All things considered, Danny Garcia didn’t look – or sound – like a guy who was ready to accept his gold watch and shuffle off into retirement.
Garcia, the former two-division champion and Brooklyn boxing staple, returned to the Barclays Center for the 10th (and last?) time Saturday to author the perfect final chapter to his career with a dramatic third-round knockout of Danny Gonzalez.
But even Garcia can’t be sure if he’s ready to end the narrative there.
"I'm just so happy,” Garcia said in the ring after scoring the 22nd knockout as a professional and running his record to 38-4. “I've done a lot in my career, and this is a great way to end it all.”
Yet against Gonzalez – a solid but admittedly less-than-elite opponent – Garcia appeared to be a fighter with some gas still swishing around in the tank. Although he came up short in his previous outing (a ninth-round stoppage at the hands of Erislandy Lara last September), Garcia showed his class immediately Saturday, requiring little time to break down the 35-year-old Queens native Gonzalez.
"I know that I hurt him in Round 1, but my timing was a little off,” Garcia said. “So I decided to work behind my jab, and I knew when he stopped his feet, I was gonna catch him.”
Philadelphia’s Garcia, 37, took less than two more rounds, in fact, to locate the openings he needed to get Gonzalez out of there.
"I was just taking it round by round,” Garcia said. “I didn't underestimate him. He was in great shape. My dad told me to just stick to the game plan.”
Garcia’s father, Angel – the enigmatic, smack-talking, smiling figure consistently at Danny’s side throughout the years – was a picture of pride postfight. The end for most prizefighters is almost never Norman Rockwell but rather the bloody, darker hues of a Quentin Tarantino freeze frame. Garcia seemed caught in between deciding whether to walk away having captured the former or, for at least one more shot at glory, to risk the latter.
"At the end of the day, I'm healthy and I've got a beautiful family,” he said. “I don't know if I'm done yet."
Jason Langendorf is the former Boxing Editor of ESPN.com, was a contributor to Ringside Seat and the Queensberry Rules, and has written about boxing for Vice, The Guardian, Chicago Sun-Times and other publications. A member of the Boxing Writers Association of America, he can be found at LinkedIn and followed on X and Bluesky.
