Madison Square Garden, NYC, NY, USA
#386a:
1. Seanie Monaghan (17-0, 10 KOs) - Roger Cantrell (15-3, 8 KOs) UD 8R - Light heavyweight
2. Felix Verdejo (2-0, 1 KO) - Tomi Archambault (1-4, 1 KO) KO 1R - Junior lightweight
3. Roman Martinez (26-1-2, 16 KOs) - Juan Carlos Burgos (30-1-1, 20 KOs) D 12R - WBO super featherweight
#386b:
1. Gennady Golovkin (25-0, 22 KOs) - Gabriel Rosado (21-6, 13 KOs) TKO 7R - WBA middleweight
2. Miguel Angel "Mikey" Garcia (31-0, 26 KOs) - Orlando Salido (39-12-2, 27 KOs) UD 8R - WBO featherweight
Garcia Wins Featherweight Title
Miguel Angel "Mikey" Garcia didn't get the knockout he had hoped for, but he kept dropping Orlando Salido -- four times in all -- until winning on a dominant eight-round technical decision to claim a featherweight title on Saturday night at the Theater at Madison Square Garden.
The best shot Salido landed? That was the head-butt that crashed into Garcia's nose in the eighth round.
"I had the perfect fight going on," Garcia said. "I was beating him up good, and then he drove his head into my face -- but it was accidental."
When the round ended, the ringside doctor examined Garcia and determined he was unable to continue. Referee Benjy Esteves called off the fight, sending it to the scorecards.
Garcia had a huge lead: 79-70, 79-69, 79-69. ESPN.com had Garcia ahead, 80-70.
"We went up to check him, and it is very broken," Dr. Robert Polofsky said of Garcia's nose. "It was too dangerous to have him to continue to fight like that, so we made the decision to stop the fight. He couldn't breathe."
The fight was expected to be a highly competitive action battle, but Garcia, 25, of Oxnard, Calif., took apart Mexico's Salido, 32, in surprisingly easy fashion before a near-sellout crowd of 4,850.
Salido (39-12-2, 27 KOs) was making his third title defense during a late-career surge that saw him go to Puerto Rico in 2011 and 2012 to score upset knockouts against Juan Manuel Lopez in all-action brawls. But Garcia (31-0, 26 KOs), a polished and poised operator built to win a title since he turned pro in 2006, totally controlled Salido.
"I trained for this," Garcia said. "That's why it looked so easy."
Said trainer Robert Garcia, Mikey's older brother and a former junior lightweight world titleholder: "He executed the game plan. Everything he did in the fight, it was all done in the gym. He did everything perfectly. We just told him, just keep your cool and stay with the game plan."
Garcia, a notoriously slow starter, had a huge first round, scoring two knockdowns. He landed a left-right combination to drop Salido, who didn't appear to be badly hurt.
Then, just before the end of the round, he landed a sharp left hook to knock Salido down again. This time Salido was buzzed, but the round ended before Garcia could throw another punch.
Salido was able to stay on his feet in the second round, but in the third round he was on the deck for knockdown No. 3 when Garcia landed a right uppercut midway through the round. Again, Salido didn't appear badly hurt, but his legs didn't look good.
Garcia scored his fourth knockdown of the fight early in the fourth round when Salido went down on the end of a left hand that didn't appear particularly hard.
"It was difficult to recover from the first knockdown," Salido said through a translator. "I was bothered by his speed and lateral movement. I adjusted to it later in the fight and started to do better, and then [the head-butt happened]."
Garcia continued to dominate Salido in the fifth round, landing several right hands, including two that nearly knocked him down again.
By the sixth round, Salido's right eye was beginning to swell, but he was hanging in there. He had some good moments in the seventh round -- which he won on two scorecards -- but whenever he would land something solid, Garcia would answer back. Garcia said he never took Salido for granted, even after opening such an enormous lead because of the knockdowns.
"I've seen Salido many times before. I've seen him get dropped and keep the same determination and will to win," Garcia said. "I know the kind of guy he is. He gets up and keeps coming back."
Then, the fight was suddenly over after the eighth.
"I never felt it was a head-butt hard enough to do that damage," Salido said.
Garcia is a stoic sort and didn't even seem all that excited to have won the title (and earn a career-high $220,000 purse).
"Maybe if we completed the fight, I would have been happier than [with] a technical decision," he said. "Then maybe you'd have seen a little more out of me."
Robert Garcia seemed happier than his brother.
"He is my little brother, but I love all my fighters," said Robert Garcia, who also trains Nonito Donaire and Brandon Rios. "I get emotional for all of them."
