punches while whipping the crowd into a frenzy. A couple of them get through Haney’s guard but he weathers the barrage well, then picks up right where he left off in the fifth, using educated pressure to score. Close round and the early spurt was enough for Garcia.
Guardian’s unofficial score: Haney 9-10 Garcia (Haney 58-56 Garcia)
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Round 5
Haney continues to apply pressure and back up a visibly frustrated Garcia, who is missing a whole lot more than he’s landing. The crowd boos a long stretch of inaction.
Guardian’s unofficial score: Haney 10-9 Garcia (Haney 49-46 Garcia)
Round 4
The gulf in class between these fighters is beginning to tell as the contest leans into the middle rounds. Thrown off by Haney’s feints and upper-body movement, Garcia is walking into counters that have started to take a toll as much mentally as physically. Garcia is looking frustrated, starting to hold more and more, looking for a opening for the left hook.
Guardian’s unofficial score: Haney 10-9 Garcia (Haney 39-37 Garcia)
Round 3
Haney lands a right hand upstairs right between Garcia’s guard. Then Haney lands a big left hook that sends Garcia reeling backward and brings the crowd to its feet. Garcia doesn’t seem hurt, pounding his gloves together as if to say: “Come on!” Haney operating in calm rhythm and with perfect timing at the moment, jabbing to the head and body.
Guardian’s unofficial score: Haney 10-9 Garcia (Haney 29-28 Garcia)
Round 2
Haney is more aggressive to start the second, throwing and landing the right hand. Garcia doesn’t seem overly interested in working the jab, instead looking for openings for that left hook. Haney scoring with the jab, one after another. An easy round for the champion.
Guardian’s unofficial score: Haney 10-9 Garcia (Haney 19-19 Garcia)
Round 1
What a start! Garcia comes out swigning, landing a flush right hand on Haney then wobbling him with a left hook, sending the crowd into hysterics and forcing the champion to tie up. Chants of “Ry-an! Ry-an!” ring through the arena. Haney is doing his best to turn down the temperature and start working behind the jab.
Guardian’s unofficial score: Haney 9-10 Garcia (Haney 9-10 Garcia)
The final instructions have been given, the seconds are out and we’ll pick it up with round-by-round coverage from here!
Ryan Garcia is making his way to the ring. He’s emerged from the tunnel in an all-white robe beneath a custom diamond crown to the ear-splitting strains of a three-song medley: No Child Left Behind and Jesus Walks by Kanye West followed by El Rey by Vincente Fernandez.
Now it’s Devin Haney, who makes his entrance to 21 Savage’s redrum in a kit designed by the luxury label Fear of God.
The ring announcer is presenting the fighters from the center of the ring. No anthems tonight.
Arnold Barboza Jr has just won a highly controversial split decision over Northern Ireland’s Sean McComb. It was a bit of snoozer, with long periods of inaction drawing boos from the nearly full Barclays Center crowd. But the Belfast southpaw was clearly getting the better of the action and the result came as a surprise. One ringside judge had it 98-92 for McComb while the other two scored it 96-94 and 97-93 for Barboza. (The Guardian had it 97-93 for McComb.)
The announcement of the decision was greeted with a chorus of boos and catcalls that only grew in volume when Barboda conducted an in-ring interview before departing the arena floor. Compubox’s punch statistics reveal that Barboza landed 10-of-44 shots per round after averaging 22-of-70 in his previous seven outings.
That concludes the undercard. Haney and Garcia should be making their ring entrances in short order.
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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.
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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.
