In a boxing gym in San Diego, Ryan Garcia is dancing.
The 21-year-old phenom has been training here for six months now, preparing in an anonymous industrial park to face Romero Duno. The gym belongs to the Mexican fighter Saul “Canelo” Alvarez; posters of Canelo cover the walls, and occasionally the familiar sight of Muhammad Ali's cocky grin appears among them. Canelo is the three-time world champion, boxing's biggest star—Garcia calls him “the head honcho, my guy”—so the message is clear: In the eyes of Canelo, at least, Garcia is next.
But is he? Part of the excitement of watching Garcia right now is the tension that surrounds him. Yes, his 19–0 record and 16 knockouts are promising, but then there's the other, somehow more remarkable stat: 4 million. That's the number of followers he has on Instagram, bringing with it the pluses and minuses of modern fame—is he a social media star or a boxing star? Can he be both? Plenty of critics have used his online persona to cast doubt on his talent: He's a pretty boy. He's an Instagram boxer. Forget that he's been in the ring since he was seven years old, forget the 215–15 amateur record, and definitely forget those professional knockouts. They say he hasn't fought a worthy opponent, that he's still unproven.
Either way, with movie-star looks and cultural cachet that extends beyond the ring, Garcia is already the rare modern boxer who has become a star outside of the sport—and not just with fight fans. The comments on his Instagram posts are endless streams of heart eyes and kitten emojis. And in a sport hungry for the kind of characters who have skyrocketed the UFC to its current heights, he's a crossover star.
“I think it's just part of my generation,” Garcia says of his digital life. “It would be weird if I didn't do social media, because it's been part of the life when you're growing up. It's just second nature now.” And when it started happening for him—when the videos went viral and the hundreds of thousands of eyes started watching this teenage prospect who was still proving himself—the decision was easy: You don't hide from this kind of thing anymore. You embrace it.
“It was crazy,” he says. “I believed it was happening, but I didn't at the same time. I was like, Oh, wow, this is happening to me. But then, I knew it was an opportunity, and I wasn't going to let it slip.”
About his rise to fame, Garcia says, “It was hard, looking at the comments, reading what people had to say: doubters, people saying that I'm not a real fighter, that I was simply a social media kid. It was hard, because I was never that. I've only boxed my whole life. To see that, I was kind of hurt, but I knew I would have a chance to get my respect, and I'm slowly doing that now.”
The questions follow him today, which is why every bout matters and why, here at Canelo's gym in San Diego, ahead of the biggest fight of Garcia's life—against Duno in Las Vegas, on a Canelo undercard—it's kind of a shock that Garcia seems so loose, so relaxed, so ready to dance.
“Whenever you get nervous about anything,” Garcia says, “start dancing. You'll feel better.”
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Garcia very nearly got a surprise shot at Duno last September. At the time, Garcia had been scheduled to fight Avery Sparrow, but a day before the bout, at weigh-ins, Sparrow was nowhere to be seen. “Somebody call him,” Garcia said at the time. Turns out, Sparrow had been arrested some 24 hours before the bell. The Garcia-Sparrow fight was canceled, but Golden Boy Promotions, the management company arranging the bout, attempted to salvage the event by replacing Sparrow with Duno, who was in the same weight class and ready to fight that weekend.
Garcia's team bristled, having trained specifically for Sparrow. Words were exchanged, with Golden Boy president Eric Gomez claiming in a tweet that Team Garcia said Duno was “a tough opponent to take on 24 hour notice without proper preparation” and Garcia punching back. “We never said no,” Garcia said at the time. “We said, ‘Let's talk numbers.’ ” Meanwhile, Duno donned a shirt that bore the message “Stop Running.”
The relationship between Garcia and Golden Boy, which dates back to late 2016, seemed at a breaking point—but only days later, the Duno fight was set for November and a new deal had been struck. Garcia describes the verbal sparring as a “miscommunication.”
When—after all the anticipation—Garcia and Duno finally met, the fight ended in a flash. Garcia obliterated Duno 98 seconds into the first round, laying quiet the speculation that resulted from the bizarre circumstances leading up to the fight. In the eyes of his toughest critics and boxing's die-hard fans, the knockout inched Garcia closer to proving himself as the real thing.
