Garcia wins title, already looking ahead

HOUSTON - Now that he is a world champion, Danny "Swift" Garcia's next order of business is to prove to any remaining skeptics that he's no one-hit wonder … and to act like he isn't one, either.

Less than a half-hour after he'd easily outpointed Mexican icon Erik "El Terrible" Morales to claim the WBC super-lightweight title, Garcia, 24, was discovering that the first order of business for a newly crowned champ is to get used to being the hunted, not the hunter. At a post-midnight press conference Sunday morning in the Reliant Center, an obviously pleased Garcia was mentioning how strange, and nice, it felt to be The Man when a member of the audience dared to suggest that his reign could be short and not-so-sweet.

"I am the (WBC) mandatory! So, are you going to going to fight me or vacate the title?" Ajose Olusegun (30-0, 14 KOs), a 32-year-old, London-based Nigerian who happens to be the WBC's No. 1-rated contender at 140 pounds, asked loudly and in an accusatory tone.

Garcia, who apparently didn't know who Olusegun was, had yet to be schooled in the proper protocol for sarcastically dismissing shouted challenges from would-be opponents who want what had just become his.

"I'm a fighter. I'm a champion," responded Garcia (23-0, 14 KOs), the Juniata Park resident who joins ageless wonder Bernard Hopkins as Philadelphia's only current king of the ring. "I'll fight anybody, anywhere, any time. I'm from Philly. I bring blood, sweat and tears."

Standing behind Garcia on the stage, Oscar De La Hoya frowned. The Golden Boy, now the president of his own promotional company, has been there and done that as both the skyrocketing phenom and the faded veteran scratching to hang on, and he understands that the surest way for a champion, be he on the way up or the way out, to maximize the value of his belt is not to be put on the defensive by the first guy to call him out. Oh, sure, big fights will be there for anyone with the goods, but some pairings need time to be built up, and it would seem that fight fans are not yet ready to start screaming for Garcia-Olusegun.

"We're looking forward to matching him up with other champions so he can unify all the titles," De La Hoya said in explaining his vision of how the next phase of the career of Danny Garcia, superstar-in-the-making, will evolve.

Then there is the matter of Garcia's reticence in pressing his obvious physical advantages over Morales (52-8, 36 KOs), who was knocked down by an on-the-button left hook to the jaw in the 11th round and might have been taken out when he was hurt and wobbly. Although Garcia won by surprisingly wide margins on the official scorecards -- 118-109, 117-110 and 116-112 -- and in punch statistics compiled by CompuBox (238 of 779 to 164 of 547), he wasn't as dominant as he might have been when it came to putting punches together against a 35-year-old guy with high mileage on his fistic odometer.

"I went to Danny's locker room and I was criticizing him left and right," De La Hoya said. "I told him, `OK, you went up against a legend, and you beat a legend. That's great. But you have to put your punches together. It was like every time he hit Erik, he stopped to pose for a picture. He can't do that.

"Look, Danny is young. He's strong. He's fast. He can do whatever he wants in there. He can put five or six punches together and move to the side. He just didn't do as much of that as he could have.

"Danny can learn from this. I think he gave Erik a little too much respect. There were a lot of good things Danny did, but he also showed a lot of flaws."

Garcia could afford a slightly flawed performance. When Morales failed to make weight on Friday, the WBC had no choice but to strip him of his championship, which meant that the title was up for grabs only if Garcia won. That turn of events probably took at least a bit of shine off Garcia's otherwise noteworthy achievement.

Morales conceded that his struggle to get down to the 140-pound limit had weakened him, as had the passage of time. He's been in a lot of battles that can speed up the aging process. Morales also had to forfeit $50,000 to Garcia when he came in at two pounds over.

"I fought a young fighter, a hungry fighter," Morales said of Garcia. "I felt that, yeah, I lost the fight. But it wasn't like he was beating me by a lot. It was a pretty competitive fight."