The outspoken welterweight contender Blair Cobbs is hoping a fight with Ryan Garcia could be on course for 2025.
Garcia is serving a year’s suspension from the New York State Athletic Commission, having tested positive for performance enhancing drugs around the time of his fight in April with Devin Haney but, despite that ban, Garcia has been called out by plenty of would-be opponents, such is the lure of his name and the money a fight with him would generate.
Cobbs and Garcia have sparring history, and there is a widely-circulated clip of Garcia putting the southpaw Cobbs down in sparring, but the Las Vegas-based Cobbs, 17-1-1 (10 KOs), said the short video does not tell the whole story.
“One of the biggest shows [next year] would be Blair ‘The Flair’ with Ryan Garcia,” he told BoxingScene. “Next year, mid-next year, would be a big show that everyone would deserve to see.”
Asked about the sparring session, Cobbs said: “Well, there were two events that happened. One person got knocked down and the other person got stopped completely.
He knocked me down, but I got back up and went to work on him like an immigrant. “Broke him down and took him out and made him quit.”
Cobbs said there was no bad blood between him and Garcia, and that any rivalry would be strictly business. Garcia publicly backed Adrien Broner to beat Cobbs when they boxed in June, but Broner was dropped and outscored over 10 rounds.
“But I did feel some type of way by the way [Garcia] was,” Cobbs went on. “I know him personally, and to take AB’s side – Adrien Broner’s side – the way he did and cast shade on me was something that’s not tolerated.”
Of the viral spar, Cobbs recalled it was “a long time ago when I didn’t know who he was at all in the Floyd Mayweather Gym. There was a couple things that played that situation, but beyond all that, the art of surprise was something that he had because I didn’t know what kind of weapons he actually had – or if he had them. And then the moment I did see what he had, I immediately took it away and broke him down.”
And although the knockdown was made public, “They don’t want to put the rest of that sparring out because it wasn’t good for him”, said Cobbs, who defeated Maurice Hooker in his previous fight, two years before Broner.
Either way, the extroverted Cobbs – who was in Hamburg to state his case for a high ranking with the WBC; he is 24th – believes he should figure in major nights in 2025.
“There are some exciting fights that must have Blair ‘The Flair’ involved because it could not be as big of a show [without him],” he said.
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