Ryan Garcia reveals that he felt concern for Devin Haney when he beat up the badly hurt fighter in the seventh round. Garcia told Devin’s father, Bill Haney, to halt the fight to save his son, but he wouldn’t do it.
Bill left Devin out there to soak up a beating from the seventh round, and he wound up losing a 12-round majority decision to Ryan (25-1, 20 KOs).
It’s unclear what was going through Bill’s mind by leaving Haney in there to get worn down with heavy shots, but it’s possible that he assumed Ryan would get tired.
He didn’t. If anything, Ryan got stronger in the championship rounds, and poured it on from the tenth through twelfth, dropping Haney twice.
“I Cared About Him. He Didn’t Look Right”
“At that moment, I cared about him. He didn’t look right in the ring,” said Ryan Garcia on social media about him telling Bill Haney to pull his son, Devin, out when he was getting battered in the seventh round and in bad shape, getting dropped repeatedly and unable to stay on his feet.
“He had nothing to give me anymore. There was no point unless you want your son to get just definitely killed. It was just weird to me. I didn’t like looking at it. I just went back to fighting when he didn’t say yeah. I did ask Bill to stop the fight.”
Haney was down numerous times in the seventh round, and he was trying to hold but was too hurt to keep Ryan from breaking free to clobber him with shots.
What may have saved Haney from being knocked out was referee Harvey Dock stopping the action to take a point away from Ryan for hitting on the break. He didn’t give Ryan a warning before that to initiate a point deduction.
Also, Dock took a lot of time with the deduction, which came right when Haney appeared teetering on being knocked out.
Garcia Frustrated by Referee’s Actions
“I never got that feeling, but looking back, ‘What the f***, bro. You took a whole a** point away from me,'” said Garcia when asked if he ever thought that the referee Harvey Dock was working against him in the seventh round, when he took a point away from him and kept pulling him off of the badly hurt Haney.
Also, when Haney kept going down, the referee wasn’t scoring them as knockdowns, even though Ryan was hitting him with punches. “There was no warning or nothing. Straight took a point away from me. Devin Haney was finished, and I was going in for the finish, and he couldn’t break us up.
“I tried to punch with my free hand. He said, ‘Break,’ and I just punched him. He held me for over 20 seconds, and he didn’t call Devin Haney even once,” said Garcia.