A week after the Duno fight, I meet Garcia and his parents in the lobby of the Westin Bonaventure, a sprawling brutalist structure that looks like it belongs more in a former Soviet republic than in downtown Los Angeles. The night before, Garcia served as a commentator at the second bout between the YouTube stars KSI and Logan Paul, which aired on DAZN. Days before the fight, Justin Bieber posted on Instagram in support of Paul.
“It was a social media influencer [event],” says Garcia's mother, Lisa, who serves as both the director of his corporation and his personal administrative assistant. “A lot of social media influencers were there, and anytime a popular influencer stood up, the whole crowd would try to run down the aisle at them.”
While that might sound like an internet sideshow, a weird by-product of the same phenomenon that's given us millionaire video gamers and TikTok stars, the event highlights how the social media generation is helping to boost boxing, a sport that, more than others, has risen and fallen with the whims of the culture. Garcia says boxing “is at an all-time high, because the fighter can promote the fight himself,” but for his part, he would rather be in the ring than in the commentator's booth.
“Everybody said I did a great job, but I hated every second of it,” Garcia says, laughing. He's wearing a patterned silk shirt unbuttoned to his navel, eating sausage and a grapefruit; Lisa and his father, Henry, who now serves as his assistant trainer after Canelo's coach, Eddie Reynoso, took over, sit next to us. The ring is where Garcia feels comfortable, where the noise of social media and the hype die down—where, finally, he has control.
“It's crazy,” Garcia says. “Before going in the ring, I'm scared shitless, and I say that as in not scared to fight the guy but scared because all eyes are on me—that feeling of like, damn, it's big-time. But when the bell rings, I'm an animal. All I see is red. Let's have at it.”
“That's weird,” Lisa adds. “That must be a mother-son-bond thing, because I feel the same way. It's not fear of the opponent so much as the pressure, and once the bell rings, it's like a release. All of my anxiety is gone, my stomach stops hurting.”
Now, in the Westin lobby, everyone is back in good spirits due to Garcia's virtuoso performance in the ring. He's been learning from Canelo and Reynoso, modeling his training on the mantra of “work smarter, not harder,” and he hopes to fight three or four times next year, steadily cementing his credentials. He'll continue to build his clout as well: He's recently signed to the talent agency WME and IMG Models, and the Hollywood Reporter wrote that there is a docuseries about his family in the works.
Family is at the heart of Garcia's life, and not only because boxing has become the family business. “I don't have friends outside of my family,” Garcia says, though he does mention close friends who he now considers members of his family. Having grown up in boxing, “I don't know anything about normal. I just want to be myself.”
And in a sport littered with the careers of fighters who were exploited by those around them, Garcia puts his trust in his family; in fact, his younger brother, Sean, is currently following in his footsteps, with a 5–0 record and nearly 200,000 Instagram followers of his own.
“My mom is the Kris Jenner of boxing,” Garcia jokes, at which point Lisa weighs in: “I had my hair short before Kris Jenner.”
The TV series isn't hard to picture, and there's more in store. Garcia is at that unique point in an athlete's career when there seems to be nothing but potential. But it's a fine balance, one that he's aware of, and one that means even more in a sport where a single loss changes the narrative completely. For now, all eyes are on the kid—and the expectations are sky-high, in boxing and beyond, with none higher than his own.
“I'm looking to expand my brand everywhere,” he says. “I want to be worldwide, I want to reach the world. If it's opportunities in acting, if it's opportunities in things like this [story and photo shoot], I'll take them if I have time. But the main focus is boxing, because without boxing I got none of this. Boxing gave me my life.”
If boxing gave Garcia his life, then Garcia has the chance to give something back to boxing: a hypermodern superstar, born on Instagram but made in the ring.
Kevin Lincoln is a writer who lives in Los Angeles.
A version of this story originally appeared in the February 2020 issue with the title "The Instagram Champ."
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Ryan Pfluger
Styled by Jon Tietz
Grooming by Hee Soo Kwon using Davines for The Rex Agency
Production by Annee Elliott