Benn Calls Garcia Good for Boxing but a Liability

Ryan Garcia won the WBC welterweight title on February 21 at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas by knocking down Mario Barrios in the opening seconds and coasting to a unanimous decision, scores of 119-108, 120-107, and 118-109. The performance was arguably the most complete of Garcia's career. It also left Conor Benn holding two contradictory truths at once.

Speaking on the Mr. Verzace Podcast with Rick Reeno in the buildup to the Barrios fight, Benn, the WBC mandatory challenger at 147 pounds, offered a diagnosis that cuts to the center of boxing's most persistent structural problem. "I think Ryan Garcia is great for boxing," Benn said. "I think he's a liability, I think he's a loose cannon, I think he's unpredictable, you could say unprofessional, but ultimately, he's sheer entertainment. Gifted. He's got great hand speed. He's athletic. He's young."

That assessment captures the bind that Garcia, now the WBC welterweight champion at 25-2 with 20 knockouts, has placed on every institution in the sport that depends on him. Promoters need the pay-per-view numbers he generates. Networks anchor their biggest cards to his name. The WBC has him atop its most commercially valuable division. And all of them have had to decide, at various points, whether the revenue justifies the exposure.

The answer from those institutions has been yes, with documented consequences. In June 2024, the New York State Athletic Commission suspended Garcia for one year and stripped his majority decision win over Devin Haney, after both A and B-samples returned positive for Ostarine, a banned selective androgen receptor modulator. Garcia forfeited $1.1 million in purse money. The result was overturned to a no contest. He was reinstated in April 2025. DAZN then put him in the main event of "The Ring: High Stakes" pay-per-view less than a year later, where he knocked down Barrios on his first right hand and never looked back.

That rehabilitation arc is precisely the dynamic Benn described: a fighter so commercially necessary that boxing's regulatory and promotional infrastructure bends toward keeping him active rather than sidelining him. Benn even predicted Garcia would lose to Barrios before the fight. "I think Barrios is going to do it," he said. "I just feel that Ryan is a liability and you just don't know what to expect. In a game where you have to be consistent, Barrios is consistent, and consistency beats anything else." He also called Garcia "a sausage" who "could get cooked" in the same breath as acknowledging that a Garcia title win would make their potential clash large enough to sell out Wembley Stadium.

Garcia won. And now the fight Benn has been engineering is taking shape. Saudi Arabia's Turki Alalshikh has expressed interest in a Garcia-Benn WBC title fight for Cinco de Mayo on May 5 in Las Vegas, a framing Benn endorsed publicly. "Vegas, T-Mobile Arena, Cinco de Mayo, sounds good to me, doesn't it?" Benn said. He had also told Ring Magazine simply: "I'll be waiting for the WBC world title next," and after Garcia's win posted on social media telling the new champion to "keep my belt warm."

Benn himself is not without complications. He left promoter Eddie Hearn's Matchroom for Dana White's Zuffa Boxing in a reported eight-figure, one-fight deal worth as much as $15 million, a move that introduced its own institutional friction, since White's promotion has declared it will not recognize traditional sanctioning body belts. Calling out Garcia specifically for the WBC title creates an immediate contradiction with his own promotional structure.

Which may be the most accurate portrait of boxing's current moment: two fighters with complicated institutional relationships circling each other for the sport's most visible belt, while the commissions, networks, and sanctioning bodies that govern the sport work out whether the box office justifies the risk.