“God hath given you one face

And you make yourself another”

Hamlet, William Shakespeare

Legend has it that a rising electric guitar player was the cause of some concern before his much-anticipated performance during a festival in a bucolic Californian town.

A rock concert backstage is not exactly the place to find oneself horrified by unruly sights, but this dressing room was particularly chaotic. Marijuana was being smoked, alcohol was being drank, nudity was being enjoyed, acid was being dropped, and a general sense of complete and utter mayhem was more than apparent when the stage manager walked in to announce that the band was due on stage in two minutes.

Jimi Hendrix performs onstage at the Monterey Pop Festival with his Fender Stratocaster electric guitar on June 18, 1967 in Monterey, California. (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Standing up from the floor where he was laying among a few naked female companions, the guitar player in question shook off the dirt and the effects of all the substances he had indulged on during the evening and walked up to his guitar case. In it, a brand new Fender Stratocaster with sunburst paint laid perfectly polished and in tune, with its respective cable coiled up on top of it. The musician in question strapped it to his body, and before he walked out of the room, he did not forget to grab a canister of cigarette lighter fuel and a book of matches that he had neatly stashed next to his instrument.

To this day, no one knows exactly the degree of madness that Jimi Hendrix was engulfed in before walking onto the stage at the Monterrey Pop Festival in 1967. His method, however, was rock-solid. In one of the most historic and emblematic rock and roll performances of all time, Hendrix extracted from his Strat every sound imaginable, painting a picture of his time that has hardly been equaled. From the growls and moans of a dissatisfied generation looking for a way out of their parent’s slumber to the acid-induced musings that he got from his wah-wah pedal to the explosion of the bombs in Vietnam that could be heard every time he dug deep into that whammy bar aided by the red-hot valves of his Marshall amp, Hendrix became the ultimate guitar hero in thirty memorable minutes. And yes, at the end of his performance he laid his guitar on the floor and set it ablaze after dousing it with lighter fluid, in a picture of madness that could not have been possible without a method behind it.

Hendrix was, indeed, a man with a plan on that night. We need to start considering that so was Ryan Garcia on the night he defeated Devin Haney.

Ryan Garcia (right) dares Devin Haney (left) to hit him during their April 20 non-title bout – Photo by Chris Esqueda/Golden Boy Promotions

There is hardly anything as potentially trailblazing and extraordinary in what Garcia did during the cringe-inducing build-up of this fight, at least not in the mold of what Hendrix did. Sure, he’s the first fighter ever to drink from a beer bottle during his trip to the scales. Big deal. He wore a one-million-dollar crown on his head before and after the fight. So what? He allegedly married a scantily clad influencer one week before the fight and partied like it was 1999 during the entire week. Whatever. And yes, he tweeted with abandon, anything from biblical quotes to death threats to conspiracy theories. Yeah, right, tell me the difference between him and the current leading presidential candidate.

In a world where the one-minute news cycle is the norm and not the exception, Garcia overwhelmed us with an unending barrage of made-for-social-network shenanigans that made everyone forget the effect that his phenomenal GPS-guided left hook had on almost all of his opponents so far in his short career. Most importantly, he made Haney forget that fact almost completely.

At 25, and already a veteran of the fight game by virtue of a long amateur career and an insane amount of exposure for a non-champion, perhaps Garcia already knows all too well the nuances of psychological warfare to a point that we cannot imagine. Smart money says that he is clueless and reckless and that his entire set of pre-fight antics was one giant mess designed more to serve as an excuse after a defeat than being an elaborate psi-op by an evil mastermind. Smart money also placed Haney as quite the prohibitive favorite. Dumb money, as it turns out, won the day.

So enthralling was Garcia’s act of deception that most observers failed to see in his handshake agreement to pay 500K for every extra pound anything other than just one more layer of dumbassery. It was, as we know now, a brilliant aikido move by Ryan. He wasn’t just agreeing to pay that sum, he was forcing Haney to accept that payment once the inevitable happened.

When Garcia stepped on the scales the next day, the act was complete. And those who believe Garcia bought himself a chance to carry more power into the fight by paying a $1.5 million-dollar fine to Haney for being overweight are just as wrong. With that money (compensated by the sanctioning fees that neither fighter would have to pay since the fight was not a WBC title bout anymore), Garcia paid for the near-certain chance to shake the world by almost stopping an unbeaten pound-for-pound talent, dispose of a lifelong nemesis in the final chapter of a seven-fight rivalry (six of them in the amateurs), and earn himself a career-best performance that he will now be able to cash in to the tune of what could very well be hundreds of millions of dollars, win or lose.

If anything, Garcia knew the fact that his performance on Saturday would make the difference between him earning street respect or becoming a joke. He threw his entire psychological and physical weight on it and placed a beer bottle on top for good measure. The result will be dissected and analyzed for a long time.

“Though he be mad, there is method in’t,” said Polonius in his analysis of Hamlet’s behavior, as written in the ultimate Shakespearian drama. In this fight, Garcia’s madness was all the more visible when contrasted with Haney’s methodic approach to his craft. A pro by his 19^th birthday, a promoter himself since his early 20s, an unbeaten champion with a string of career-defining victories coming into this fight, Haney was arguably ill-prepared to face Garcia’s whirlwind of irrationality. In the end, it was his lack of appetite for madness, apparently, what triggered his defeat.

It will now be interesting to see how Garcia’s future foes react to his antics. A no-nonsense streetwise fighter like Gervonta Davis appeared impervious to his rants. But as solid as Garcia’s matchmaking has been in the purely athletic department, it will also be interesting to see whether the same will apply in the psychological profiling of his prospective rivals. Against Garcia, having a weak chin could be just as dangerous as having a thin skin. The wiser matchmakers should take note of that – and they probably will.

“Madness in great ones must not unwatched go,” pleaded King Claudius to Polonius in response to his concerns over Prince Hamlet’s mental state. It is now up to Oscar de la Hoya, Garcia’s chief handler and a king in his own right in his heyday as a fighter, to steer his young prince in the right direction and keep his madness in check as he rises to what could potentially be an uncharted level of superstardom. As a virtual doppelganger of Garcia in his physical looks, De la Hoya has his babysitting job cut out for him, but he is aided by his experience with his own personal bouts of madness and exposure to demons that he described in such harrowing detail in a recent documentary. Whether Ryan will also become Oscar’s doppelganger in the ring is something that appears unlikely at the moment, given how far behind Garcia is in terms of accomplishments at his age. But their eventual symbiosis could easily lead them to be the most profitable and successful fighter-promoter duos of all time.

The only certainty going forward, it seems, is that a play worthy of The Bard awaits us. For boxing’s sake, let’s just hope the young prince doesn’t end his days in agonizing pain after a self-inflicted poisoning during a misguided duel.

After all, there’s only so much tragedy that boxing can endure and still survive.

Diego M. Morilla has written for The Ring since 2013. He has also written for HBO.com, ESPN.com and many other magazines, websites, newspapers and outlets since 1993. He is a full member of the Boxing Writers Association of America and an elector for the International Boxing Hall of Fame. He has won two first-place awards in the BWAA’s annual writing contest, and he is the moderator of The Ring’s Women’s Ratings Panel. He served as copy editor for the second era of The Ring en Español (2018-2020) and is currently a writer and editor for RingTV.com.

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