IBF welterweight champion Errol Spence took some time to chat with Fight Hub about his March 16 fight with Mikey Garcia. Check out some excerpts on his thoughts on the fight which is now just a couple of weeks away...
Spence on how he’s feeling with the Garcia fight just around the corner:
“I feel a lot better. I feel great. I’m in tip-top shape, I’ve been training hard. If you seen me two months prior to this, you seen how I looked and you see how I look now. So I mean, I been training hard, focused, and 100% ready for this fight.”
On how big he gets in between fights:
“I don’t know, I don’t check my weight...we’ll keep that a secret.”
On seeing Garcia a lot during the promotion of this fight and what he makes of their size difference:
“I don’t look at it that way. I look at it as skills and talent. Skills and talent and boxing IQ so, I mean, that’s what you gotta have. There’s a lot of bigger guys that end up losing to smaller guys because they think that just because their size they’re gonna beat an opponent up. I mean Floyd made a career out of beating bigger guys, so I can’t let that be the reason why I lose on March 16. So we’re focused on skills and boxing IQ and just using all of my abilities and, you know, putting it to use.”
On fans expecting him to put the pressure on more than box:
“I mean I’m still gonna be me, I’m still gonna be me but, you know, we’re gonna think about it. Like I said, boxing is a chess game, it’s a chess match — he makes a move, I gotta counter with a better move. So it’s all about adjustments so depending on what I see and what I feel inside the first round is how I react to certain things, and how he reacts to certain things that’s gonna change how I react.
“So it’s just a chess match — just his move, my move, his move, my move. And once I take all the pieces then I’m gonna take him out.”
On if he’s expecting an impressive knockout:
“We’ll see. I’m the type of guy that lets my knockouts come. I’m not gonna force a knockout...The only time I get a good feeling [about a knockout] is in the ring, you know, if I feel my opponent weakening or I can take him out, that’s when I go for it. But I don’t bank on a knockout before the fight because you don’t wanna do that and then it’s a 12-round fight. So, like I said, I expect the unexpected and I’m expecting a hard 12-round fight and I’m expecting him to stand up to my punches.
“Now if he doesn’t, then we’ll switch it up and I go get him but right now I psyched myself out and I believe it’s gonna be a hard 12-round fight whether it is or is not.”
On what he thinks of Garcia training under the SNAC [Dragon Ball Z-like] program to prepare for this fight:
“I mean, you mentioned Dragon Ball Z, so just like Vegeta man, no matter how hard he trained he couldn’t beat Goku. So it doesn’t matter to me...”
On respecting Mikey for moving up for this fight:
“Yeah, I respect him. I respect him for doing it but, you know, at the end of the day that respect goes there — I mean, for that, he took the fight. They say he signed off on it so now it’s time to make him pay for signing the contract to fight me.”