THE WAR ZONE: Revisiting Classics (Vol. 3 - Ben Tackie vs. Roberto Garcia)

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File it under "masterclasses spoiled in the eleventh hour".

Roberto Garcia put in some very nice boxing through eight. The lightning-strike combinations, the gotcha jab on the step-by, the serpentine defense setting up turns and counters repelling each attack nearly without fail. People forget or may not ever have been aware, long before he was training a stable of champions mostly known for breakneck offensive styles - "Grandpa" (so called even in his youth :yep) was a consummate technician. At the century's turn he was probably among the most skilled pure boxers pound for pound. Give him more of a punch and there isn't a lot separating him in his prime from kid brother Mikey, a current rising star in the sport.

At this stage a recent former champion, unceremoniously swatted from his perch by the peaking Chico Corrales, another run at world contention was still within grasping distance for Garcia. He lost to Chico mainly due to being a smallish 130lber in with a leviathan at the weight - with the body of a super lightweight squeezed into a super featherweight's skin like so much ground meat in a sausage casing. Ironically it was Garcia who set out for greener pastures at 135 while Corrales stayed put for 11 more bouts.

Here against Tackie - over whom a successful coup might have meant breaking into the lightweight rankings - Garcia once more gave up considerable mass and brawn. Yet, for more than half of the contest he made do with the disadvantages...putting on a clinic against the poster child for the "teak-tough Ghanaian pressure fighter" cliche.

He lapsed a bit in the sixth, which the commentators gave Tackie (as did all three judges, and myself) but restoked the coals and looked to have righted the ship in the ensuing couple of frames. His work really can't be understated in the 7th through most of the 9th, lighting Tackie up like the nighttime Vegas strip outside. At the end of the ninth, however, Tackie reaped dividends from his perseverance and the slow and steady tortoise caught the nearly exhausted hare with a clubbing shot that depleted the fumes on which he was running.

Then it was simply a matter of clean-up in the last, where you knew before they answered the bell that Garcia wouldn't be making it three minutes until the next and would-be final one. Tackie did what needed doing, and secured a knockout of the year candidate literally smacking gobs of sangria from Garcia's countenance.

Tackie, like Garcia, entered having only been once defeated in his pro career but without the championship experience. By then he was already pretty much an open book - heavy hands, single gear, not that difficult to hit but nigh impossible to hurt.

Tackie had already developed a bit of a reputation for late heroics, stopping Edwin Santana while trailing on the official cards entering the championship rounds and dropping Gregorio Vargas in the 12th to nearly avert his first loss. That single blow in the 9th against Garcia, however, altered the course of both men's careers. Tackie would go on to rack up a 9-10-1 record over his next decade of work but was always perceived to be a respectable scalp - a gatekeeper in the most direct sense, from whom elites ought to be able to snatch a decision but who could always be dangerous and would never cease to be in a fight until the fat lady sang. As for Garcia, his staggered comeback attempts over the following year sandwiched a third stoppage loss, to prime champ Joel Casamayor in a return to super feather. He was essentially finished off by that one pneumatic drill to the back of the head.

Tackie is better remembered these days for his game forthright efforts in his lopsided defeats to a cavalcade of eventual or former champions, and his W column is usually noted primarily for his ridiculous melee with Ray "Kicks Like A Mule" Oliveira - but notching this KO over Garcia stands as maybe the signature moment of Wonder's sixteen years in the ring.

Moral of the story: you can have all the skill and even the will in the world - but if you're smaller and less durable you damn sure need to be "on" until the gloves come off. Anything can happen in boxing, and even a guy on his way to a whitewash loss can pull his singed hide from the fire. This wasn't quite as dramatic an example as Taylor vs. Froch (since the beginning of the end here came in the penultimate round, with the writing already on the wall before the start of 10) but for me it's the more entertaining watch from start to finish, courtesy of Garcia's pretty style and Tackie's obliging, determined, and ultimately fruitful one.

 

Thing is, though, I wouldn't even call him weak chinned.

Diego Corrales and Ben Tackie dwarfed him in the ring, and both could bust walnuts in the crook of their pinkies. Those are big, strong dudes his punch resistance failed to withstand. By 2001 when he challenged El Cepillo he was essentially coming off two consecutive physically & mentally brutal (as demoralizing as violent) setbacks - both in matches where he was doing very well. Not to discredit Casamayor, but he got a broken Garcia - and it was still competitive before history repeated itself. That same Casamayor versus the undefeated version of Garcia is rather something to contemplate.

 

:nod

I'd say that was a much lower skill iteration, since Bey for all his polished veneer doesn't possess half the gadgets tucked away in Garcia's utility belt - and Molina, as much as he is renowned for his infantry-line chin, relentlessness, and heavy hands...can't hold prime Tackie's jockstrap in any of those categories. (nor that of his namesake, the original John John Molina - a common opponent of Garcia and Tackie, as it happens...)

...but yeah, they played out nearly parallel.

My pleasure. :good Sorry about the fortnight hiatus...it was a hectic period.

I think it's a goddamn shame he and Kassim Ouma missed each other despite having some overlap in their professional tenures. :verysad

They could have set a sum CompuBox record that, no hyperbole, could have stood for the rest of the century...easily our lifetimes.

Really it's a goddamn shame more things didn't work out for Ray...and not just because he is a semi-local (yeah, there are few enough Bostonian pugilists of renown these days I'll resort in a heartbeat to claiming someone from Nu Beffa)

He always came up short at just the wrong times, but with the amount o skill and courage he displayed over the years it stings he never got hold of a piece of major org tin.

He and Tackie, incidentally, probably vie for #1 among "guys who made early Hatton look spectacular". They both put him over big time and gave him a serious boost on the way to stardom.

Oh - and I don't wanna spoil anything, but at least one more of Ray's opponents is set to be featured in a future installment of TWZ. :deal

 

Roberto has more boxing savvy and slick maneuvers in his little piggy toe alone than Rios has in his entire body, and on paper should dance circles around him doling out even more advanced lessons than Mr. Abril taught him - but if Rios is alllowed to hydrate the equivalent of a medium-sized adult dog back on after weighing in as usual it could wind up being that familiar unmaking foible of Garcia's - doomed to get walked down and ground to dust by a big strong puncher before the clock saw him through.

So Garcia wide on points or Rios by late stoppage (it wasn't just Tackie who showed Garcia to be vulnerable in the home stretch - Molina got him to fall in the 12th but failed to finish him off in time) are the most likely outcomes ...but don't rule out the other possibilities: Rios by UD (robbery, that is...hey, if he got the call over Abril nothing is impossible) or even Garcia by knockout. (Alvarado showed him to be human, and while Garcia doesn't hit like Mike and was always more of a stylist he was no creampuff and would probably rain copious amounts of accumulated leather on his charge.)

 

:good He at least put some wear on the groove tread, if nothing else.