Elijah Garcia is now a super middleweight.
The still-promising 22-year-old is threatening to outgrow the middleweight division, where he cut his teeth as a rising prospect. A test drive of sorts will come with his full-fledged 168lbs debut on the preliminary undercard of the December 6 Isaac Cruz-Lamont Roach Jnr Prime Video Pay-Per-View event from Frost Bank Center in San Antonio, Texas.
“He is going to do his first fight at 168lbs,” Bob Santos, Garcia’s head trainer, told BoxingScene. “We are going to test the waters at the super
middleweight division.”
Garcia, 17-1 (13 KOs), turned pro as a junior middleweight in 2020 but quickly developed into a blossoming middleweight. His rapid growth became apparent, first in a canceled fight with Kyrone Davis after he was hospitalized just hours before the weigh-in for their planned March 2024 meeting.
The two were back on the schedule just three months later, only for Garcia to badly miss weight. As a double whammy, he suffered his lone career defeat when Davis emerged via split decision,
The loss came in the midst of a tough run, as the young pro took on big challenges early.
Garcia emerged in 2023 with a stoppage victory over Amilcar Vidal, which was featured on a Showtime Championship Boxing telecast. He holds a win over Armando Resendiz, the man who recently defeated Caleb Plant.
However, the bloom has come off the rose in his two most recent bouts. Garcia rebounded - to a degree - from his loss to Davis with a narrow points win over Terrel Gausha. Their March 22 clash saw Garcia survive an opening round knockdown to claim a disputed split decision victory over the 2012 U.S. Olympian and former title challenger.
Regardless of split opinion on that verdict, Garcia’s team prefers to take away the positives from the fight. Namely, yet another tough challenge against a serviceable fighter in and around the middleweight division.
“He has never turned down an opponent that was put in front of him,” points out Santos, who joined Garcia’s training team earlier this year.
The role is shared with George Garcia, Elijah’s father and co-trainer. It was Santos’ first full camp with Garcia, after which came the hard discussion about the best weight division for this stage of his career - and life. conclusion that the best thing for Garcia to do at this point was to move up a weight class.
“He is starting to get bigger,” Santos said. “His body is starting to grow and fill out.”
Lucas Ketelle is the author of “Inside the Ropes of Boxing,” a guide for young fighters, a writer for BoxingScene and a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. Find him on X at @BigDogLukie.