Mikey Garcia was disappointed that the fight was stopped.
"It's not as good of a feeling as I would have had if we went the distance and we finished," he said. "It was accidental. I told him, if he wants the rematch, 'I will give you the opportunity, like you gave me.' It was accidental, he didn't intend for it to happen like this.
"I fought with a broken thumb once. It's hard for me to breathe a little bit, so the doctor and referee came to look. If I could breathe a little better, I could have fought the entire fight."
To Garcia, it was just another day at the office.
"It felt like another job, like another fight," he said. "I was doing everything perfectly fine. We had a game plan, we executed it."
Golovkin On Seventh-Round KO
One of middleweight titlist Gennady Golovkin's dreams has been to fight in the Big Apple and begin to build a name for himself in the United States.
He's on his way after retaining his title for the sixth time in a blood-soaked seventh-round knockout of Gabriel Rosado on Saturday night at the Theater at Madison Square Garden on the undercard of the Orlando Salido-Miguel Angel "Mikey" Garcia featherweight title fight.
Golovkin, 30, a 2004 Olympic silver medalist from Kazakhstan, made his United States debut in September in a title-retaining fifth-round knockout of former European champion Grzegorz Proksa. He looked just as good taking Philadelphia's Rosado apart in his second consecutive HBO appearance.
Golovkin -- who was sick in bed two days ago and considered pulling out of the fight -- dominated even though Rosado, 26, was game.
"This is true, this is true," Golovkin said of being ill. "I'm a little bit sick, but I feel great. I feel my power. I know that Gabriel, I can knock him out. I can do much more better. This chance for me, this was for the public."
As good as Golovkin looked, he admitted he was not at his best.
"No, no, no, no. I wanted to show the public my technique and my tactic," he said.
He cut Rosado in the corner of his left eye in the second round. He rocked him with a right hand in the third round. By the fourth round, Rosado's face was a bloody mess after also being cut over his left eye and bleeding from the nose.
Rosado (21-6, 13 KOs) must have landed something solid in the fifth round, because Golovkin (25-0, 22 KOs) suddenly had a bruise around his right eye. But Golovkin was dishing out way more than he was taking.
Rosado's left eye was in very bad shape and the ringside doctor took a good look at it before both the sixth and seventh rounds as Rosado pleaded to be allowed to continue.
Both fighters were covered in Rosado's blood in the seventh round as Rosado continued to bleed badly until his trainer, Billy Briscoe, climbed the steps and threw in the towel. When referee Steve Smoger saw the towel, he intervened and stopped the fight at 2 minutes, 46 seconds.
Rosado was a mandatory title challenger at junior middleweight but gave up the shot to rise in weight for a bigger payday -- and much tougher fight -- to face Golovkin.
"I just want to say this guy is strong as hell," Rosado said. "I just couldn't see. He's a tough fighter."
Martinez and Burgos draw
The fight did not deliver the kind of sustained action many expected it might, but Roman "Rocky" Martinez of Puerto Rico retained his junior lightweight title in a split draw against Mexico's Juan Carlos Burgos.
Judges Woleska Roldan had it 117-111 for Burgos, Tony Paollilo had it 116-112 for Martinez and John Signorile had it 114-114. ESPN.com had it 116-112 for Burgos.
Martinez was making the first defense of the vacant belt he won via bloody split decision against Miguel Beltran Jr. in a Sept. 15 slugfest on the Sergio Martinez-Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. undercard. The fight with Burgos, however, came nowhere near delivering that kind of action.
The 24-year-old Burgos (30-1-1, 20 KOs), however, seemed to carry the better of it. He used a hard, sustained body attack throughout the fight. Of the 234 power shots Burgos landed, 118 were to the body, according to CompuBox statistics. Burgos outlanded Martinez (26-1-2, 16 KOs) in 10 of the 12 rounds.
"Burgos is a big, strong difficult guy to fight," Martinez, 29, said. "I thought I won at least eight rounds, but the three rounds were very, very difficult. He came on and he threw a lot of overhand rights that really bothered me. Rematch? No problem."
The fight started slowly but eventually brought the crowd to life in the sixth round, when they traded often and bombed each other with big body shots. But it settled back into a more measured pace after that with Burgos being warned by referee Eddie Claudio for low blows in the seventh round.
Burgos' main offense came from hard body shots throughout the fight. Martinez would often grimace when hit with them.
Burgos, the mandatory challenger, was getting his second title shot. His only loss came to Hozumi Hasegawa in a 2010 vacant featherweight world title fight in Japan.
"It was a real tough fight," Burgos said. "Martinez is a tough guy and he came in the whole time, but I thought I won the fight."
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