Garcia hopes for Linares fight with a win over Broner

I’d hate to say a consummate professional like Mikey Garcia may be overlooking an opponent, but Garcia has been talking about his immediate plans should he get past Adrien Broner next weekend. Speaking with Sky Sports, Garcia admits that he’s looking to move back down to lightweight to unify titles with Jorge Linares as his first priority.

"I would really like a fight with Linares but if that's not available and other unification fights are unavailable, I will have to look at the super-lightweight or even welterweight.”

Garcia continues by saying he really wants to clean out the lightweight division entirely before moving up in weight for good and only took this fight at 140lbs because it was the biggest one available to him at the moment. But once he makes his mind up to campaign at 140, 147 - he’s looking to take on the top names.

"The options are going to be big after this fight, so I would definitely look at fighting the winner of Crawford-Indongo and those sort of fights.”

But before we can get to any of that business, Garcia first has to deal with the task at hand — and believe it or not, I think Broner is going to be a real handful here.

Since this fight was announced I’ve been keeping a pretty close eye on Broner to see how he would handle it. I won’t make any statements on whether he’s finally matured or whatnot — I don’t know the man personally — but I can say he seems to truly understand the gravity of this fight and the impact it will have on his career trajectory.

In fact, I think Broner has taken this fight so seriously that if I were a betting man, and the odds were still at 5:1 against him, I’d probably put some money down on him. Broner appears to have whipped himself into great shape for this fight while training in Colorado Springs, and I’m leaning towards him pulling off the upset.

But that’s not to take anything away from how good I think Garcia is — he’s really, really good — but Broner is a talented and naturally bigger man, and Garcia has been dropped by lesser punchers before.

What we all can agree and hope for is that we get a really good fight on July 29th, and I think we’ll be getting just that.