Trainer Kenny Porter gives his perspective on the upcoming Garcia-Rios fight while they were the ones actively seeking out a fight with Garcia...
“As you’ve seen Danny on his many videos that he’s said now...he said he never knew that we wanted the fight with him. I don’t understand how he could not know that. Um, there was also a statement released by [WBC president] Mauricio Sulaiman which said that the WBC wanted #1 Shawn Porter to fight #2 Danny Garcia for Keith Thurman’s interim title while he was out with his injury, which Keith’s been gone over a year and it’s continuing right now, he has no date to come back.
“So between the video, between the WBC president bringing that announcement out, I don’t understand why he didn’t realize and understand that we wanted to fight him. We’re in the same division, you know, but, for some reason if some kid in the neighborhood has got a problem with another kid in the neighborhood, that information doesn’t get to him. You know that’s not true but...that’s the only reason that it hasn’t happen. As far as we’re concerned, we would’ve invited the fight, we would love to have the fight. We took another fight because we couldn’t get that fight...[Garcia] could’ve had us for this fight. That’d been no problem. He can have us after this fight...”
On Garcia saying that he never received a call for a fight with Porter:
“If I was interested in fighting you and I brought it out to the public that I wanted to fight you, and you knew I wanted to fight, it’s very simple on your behalf to either say yes or no. But to pretend like it didn’t happen is just total bullshit. Now, did somebody give him a contract? Well guess what, he’s fighting Brandon Rios without a contract right now.
“That’s not how boxing works. He doesn’t have a contract to fight Brandon Rios. He won’t receive that contract to fight Brandon Rios until maybe tomorrow. He might get it tonight but he hasn’t received a contract so if you’re interested in fighting with someone it has absolutely nothing to do with the contract, because you’re gonna go a whole entire camp, all the way leading up to fight week, without a contract. That’s the way boxing is.
“At this level guys are not signing a contract — no one up here right now has probably got a contract to fight the other guy until we probably get to within 48 hours to the fight.”
On if he just believes Danny just didn’t want to fight Shawn:
“It’s bullshit. What else could you feel?!...The WBC president said it could happen, we said let’s make it happen after that, but [Garcia] don’t know anything about it? But he did respond to that...he responded and called Shawn a clown. But you don’t respond in terms of ‘yeah, I wanna fight’ or ‘no, I don’t wanna fight you.’ Very simple.”