Bill Haney is back to selling his favorite version of history, claiming Devin showed unmatched heart against Ryan Garcia while Conor Benn simply folded. Bill is half right, but the rest of his story requires wiping away everything that actually occurred inside the ropes.
“Conor Benn took one and folded like a lawn chair. Devin, three times going down, three times back up. And then let’s talk about what the card looked like and how Devin performed after getting dropped. Was he competitive still? Let’s talk about Conor Benn on the ropes not having any answer or anything. We talk about skill. So, that’s not the same,” Bill told Brian Custer.
Nobody disputes Devin showed far more toughness than Benn. Benn caught a flush right hand, drifted back into the ropes without a guard, and let the referee rescue him without mounting a whisper of an argument. Devin hit the canvas three times, peeled himself up in rounds seven, ten, and eleven, and dragged his broken game plan through to the final bell. He proved his resolve beyond any debate.
The fiction starts when Bill tries to frame that brutal ordeal as a tactical clinic. Devin was not timing Garcia on the way in. He was not firing crisp counters off the ropes. His immediate priority was grabbing cloth, tucking his chin under Garcia’s armpit, and clinging on with everything he had left.
Devin survived because he understood ring survival mechanics. When his legs turned to jelly in round seven, he did not look for a clean trade. He smothered punches, wrapped up Garcia’s free arm, and killed the clock second by second. Referee Harvey Dock gave him endless leeway to tie up, which prevented Garcia from landing the clean finishing blow.
Ryan also did Devin a massive favor by drilling him on a break during that disastrous seventh round. The resulting point deduction cost Garcia momentum and granted Devin essential recovery seconds when he was completely out on his feet. Without that break in the action, the contest might have ended before round eight ever started.
The idea that he was methodically outboxing Garcia after round six is pure fantasy. Devin was not throwing punches with any real spite. He was flicking out lazy, keep-away jabs and arm-punches just to interrupt Garcia’s forward march. His main defense was smothering, but ironically, his obsession with tying up put him directly in harm’s way. Whenever Devin lunged forward blindly to initiate the clinch, he put his chin on a silver platter right in the arc of Garcia’s short, detonating left hook. Garcia did not even need full extension. He just clipped Devin on the way into the tie-up because Devin kept diving in predictably with zero head movement.
Devin is exceptionally lucky the referee gave him such an absurd amount of rope. A lot of officials would have stepped in during round seven when his legs completely betrayed him. He took massive, concussive shots, went down repeatedly, and spent vast stretches of the championship rounds clinging to Ryan’s waist like a drowning swimmer. Surviving that took raw, stubborn toughness, but acting like he was mounting a calculated tactical counter-offensive ignores how close he was to getting stopped on his feet.
Benn panicked, froze against the ropes, and gave the official an easy exit. Devin had the ring IQ to tie Garcia into knots and hear the scorecards. Surviving that left hook deserves genuine respect, but trying to rewrite desperate clinching into an inspiring offensive comeback ignores what the cameras captured. Devin survived by exploiting every veteran trick available, not by turning the tables.
