Arum says Mikey Garcia vs. Vasiliy Lomachenko no longer a 50-50 purse split

By Aragon Garcia

Boxingnews24.com

Top Rank promoter Bob Arum says Mikey Garcia has damaged his “viability” with his poor performance in losing to Errol Spence Jr., and he can now forget about getting a 50-50 purse split when the time comes for him to fight WBA/WBO lightweight champion Vasily Lomachenko in a unification fight.

Mikey says he’s going to move back down to 135 and look to fight Lomachenko, but that might be a little difficult with Arum saying that he’s no longer going to get a 50-50 split because of his loss to Spence.

The undefeated IBF welterweight champion Spence (25-0, 21 KOs) controlled the entire fight with Garcia (39-1, 30 KOs) in beating him by a 12 round unanimous decision by the scores 120-107

“I thought Mikey didn’t try,” Arum said to esnewsreporting about the Spence vs. Garcia fight. “He was there. He saw the guy [Spence] was too big. He should have thought about that before he got into the fight. Then he played defense for 12 rounds. That’s cheating the people in my opinion. Mikey has really damaged his viability. So yeah, we’d do that fight, but it ain’t a 50-50 anymore,” Arum said about the Lomachenko vs. Mikey Garcia fight.

It sounds like Arum doesn’t want to make the Mikey vs. Lomachenko fight. Garcia isn’t going to agree to take the smaller money to fight Lomachenko. That’s not going to happen.

Mikey, 31, did the best he could against a fighter that was a lot bigger than him in 5’9 1/2″ Spence. Moving up weight classes to fight Spence was never going to be easily for Garcia. It wouldn’t have mattered how hard Mikey fought. He wasn’t big enough to make up for the size that Spence had. Arum should know that. If this had been the 5’7″ Lomachenko (12-1, 9 KOs), it likely would have been the same result, but worse with Spence knocking him out if he tried to fight. Lomachenko doesn’t react well to body shots, as we saw in his loss to Orlando Salido in 2013. Spence hits a lot harder than Salido, and he would go after Lomachenko’s body and have him holding all night like he did against Salido. It would look far worse with Lomaching hugging Spence all night than what we saw with Mikey, who at least tried his best to fight.

“He’s talking obviously in his favor, because that’s his fighter,” Robert Garcia said to esnewsreporting in responding to Arum’s comment about Mikey no longer getting a 50-50 purse split against Lomachenko. “It was a good experience. Spence wasn’t the right fight to take. So what? Go back to 135 or 140. He had an answer for everything Mikey [was doing],” Robert said about Spence. “He showed a lot. Mikey told us, ‘He had an answer for everything I tried.’ He fought a good fight, so we have to respect that,” Robert said.

Mikey tried to do things against Spence, but they weren’t working because of the reach, size and power advantage he had. Towards the end of the fight, Mikey was getting the upper hand in the 11th and 12th round in catching Spence with shots while he was coming forward. Spence stopped attacking Mikey like he’d been doing in the ninth and tenth. Mikey was able to make Spence fearful of wading in to land his shots. That’s a victory for Mikey with him being able to hold off Spence. If Spence didn’t have any fear, he would have stayed on Mikey in the championship rounds to knock him out. He would have continued to work Mikey over like he was doing in the ninth round. There was no way Garcia could have held up under that kind of withering fire from Spence if he’d been allowed to continue to land his big power shots unabbatted in rounds 10, 11 and 12.