Ryan Garcia achieved a huge milestone in his boxing career last night (Sat., Feb, 21, 2026) by defeating Mario Barrios via a lopsided unanimous decision to claim the WBC Welterweight championship (see it again here).
Shortly after his big win, Garcia called for a fight against current WBO and The Ring Junior Welterweight, Shakur Stevenson, who is fresh off a big win over Teofimo Lopez earlier this year (see it again here).
“You know who I want,” Garcia said to Ring Magazine. “He’s right there. Shakur
Stevenson, let’s go. Let’s run that shit. I want to be a great champion, and I’m not scared of shit,” he said. “I fought Devin Haney, I’ll fight Shakur Stevenson… let’s fucking go!”
During the DAZN broadcast, Stevenson was asked about moving up to 147 pounds to fight the newly-crowned champion. And while he was open to the idea, he does have a couple of stipulations in place before the fight actually gets made including weight and drug testing.
“We’re gonna meet in the middle,” Stevenson said. “Two big stars; big fight; we don’t need a belt for the fight.”
Garcia moved up from 140 pounds to face Barrios at the 147-pound weight class. As for Stevenson, he moved up from 134 to 14- to face Lopez, so once can see how it wouldn’t take too much of a compromise for either man to find common ground.
Another, perhaps more important, stipulation that Stevenson has before a fight between the two goes down is they involvement of VADA when it comes to drug—testing.
“Was VADA involved in this fight? Because I seen against Rolly and he didn’t look like that. If he’s fighting me next, I’m all for the challenge but VADA will be involved.”
Of course, it’s an obvious dig at Garcia’s fumbled drug test for his fight against Devin Haney, which ultimately resulted in officials overturning the bout to a No Contest. In his comeback fight he lost to Rolly Romero before returning to the win column against Barrios.
For the record, VADA did conduct the drug-testing program for the Garica vs. Barrios title fight.
Garcia and Stevenson did compete against one another in the amateurs back in 2013 which ultimately saw Stevenson win the fight on the judges scorecards in what were the semi-finals of the 2013 U.S. Junior National Selection Tournament.
Anyone think it would go any different at the professional level?
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