By Keith Idec
Robert Easter Jr. doesn’t believe the reasons Mikey Garcia gave for not making their fight.
Easter feels Garcia knows he is a high-risk alternative and simply doesn’t want to face him in a lightweight championship unification fight. Adviser Al Haymon, who works with Garcia and Easter, discussed that bout with them before Garcia went in a different direction last month.
Garcia (37-0, 30 KOs) instead decided to remain at 140 pounds for a second consecutive fight, this time against IBF junior welterweight champion Sergey Lipinets (13-0, 10 KOs). Lipinets will make the first defense of his title against Garcia on February 10 at the Alamodome in San Antonio (Showtime).
Once Garcia picked Lipinets, Easter (20-0, 14 KOs) agreed to make the third defense of his 135-pound championship against the Dominican Republic’s Javier Fortuna (33-1-1, 23 KOs) on January 20 at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Showtime also will broadcast Easter-Fortuna before a main event featuring IBF welterweight champ Errol Spence Jr. (22-0, 19 KOs), who’ll make his first title defense against Lamont Peterson (35-3-1, 17 KOs).
Garcia told BoxingScene.com recently that facing Easter made less financial sense for him than opposing Lipinets. Easter also alluded to the Oxnard, California, native indicating he doesn’t have a big enough fan base to make their fight worthwhile.
Easter – who has packed an 8,000-seat arena in his hometown of Toledo, Ohio, for his past two fights – disputed Garcia’s rationale during a conference call Thursday.
“That’s just a lame excuse to not fight,” Easter said. “I don’t produce enough fans. What does Lipinets – no disrespect to him – but what … come on now. Everybody knows that is not true. I have fans all over. My fan base is big. Like I said, man, it don’t matter if we fought in a room with nobody. It shouldn’t even matter. If the money’s good and the contract’s good, then we should fight. I wouldn’t care about fighting in front of nobody, because I know what I’m gonna do.”
It’s more likely, according to Easter, that Garcia, the WBC lightweight champion, didn’t want to move back down to 135 pounds for their title unification fight because he is 5-feet-11, five inches taller than Garcia, and can box and punch.
“If I was that much an easy fight, the fight would’ve been made off the offer they gave Mikey,” Easters said. “It would’ve been made. It just didn’t make sense, all these excuses. I don’t make no excuses. I’m coming to fight and they know that.”
Easter still hopes to challenge Garcia later this year, but acknowledged during the conference call he is “sensing that” Garcia isn’t as interested in that fight as him. Garcia has talked about battling WBA lightweight champ Jorge Linares (43-3, 27 KOs) in a much-discussed championship unification match in the summer after facing Lipinets.
“I wanted the fight,” Easter said. “It was serious on my side. I don’t care where, how much, none of that. I wanted the fight. I heard, you know, at first it was I didn’t produce enough fans or the fight didn’t make sense, which that didn’t make sense, and some other excuses the guy came up with. But like I said, I was ready to fight whenever, whatever or how much. It didn’t even matter.”
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.