Ryan Garcia joined The Judgment Day this week when he hit Joe Hendry with a guitar on WWE Raw, and it’s the most fun thing that’s happened in combat sports in a month — boxing should be furious it didn’t get there first.
The segment itself was pure theater. Hendry and Danhausen ran a full parody concert bit called “I Believe That You Are CURSED,” Minihausens and a dance squad included, while Garcia sat at ringside like a guy who’d wandered in with a good ticket. He sang along for a few bars. Then he stood up and swung a guitar into Hendry, a sentence I genuinely did not expect to type about a reigning world champion this year, according to Bleacher Report. Six weeks before he steps into the ring for real business, a Tuesday night comedy bit generated more buzz than his actual fight week has managed so far — which says less about Garcia’s judgment than it does about where the real heat in combat sports currently lives.
Boxing press conferences wish they were half this entertaining.
Dominik Mysterio and JD McDonagh ran in right behind him, and the beatdown that followed on Hendry and Danhausen was thorough. Garcia posed with his new stablemates afterward like he’d been doing this for years, officially attaching himself to the Judgment Day storyline that’s been running through Raw all summer. A world champion boxer just got jumped into a wrestling faction, and somehow it read as the most natural thing on television that night.
This wasn’t some random ambush, either. Judgment Day paid Danhausen good money weeks ago to put a hex on Oba Femi, and Danhausen took the cash and delivered nothing, which is why the Oba Femi curse Judgment Day paid Danhausen for in the first place has been a running grievance all month. Dominik and McDonagh have been hunting for repayment ever since, and Danhausen now owes them in a “Human Monies on a Pole” match at SummerSlam. Garcia picking a side wasn’t chaos for chaos’s sake. It was a debt collection with a celebrity guest star, and WWE’s own account leaned into the bit with a caption that didn’t need much extra work.
https://twitter.com/WWE/status/2081911287554961703
“OH NO! @RyanGarcia does not believe” is doing more work as copy than most PPV taglines manage all year. Full disclosure: I watch wrestling too. Don’t @ me.
None of this erases the fact that Garcia has real business on the calendar. He faces Conor Benn on Sept. 12 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, and he spent this week getting cracked with a foreign object for free instead. If boxing had produced a press conference half this alive, nobody would be sitting here talking about a wrestling show.
Instead WWE won a Tuesday it wasn’t even trying that hard to win, and Garcia’s own sport got dunked on by its own champion.
