Devin Haney: The Comeback

For better or worse, agree or disagree, Devin Haney is still one of the prominent names in American boxing at the moment.

It’s a testament to his name value that even a quip inside an Eddie Hearn mini-interview about Haney as a possible opponent for new IBF 140 lb. champ Liam Paro is enough to generate headlines. Maybe a slow news cycle in the dog days of summer is just as responsible for the headlines as Haney’s name value, but the 25-year-old does touch the eyes and ears of boxing fandom.

However, it remains to be seen what remains of the young man when he does return to the ring.

Normally, a loss for a 25-year-old fighter doesn’t mean a whole lot, even one where he gets touched up significantly. This last one against Ryan Garcia, though, will weigh heavy on him.

Technically now a No Contest due to Garcia testing positive for a banned substance, nobody but the hardest of hardcore Devin Haney fans can look back at that night and see it as anything other than a loss.

As the writer noted at FightHype.com:

“Haney, meanwhile, recently vowed a comeback (because ‘the game ain’t been the same’ without him)…

Truth be told, I don’t care if Haney ever actually comes back and most fans probably feel the same way I do. Although his loss to Garcia got turned into a No Contest because of Garcia popping dirty, the performance still carried the big stench of an ‘L.’ Nobody can un-see the way an unfocused, semi-trained, and admittedly booze and weed-addled Garcia buckled him every time he landed. That was a legit ass-whupping and it’s going to stick on him.”

Haney won much of the Garcia fight (when he wasn’t being rocked) and, on paper, the scoring should’ve been very close because of that. But, still, he did get whupped by a sloppy-as-f**k Garcia who seemingly had no game plan coming into the fight and may have been on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

It was an utterly embarrassing fall from grace for a young fighter who was almost laughing his way past Garcia during the buildup to the event and had every reason to believe that he was one of boxing’s elite faces.

You just can’t “un-sh*t” your pants after everyone’s seen you sh*t them (and, per video replay, Haney may have done so, literally, that night).

Garcia’s trainer Derrick James also believes that the road back for Haney will be rough.

“I think it would have been better for [Haney] to get knocked out [early] because it’s going to be hard to recover from getting beat up like that,” James told media immediately after the fight. “He’s a good fighter. He’ll be back. He’s still young. He can be hungry. He’s 25.”

Hearn, who’s worked with Haney several times in the past and is now talking up a Paro fight, also questions whether Haney can really and truly come back.

“I don’t think he’s rushing back. I think he’s lost some love for the sport through what happened,” Hearn recently told Andre Ward in an All The Smoke interview. “He’s taken a little bit of a beating that night. Now the question is, ‘How bad do you want it?’ The minute a fighter starts fighting for money, ‘Just one more.’ They’re not the same fighter.

“He showed an unbelievable heart. I think the defeat is quite psychologically and emotionally damaging for Devin and I think it will take him a while to get over it.”

One of the first things Devin and Team Haney did was announce that Haney was temporarily stepping back from the WBC world junior welterweight title and taking some time away from the sport. The sanctioning body has named him “Champion in Recess.”

Aside from a carnival scuffle caught on video, Haney’s been nowhere near a fight since the Garcia beating. And, barring something going on behind the scenes that has alluded all radar, there are no concrete plans to get him back in the ring.

That might be a good thing for a good kid who was jolted awake, brutally, from dreams of grandeur.