De La Hoya says July 4th show off- feuding with Garcia again

The outside the ring, soap-opera drama involving lightweight contender Ryan Garcia has now boiled over for a second time in less than a year. And, it means that Garcia will not be headlining a Golden Boy proposed return to fights boxing on July 4th.

Golden Boy’s founder and Hall of Famer, Oscar De La Hoya, confirmed Monday afternoon that the 21 year old unbeaten Garcia is refusing to agree to fight in the scheduled main event on Independence Day. And, therefore there will be no Golden Boy show three weeks from now:

Due to Team @KingRyanG decision not to accept a July 4th bout, we will now return in late July with the future of boxing ? @vergilortiz , more exciting details to follow @GoldenBoyBoxing

— Oscar De La Hoya (@OscarDeLaHoya) June 15, 2020

Garcia has reportedly been considering a couple of options about opponents, but just as he did a year ago, when De La Hoya and Golden Boy were forced to find a last minute replacement fighter for him in September, Garcia won’t agree.

Ultimately last fall, after several days of drama, Garcia and De La Hoya smoothed things over. And they announced a signed extension with Golden Boy with a large pay increase.

The war of words on social media ramped-up later Monday afternoon, when Garcia saw De La Hoya’s tweet and fired back at his promoter in a now deleted tweet saying, “you do realize, you’re supposed to be my promoter, not hating on me right?”

Garcia was last in the ring in February, when he scored a one punch, first round KO over Freddy Fonseca to improve to 20-0, with 17, KOs.

Obviously, Golden Boy is enduring the same Covid 19 hardship that Top Rank Boxing and Premier Boxing Champions are with trying to put on high quality fights with big-name fighters, when there currently cannot be fans present at most venues. So, the “live gate revenue” is non-existent.

De La Hoya and his promotion were hoping to get back to fights in the ring starting with July 4th weekend and then, fight at least a couple of times in July and monthly for the foreseeable future.

As he alluded to in his tweet, it appears that their first card back will now be later in the month and feature unbeaten rising star Welterweight, Vergil Ortiz.