Boxing Stars Who Failed to Impress in 2014

It was kind of a down year on the boxing calendar in 2014.

Obviously if it was a down year overall, there had to be a few boxers who failed to impress this year. It could be that they were inactive, lost a fight they weren't supposed to or because they didn't schedule very tough opponents. Regardless of why, these guys all left us feeling disappointed.

Please note and take into account while reading this list that it's only about what they did in the ring during 2014. All of these boxers have had a great deal of success and will likely go on to achieve great things in 2015 and beyond, but for various reasons they had a down year in 2014.

Their success in previous years and earlier in their careers is part of why many would consider this year a disappointment. Without having previous success there is nothing to be let down by because the bar would already be set low, but that's not the case with these boxers.

So take this not as a knock on their career achievements or as an overall slight toward their skill in the ring, but instead as a look back at perhaps some poor decisions from a booking perspective that led to a lackluster 2014.

Five fighters were included on this list, but certainly there were many more who could have been included also if the list was expanded. I tried to keep it to fighters who are or were at one time major champions instead of prospects or average fighters.

Fighters that just missed the list include: Mike Alvarado, Deontay Wilder, Sergio Martinez and Peter Quillin.

Julio Cesar Chavez Jr.

Eric Gay/Associated Press

Record in 2014: 1-0 with a victory in March over Brian Vera.

The son of the legendary Julio Cesar Chavez followed up his uninspiring victory over Vera from 2013 with a more clear decision but still failed to silence his critics or erase the doubt he created in their first match.

Since losing a lopsided decision to Sergio Martinez in the fall of 2012, Chavez has only fought once in each of the next two years; both fights coming against the journeyman Vera. As badly as Martinez exposed him in the ring, the lack of desire or passion shown from Chavez since has exposed him even more.

After Chavez walked away from a PPV fight against Gennady Golovkin in July—GGG signed and agreed to move up to 168—and a match vs. Carl Froch for January, many have started to wonder if Chavez really wants to be a fighter or just chose this career because it came easy to him and is lucrative due to his last name.

Chavez also oddly turned down a title shot against super middleweight champion Anthony Dirrell earlier this year. Who turns down two huge fights against major stars like Golovkin and Froch and then also turns down a title shot that he arguably didn't earn?

Dan Rafael of ESPN summarized the last two-plus years of Chavez' career pretty well:

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So since Chavez trained all of about a week for his shot against then-middleweight champion Sergio Martinez in September 2012 -- and then failed a postfight drug test and served a nine-month suspension -- he has fought all of twice, both times against Vera, including the first fight which he failed to make weight for and deserved to lose.

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If I were running Top Rank I would just drop the court case and let him go; he's not worth the headaches.

Andre Ward

Harry How/Getty Images

Record in 2014: 0-0, didn't fight once.

It's hard to be impressive when you don't even step into the ring. ESPN was finally forced to take him out of its top pound-for-pound list after over a year of inactivity.

Not much to write about here other than to say Andre Ward seems like he'd rather lose court battle after court battle than suck it up and fight until his deal is over.

I'm not someone who typically blames athletes for going after every dollar they can earn because it's their body that's on the line, but at some point enough needs to be enough with Ward.

It seems obvious that the court system believes his promoter is in the right, so why not run out the clock on the deal by scheduling some matches and making some money? By not fighting he's only going to make the deal longer because most deals call for a certain number of fights as well as years.

For example, Manny Pacquiao's current contract with Top Rank is for five fights. Like many other top stars, Pacquiao only fights twice a year, but in theory he could step that up to three times a year and be done with the contract in one-and-a-half years instead of two-and-a-half years.

Alternatively, of course, he could instead follow the Ward school of boxing business and not fight at all, which would make the contract last for infinity.

Whether Ward's promoter broke laws or didn't live up to their agreement like he claims, I don't know either way, but what I do know is he's wasting years of his prime while chasing his own tail in the court system.

No one will remember 10 years from now that Ward took a stand; what they will remember is that one of this generation's best fighters took several long leaves of absence from the sport during his prime.

