Nobody is perfect.

That’s a mantra that everyone including boxers, promoters and managers should realize. No person is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes.

Ryan “King Ry” Garcia (23-1, 19 KOs) returns to the prize ring to face thunderous punching Oscar Duarte (26-1-1, 21 KOs) on Saturday, Dec. 2, at the Toyota Center in Houston, Texas. DAZN will stream the stacked Golden Boy Promotions card.

A press conference started slowly like a long-lit fuse slowly burning to the stick of dynamite. And when the fire reached the stick, it exploded with everyone in the vicinity burned.

Garcia unleashed pent-up frustration with verbal attacks on his promoters and burned the perimeter with fire. Poor Duarte sat there knowing something happened, but probably needed translation from his people to discover Garcia burned the room.

No survivors.

If that’s just a sample of what’s coming on Saturday night, well buckle-up and don’t miss a second of Garcia and Duarte’s confrontation.

Duarte has 11 consecutive knockouts and an 80 percent knockout rate. Garcia recently lost to Gervonta “Tank” Davis by stoppage and is looking to raze the earth. He has an 82 percent knockout rate.

Somebody is going to sleep in front of millions of fans.

“Oscar is a tough opponent. I know he’s going to come to fight. But I’m right here to make an example for the 140-division,” said Garcia with a death knell stare during the face-off. “This is how I’m coming. This is the Ryan Garcia you are going to get.”

Duarte knows he’s in the limelight. There’s no better place to be. Or is there?

“This is a dream for me. I come very prepared. This Saturday you will see my best version,” said Duarte. “I’m going to win.”

Maybe he picked the wrong time.

Garcia looked as if he were General Sherman on his way to scorch the earth on his way to Atlanta. No survivors.

It doesn’t look good for anyone.

“I’m laser focused” said Garcia with a stare that looked like Superman shooting lasers from his eyes.

The loss to Davis last spring was only on his ledger. In his pocketbook the lean, snap-quick fighter from Victorville, California gained $30+ million. That’s what happens when you fight the best and the world wants to see it. Both he and Tank Davis broke the bank and the counting machine for pay-per-views.

But winning still remains important and few know better than promoter Oscar De La Hoya.

“You never know where the mindset is in a fighter after he loses. You have to give it up to Ryan. When you pick a guy who is dangerous and speedy and who has a shot, kudos to Ryan,” said De La Hoya on social media in a statement that probably lit the Garcia’s fuse that roasted the room.

“When fighters lose they have their emotional rollercoasters. But once you win and you get 30 million bucks everything is friggin good,” De La Hoya added.

Others on the card are Shane Mosley Jr., Floyd Schofield, Darius Fulghum and Ryan’s younger brother Sean Garcia.

It’s loaded. Beware of fire.

SoCal

Amado Vargas, son of the great Fernando Vargas, makes his return.

Vargas (9-0, 4 KOs), a lightweight, meets Ezequiel Flores (4-1) in the main event on Saturday Dec. 2, at C. Robert Lee Center in Hawaiian Gardens, Calif. on the MarvNation Boxing Promotions card

All three of the Vargas brothers have been burning up to boxing ring and all are signed by promoters. Amado and Fernando Vargas Jr. signed with MarvNation and have attracted many fans.

This is the last boxing card of the year for MarvNation. Doors open at 5 p.m. For more information call (562) 713-9026 or (562) 639-3980.

Florida

Don King Productions has its last card of the year and ends it with five title fights including undefeated Antonio Perez (8-0, 5 KOs) versus Haskell Rhodes (29-5-1, 14 KOs) in a welterweight clash at Casino Miami Jai Ali in Miami, Florida.

Perez, 21, is only 5-6 in height and Rhodes is even shorter, but has experience against top competition such as Floyd Schofield and Sergey Lipinets.

Also on the card are Ian Green, Vaughn Alexander, Tre’Sean Wiggins, Chris Howard, Alex Castro, Harry Cruz and more.

The Don King Production card will be streamed at this link: https://itube247.com/

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These are heady days for the sport of professional boxing in Australia. Cruiserweight Jai Opetaia is the best fighter in his weight class. Tim Tszyu is a major star in the Land Down Under and his younger brother Nikita is lapping at his heels. Then there’s undefeated super lightweight Liam Paro, 27, whose profile will grow immensely if he can get past Cleveland’s Montana Love when they meet on Dec. 9 in San Francisco at the home of the Golden State Warriors. It’s a 12-rounder that will serve as the chief supporting bout to the showdown between Devin Haney and Regis Prograis.

