According to Dan Rafael of espn.com, former two-division world champion Mikey Garcia will be back in action on July 30 as the co-feature bout against Elio Rojas at Barclays Center in Brooklyn and on Showtime.
“The best of my career is what’s next,” Garcia said during a small media session with reporters on Saturday night at Barclays Center before the Keith Thurman-Shawn Porter welterweight title fight. “I think you’ll remember me most for what I achieve from here forward than for what I’ve done. The best challenges are next.
“All I have wanted is a date and a fight and to get back to boxing. I didn’t want to be waiting, guessing and thinking about when I might fight. Now I have a date, I have a fight and I am very happy.”
“(Adviser) Al [Haymon], Stephen and Lou worked out this fight for me almost as … a trial type of work,” Garcia said, adding that he has no deals with anyone beyond the July 30 bout. “Stephen and I have talked in the past. He really wants me to be part of the Showtime network, and Al has a lot of fighters that I would love to fight, and I won’t have access to those fighters if I don’t do business with them.
“I need to make up for lost time. I need to get back. This (protracted legal battle) took too much time. The court system isn’t something you just walk into and handle it. It takes time.”
“Floyd [Mayweather] has been trying to push to maybe get something going,” Garcia said. “We have been talking on how we can arrange something. Floyd proposed maybe a short-term opportunity to work with him. Al also proposed his idea of what he thinks he can do for me. And having Stephen as a network, great things are about to happen. I just want to make sure whatever I do is best for me, for my career.”
“A year ago, we made a few attempts to settle this. If [Top Rank] believed I owed them anything money-wise, give me a number. They said no, that’s not available, that’s not for sale,” Garcia said. “So that kind of frustrated me. It motivated me to go full on and go through litigation.
“As a fighter, you’re supposed to stay in the gym. This is what I do. I don’t do anything else. I don’t do any other sport. I box. I like to be in the gym with the guys. I’ve been in shape the whole time. I’ve been training, sparring. I helped just about every single guy Robert has in the gym. We had guys come from other gyms looking for sparring with me because they wanted to get in shape. I didn’t mind it. I said let’s do it. It helps me stay in shape.”
“I think the two years off was good for him. He focused on other things,” said brother/trainer, Robert Garcia. “Now he wants to pick up a title at 135, 140 and maybe 147. Things were too easy for him before. Now he has challenges in front of him. I think he had fought for the past two years maybe because he would be bored and not want to fight anymore.”
So he said he declined fights because “it’s hard when they don’t give you an exact number of fights they believe you owe them. I believed my contract was up. I still stand by that. They believed there was an extension that applied. I didn’t see how that extension could apply, especially when they never gave me their own interpretation. Every clause, every contract they had with me would never end the way they have it written down. They wanted me to get a title fight so they could extend for another three years, and then before tha
“I have always said they did a very good job building me up,” Garcia said. “They picked the right dates, the right times, the right fighters as opponents for me. There’s a few things I was not happy with — some of the disclosures, some of the revenues, stuff they should be sharing with me and I never got to see certain things and I questioned it. And when they promise you a purse and then they come back with a $100,000 or $150,000 less, it just doesn’t look right.”
