Mikey Garcia Ready to Return to Stardom in Showdown with Elio Rojas

If you could hit the rewind button and loop back to 2013, you’d find few fighters in boxing who had a better year than Mikey Garcia.

He began the year with a dominant win over Orlando Salido—a win that looks even better now than at the time—to win a featherweight world championship and followed it up with knockouts of Juan Manuel Lopez and Rocky Martinez, the latter for a title he lost on the scales.

Everything about Garcia said future star.

He fought once more, early in 2014, to extend his record to 34-0 with 28 wins inside the distance, and then he fell off the map.

Garcia fell victim to the dreaded “promotional issues” that have derailed plenty a fighter and lost two-and-a-half years of his career. Out of sight is out of mind in this game, but the Oxnard, California, native has all that unpleasantness behind him and is on the comeback trail.

He faces former featherweight champion Elio Rojas in the main support bout for Leo Santa Cruz and Carl Frampton Saturday night at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York, on Showtime.

“I could have chosen another opponent—a much easier opponent, being that I’ve been gone for over two years, but that’s not what I want,” Garcia said on a media conference call. “We had a few names that we mentioned, but they were not available, either for timing or they already had another fight scheduled, or other opponents just clearly said no.

“And Elio was available. We looked at him. He’s a former world champion. I remember him from when he was champion at the featherweight limit. And he’s a very good fighter. He’s got excellent skills.”

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Rojas, like Garcia, has been out of the ring for an extended period of time. He’s a former featherweight titlist but has been sporadically active over the past several years.

In other words, this is a showcase opponent for Garcia. Rojas is a fighter who is decent enough and with good enough credentials to give him just the right amount of challenge needed to get his feet wet after two-plus years on the shelf.

Extended layoffs are always tricky business for fighters. It kills momentum, which it did for Garcia, and often fighters come back and have significant amounts of ring rust to work off before they return to top form.

Some guys never get it back, but that’s not something Garcia worries about much.

He’s remained active in the gym, even if it’s been a long time since he’s faced live fire in the ring.

“Even though it’s been two-and-a-half years, I stayed in the gym almost the entire time. I probably took maybe two to three weeks off throughout the entire two-year period. I was always active, always in the gym, and I was doing a lot of sparring, actually,” Garcia said.

“I helped out a lot of the guys in my brother’s gym, starting with Marcos Maidana when he fought [Floyd] Mayweather. I was his primary sparring partner, and we worked a lot of rounds with him.”

Most fighters will tell you that there’s a world of difference between sparring sessions and stepping through the ropes to face a guy who is there to take your spot.

Rojas is 33 years old and has only fought a total of four times over the last six years.

We don’t know what he’ll bring to the fight—his last meaningful outing was a wide points loss to Jhonny Gonzalez in 2012—but he’d be smart to plan on this being his last high-profile opportunity.

Upsetting a fighter such as Garcia, who, even with the layoff, remains a big-name fighter with the skill to develop into a superstar, would be a huge boon.

It would also be a disaster for Garcia, who is not signed to any promoter or network after this fight, and those who hope to see him reach his potential with significant matchups that could include fighters such as Terence Crawford or even Vasyl Lomachenko in the near future. 

He’s confident that this is a fight he can win—and is widely expected to with some ease—but he’s been in this game long enough to know one never gains anything from overlooking an opponent.

Garcia will be ready for whatever Rojas brings to the party.

“He’s a former world champion. I’m just getting ready for whatever Rojas decides to show up," Garcia said.

“I make the right adjustments in the ring. If we see something not working so well, we’ll make the adjustments, and we’ll always try to make sure that we’re on top of everything.”

Kevin McRae is a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes were obtained firsthand.