Forget the fact that Matchroom honcho Eddie Hearn has seen fit to dress up this fight with some frivolous title; this is a good match-up. An undefeated southpaw, Liam Paro (23-0, 14 KOs) is coming off the best win of his career. Montana Love (18-1-1, 9 KOs) would likely be undefeated too if not for a bizarre disqualification in his most recent bout. He too is a southpaw.

Paro turned heads in is his last outing when he scored a brutal, one-punch, opening-round knockout of countryman Brock Jarvis. Paro was favored, bur Jarvis, a disciple of Jeff Fenech, Australia’ most famous living boxer, was accorded the better chance of ending the bout with one punch.

Paro vs. Jarvis, staged in October of last year in South Brisbane, marked Matchroom’s first foray into Australia. Paro has had two fights fall out in the interim. The British Boxing Board of Control pulled Paro out of a March 11, 2003 match in Liverpool, England with Robbie Davies Jr. when a routine but mandatory scan showed evidence of a facial fracture. Three months later, Paro was forced to withdraw from a title fight with WBA 140-pound belt-holder Regis Prograis because both of his Achilles tendons were inflamed, compromising his mobility.

The facial fracture, insists Paro, was a false positive; the test was defective. As for the Achilles issue, that’s cleared up. “It’s in my rear-view mirror,” he says.

Paro was raised in the city of Mackay which is near the Coral Sea coast of Queensland. His ancestors migrated here from Italy to work in the sugarcane fields. Unlike so many other dads, his father Errol, a welder in the steel industry, has no boxing background and isn’t directly involved in preparing his son for a fight. Errol is with his son in Las Vegas at the moment (Errol’s first visit to Sin City) and will be there with several other family members to cheer on Liam when he resumes his career in San Francisco on Dec. 9.

When healthy, Liam Paro can usually be found training at the Top Rank Gym in Las Vegas. The boxing infrastructure of the Southern Nevada city draws prizefighters from around the world. He has sparred extensively with Jamel Herring and has boxed with the likes of Shakur Stevenson and Devin Haney. Practicing his craft with fighters of that caliber may give him an edge when he touches gloves with Montana Love.

Montana Love

Montana Love came to the fore in August of 2021 when he stepped up in class and upset Russian tough guy Ivan Baranchyk on a Jake Paul promotion in Cleveland. Baranchyk’s handlers stopped the one-sided affair after seven rounds. Five weeks later, Love signed with Matchroom.

Montana Love

What followed was a third-round blast-out of 29-1 Carlos Diaz followed by a hard-earned 12-round decision over Gabriel Gollaz Valenzuela and then a match with Australia’s Steve Spark which marked Love’s debut as a top-of-the-marquee attraction in his hometown.

The fight between Love and Spark was even on two scorecards after five rounds. In the sixth, shortly after a clash of heads left Love with a bad cut over his left eye, Love pushed Spark out of the ring and was immediately disqualified by referee David Fields. It was a controversial call; a “terrible call” in the words of Eddie Hearn. For the record, after flipping over the top strand of rope, Spark landed on his feet and was fit to continue.

A 28-year-old father of three, Love has always had the vibe of a hungry fighter, a residue of the adversity he has had to overcome. His father died when he was three years old and his mother was only 38 when she passed away from colon cancer. In 2015, as his career was just getting started, he was remanded to prison on theft- and drug-related charges and served 16 months.

It’s rather ironic that Love will be facing an Australian opponent on American soil in back-to-back fights. Needless to say, he hopes that the second installment will go better than the first.

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There will be a boxing show this Friday at Philadelphia’s 2300 Arena, a low-budget card featuring the return of former IBF 130-pound world title-holder Tevin Farmer. During the event, there will assuredly be a somber moment when those in attendance stand and silently pay homage to Samuel Teah as the timekeeper tolls the traditional 10-bell farewell. Teah passed away last week on Black Friday, Nov. 24, another victim of America’s epidemic of gun violence. He was 36 years old.

Teah was shot in the mid-afternoon during an altercation that spilled onto the sidewalk of a street in Wilmington, Delaware, and died at a Wilmington hospital. As of this writing, there’s been no arrest, but the shooting was apparently not random. A bus driver for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority, Teah was purportedly in Wilmington (roughly 35 miles from his home in Philadelphia) to visit the mother of his child.

Samuel Teah fought as recently as this past May when he suffered a shocking defeat at the hands of journeyman Andrew Rodgers at a show in Pennsylvania’s Newton Township, reducing his record to 19-5-1. Two months earlier he had spoiled the undefeated record of Enriko Gogokhia, an Egis Klimas fighter (think Oleksandr Usyk and Vasily Lomachenko) on a card in Ontario, California. This embellished his reputation as a spoiler. Earlier in his career, he had spoiled the undefeated record of O’Shaquie Foster, winning an 8-round unanimous decision over the man that currently reigns as the WBC world super featherweight champion.

