For anyone familiar with boxing, a Danny Garcia press event really means one thing, a platform for Angel Garcia to get on the microphone so he can rant and rave about Danny’s opponent, immigrants and really whatever else might cross Angel’s mind at that moment.
Today’s media launch for the March 4th fight between Danny Garcia and Keith Thurman did not disappoint. Depending on your attitude towards Danny or how boxing should be presented, this was either a moment of great embarrassment or a moment of great entertainment.
Yet amidst Angel’s stance that fighters from Florida are immigrants, and calls for Donald Trump to make America great again, there is a certain genius behind these actions that go beyond his desire to be center stage. The real motivation behind Angel’s antics is to draw the attention and pressure away from Danny and allow his son to focus on nothing but the fighting.
trash talking…when used properly can create a mental advantage that shapes the fight.
While boxers such as Muhammad Ali and Floyd Mayweather were able to use their words to distract and throw opponents off their game with ease, trash talk has never been Danny’s forte. He can participate, but it doesn’t come off as natural and plays more like good-natured ribbing than the soul searing attacks waged by the masters.
While Floyd is humiliating
Danny is smiling
While some pass off trash talking as nothing more than an attempt to sell tickets, when used properly it can create a mental advantage that shapes the fight.
And if your plan is to trade with Danny Garcia, you’re going to have a long (or in Amir’s case, short) night.
Danny’s most famous example of gaining the mental advantage was his fight with Amir Khan. Amir could have stayed at range and outboxed Danny using his superior hand-speed, something Angel understood.
In order to nullify the advantage, Angel went all out attacking Amir Khan to the point where Amir spent more time talking about Angel than he did focusing on Danny.
Amir was hooked and his trainer at the time, Freddie Roach, knew it. Freddie stressed in the fight week interviews that if Amir kept his cool and boxed he would have an easy victory.
Come fight night Amir started off smart but he ended up trying to make a point, not to Danny, but to Angel.
When he went to put a beating on Danny he placed himself in the range of Danny’s power punches. And if your plan is to trade with Danny Garcia, you’re going to have a long (or in Amir’s case, short) night.
While the WBC has once again tried to dust-off its law on barring father’s from being a fighter’s chief second, the pairing of Angel and Danny shows just how far a fighter can go when they work together.
I’m sure many will take umbrage with Angel’s antics. These displays of aggression have been an issue with boxing fans since Western culture shifted away from the brutal reality of agriculture and manufacturing jobs being the backbone of the economy.
In the days when workplace deaths were a common sight it seemed that most accepted that boxing was about two men trying to inflict crippling damage upon each other in yet another display of the struggle of life.The pairing of Angel and Danny shows just how far a fighter can go when they work together
But with the rise of the service sector, or perhaps the lack of lead in paint, many want to wrap the sport in a pretty package where it’s just a contest between two chaps who after the bout will go out for a pleasant meal and have a good chuckle about their little dust-up.
But Angel knows different, and one statement he made should never be forgotten is, “It’s brutal in that ring.”