After watching all of “the madness” that transpired at Friday’s Ryan Garcia-Devin Haney press conference, there was one takeaway.
“We’re heading to the finish line,” former 140-pound champion Chris Algieri said from Barclays Center, where he watched Garcia come in a staggering 3.2 points overweight for his second title fight in a year, with unbeaten champion Haney (31-0, 15 KOs) vowing to finish his former amateur rival.
In addition to sabotaging his opportunity to wear the belt he has long insisted he craves, Garcia (24-1, 20 KOs) has participated in one of the most maddening promotions in some time, punctuating it by showing up two hours late for Friday’s ceremonial weigh-in, where he sipped from what he was said was a beer bottle before revealing his overweight figure.
“People like to watch train wrecks so they can gossip,” said Paulie Malignaggi while joining Algieri on Friday’s episode of ProBox TV’s “Deep Waters.” “This guy [Garcia] has been a train wreck the whole time. Ryan is his own walking train wreck.”
Former welterweight champion Malignaggi was floored by what he saw, with Garcia soberly transforming a boxer’s crushing, missed-weight moment into a social media scene.
His weight was “not even close – nor did he try, nor did he care. Wild, wild stuff.”
Algieri watched both the Haney and Garcia teams approach the weigh-in stage as if “on a mission,” with Haney’s father/trainer/manager, Bill Haney, appearing unnerved before he and Garcia’s promoter and former world champion Bernard Hopkins confronted each other on stage.
“There was a lot of edginess,” Algieri said.
“In terms of how this promotion missed, not only are the fans starting to turn on Ryan, they don’t like the antics. It’s cringe-worthy.”
From his perch, Algieri noticed the undercard fighters’ response to the wasted time waiting for Haney and Garcia to appear Friday.