What made Teah’s death more tragic, if that were possible, were all the tragedies that he had overcome. He was born in Liberia when that country was embroiled in a civil war. The family escaped to a refugee camp in Ghana and eventually reached the United States, settling first in New York and then Philadelphia. On the day after Christmas in 2008, when Teah was 21 and working at a Home Depot, he lost six members of his family in a fire that swept his mother’s West Philadelphia duplex after a kerosene heater exploded.

For some, Teah’s violent death may call to mind the murder of another Philadelphia boxer, Tyrone Everett.

That’s an awkward comparison.

Tyrone Everett was a world-class fighter. Six months before he was shot dead by his girlfriend in May of 1977, Everett, then 34-0, lost a 15-round split decision to Puerto Rico’s Alfredo Escalera in a failed bid to win Escalera’s WBC junior lightweight title, a decision so rancid that it stands among the worst decisions of all time. Moreover, the circumstances of Everett’s murder were sordid. His girlfriend, no stranger to the police, fatally shot him after finding him with a transvestite and there was heroin in the apartment they shared. (Editor’s note: For more on this incident, check out the new book by TSS contributor Sean Nam: “Murder on Federal Street: Tyrone Everett, the Black Mafia, Fixed Fights, and the Last Golden Age of Philadelphia Boxing” available on Amazon).

Samuel Teah was no Tyrone Everett. A man of deep faith, Sam’s positive attitude, despite all his tribulations, was infectious. “Everyone liked Teah,” said prominent Philadelphia sports journalist Joe Santoliquito who, upon hearing of Teah’s death, tweeted, “he will always have a special place in my heart.”

While the circumstances are different in every case, Teah joins a long list of boxers who met a violent death. If we limit the list to fighters who were still active at the time of their passing, here are four that jump immediately to mind.

Stanley Ketchel

The fabled Michigan Assassin, Ketchel met his maker on Oct. 15, 1910, at a ranch in Conway, Missouri. In the immortal words of John Lardner, “Stanley Ketchel was twenty-four years old when he was fatally shot in the back by the common-law husband of the lady who was cooking his breakfast.”

Battling Siki

Famed for knocking out Georges Carpentier when the “Orchid Man” held the world light heavyweight title, Siki was only 28 years old when he was gunned down in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan on Dec. 15, 1925, but by then the Senegal-born Frenchman had already degenerated into a trial horse. Siki’s body was found in the middle of the street with two bullets in his back fired at close range by an assailant, never identified, who was thought to be avenging a beating he suffered at one of the speakeasies that Siki was known to frequent.

Oscar Bonavena

At age 33, Oscar Bonavena was still an active boxer when he was gunned down on May 22, 1976, on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada, at the front gate of the infamous Mustang Ranch, a legal brothel. Bonavena had come up short in his biggest fights, losing a 15-round decision to Joe Frazier and losing by TKO in the 15^th round to Muhammad Ali, but the rugged Argentine was still a major player in the heavyweight division.

The shooter was a bodyguard for the brothel’s owner Joe Conforte, and rumor has that Conforte was the de facto triggerman, having Bonavena assassinated because the boxer was having an affair with Conforte’s 59-year-old wife Sally who was also Bonavena’s manager of record at this point in the boxer’s career. The story about it spawned “Love Shack,” a 2010 movie that despite a seemingly can’t-miss storyline and a formidable cast (Joe Pesci played Joe and Helen Mirren played Sally) proved to be a box-office dud.

Vernon Forrest

While all homicides are tragic, some are more distressing than others and the death of Vernon Forrest on July 25, 2009, was particularly gut-wrenching. Forrest was shot twice in the back by would-be robbers with whom he exchanged gunfire on July 25, 2009 at a gas station in Atlanta.

Forget the fact that Forrest was a two-division title-holder who had regained the WBC world super welterweight title in his most recent fight with a lopsided decision over Sergio Mora. Few in the sport were as widely admired. His philanthropic work included establishing group homes in Atlanta for the mentally disabled. His death came just two weeks after the death of Arturo Gatti who left the sport following a loss by TKO to Alfonso Gomez in July of 2007 and died under suspicious circumstances at age 37 at a hotel in Brazil.

We here at The Sweet Science send our condolences to Samuel Teah’s family and loved ones. May he rest in peace.