Danny Garcia

Ed Mulholland/Getty Images

Record in 2014: 2-0

Sorry to beat a dead horse, but scheduling a match against Rod Salka alone is enough to get you on this list regardless of what else happened the rest of the year. Salka has more losses in his career than knockout victories; there's no excuse for Garcia to take that match.

His management team is more to blame for scheduling such an awful match, but at some point a boxer needs to put his foot down and take control of his own career when dumb decisions like fighting Salka are being made on his behalf; after all, he is the one most often getting grief for the match.

If Garcia had fought a top junior welterweight before or after the Salka match, then most would have probably forgiven him. But his only other fight this year was against Mauricio Herrera in what was supposed to be a showcase fight for Garcia in Puerto Rico, his family's country of origin.

Instead Garcia looked completely unprepared for the first half of the fight and walked away with a close controversial decision that many—including myself—didn't believe he deserved.

Many readers tend to get the impression that I don't like Garcia, but nothing could be further from the truth. He's a very entertaining fighter with impressive skill that I enjoy watching, but the matches his team scheduled for him this year was insulting to his fans and did Garcia a disservice by wasting a year of his prime.

Hopefully they'll do better in 2015, like with perhaps a unification fight against Lamont Peterson.

Mikey Garcia

Tom Pennington/Getty Images

Record in 2014: 1-0

Being compared to Andre Ward is usually a great compliment, but not when it comes to one part of the business. Like Ward, Mikey Garcia has also been MIA for a lengthy time due to a legal dispute with his promoter.

Garcia last fought in late January when he won a decision over Juan Carlos Burgos. But he has been inactive since that fight because of a lawsuit he filed to get out of his contract with Top Rank Promotions.

Since last defending his 130-pound belt in a frankly boring fight last January, Garcia has decided to drop that belt while the process of his lawsuit continues to play out. Whenever Garcia does finally return to the ring, he will reportedly do so up two weight classes at junior welterweight.

For a guy who is considered by some to be a top-10 pound-for-pound fighter, to go an entire year with only one fight and lose your belt on top of that has to be considered a down year.

Adonis Stevenson

Record in 2014: 1-0, has a fight scheduled for December 19 against Dmitry Sukhotsky.

His victory came in May against Andrzej Fonfara with Adonis Stevenson suffering a knockdown in Round 9. Fonfara isn't a bum, but after running away from or dragging his feet on making fights with Sergey Kovalev, Bernard Hopkins and Jean Pascal, he definitely needed to be more impressive.

There isn't a dirtier word in the sport of boxing that a fighter can be labeled with than be called someone who "ducks" tough opponents, but that's exactly what happened to Stevenson in 2014.

Stevenson has been all bark and no bite recently, which Dan Rafael of ESPN did a good job of calling him out on when Stevenson said he would attend Hopkins-Kovalev and fight the winner.

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If he really intends to fight the winner -- and I’ll believe it when I see it -- why didn’t Stevenson sign the deal that had been agreed to for the Kovalev fight? You know, the one that led to Stevenson, Al Haymon (Stevenson’s adviser), Showtime and others getting sued by Kovalev promoter Main Events? 

If Stevenson really wanted to fight Hopkins, why not finalize the fight when it was sitting in his lap? There was plenty of time to get it done. It was the entire reason, supposedly, that Haymon steered Stevenson to Showtime in the first place and blew off the Kovalev deal. 

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Really, it's a shame what has happened to his reputation, but, of course, he has no one to blame but himself.

Stevenson became a rising star in the sport and started to win over the non-hardcore audience with his quick first-round knockout of Chad Dawson in June 2013, but in just over a calendar year all he had worked to build had been flushed away after the fights with Hopkins and Pascal fell through.

Pascal is now already scheduled to fight Kovalev next spring, and a match with Hopkins won't mean anywhere close to what it would have this year now that he's lost his belts, so it's hard to imagine that 2015 will be any more exciting for Stevenson.

Follow me on Twitter for more opinion on boxing and live scoring of big fights: @sackedbybmac