Ryan Garcia has a new answer for the hardest fight of his career, and it is not Tank Davis. The 27-year-old told DAZN that Oscar Duarte gave him more trouble than anyone else he has faced, saying Duarte was "the one that Richardson Hitchins ducked" and that he knocked him out, but only after a hard night.
Garcia and Davis met in 2023 at Dignity Health Sports Park in Los Angeles, where Davis stopped Garcia with a body shot in the seventh round. Months later, Garcia went eight rounds with Duarte before winning by TKO, a fight that now sits at the center of his assessment of his own career.
That comparison carries weight because the two bouts ended very differently. Davis handed Garcia a clean knockout loss in one of the year’s most watched boxing matchups, while Duarte proved stubborn enough to stretch Garcia the distance before he finally closed the show. Garcia’s view, as he put it to DAZN, is that the Duarte fight was the harder one.
Duarte had not originally been Garcia’s opponent. He was brought in as a late replacement after Richardson Hitchins withdrew on fight day because of weight management issues under the IBF’s 10lb rehydration clause. Garcia’s promotional team secured the backup bout against a fighter who was 26-1-1 at the time, and that scramble turned into one of the tougher nights of Garcia’s recent run.
The contrast matters because it redraws the way Garcia’s 2023 campaign is remembered. Davis delivered the more damaging result, but Garcia is now arguing that Duarte presented the more difficult style and the greater in-ring test. For a fighter who has been defined as much by headline bouts as by outcomes, that is a sharp read on his own record.
Garcia has been knocked out by Davis and has gone the full eight rounds to beat Duarte, and that is where the debate lands now. The next question is whether his assessment changes the way fans judge those two fights, or whether Davis remains the name that still defines the biggest night of Garcia’s year.
