After fighting feds, Garcia ready for Brown

At this point last year, Leonard Garcia figured he was about to get a shot at the WEC featherweight champion Urijah Faber. He had just knocked out Hiroyuki Takaya in only 1:31 in his debut in the company.

But a few weeks later Garcia made local headlines in his hometown of Lubbock, Tex., and it had nothing to do with fighting.

He was arrested as part of an alleged cocaine ring, which put his career on hold. Three months later, he was exonerated.

"That news ended up everywhere," said Garcia. "It was never that serious for me. The newspapers said 40 years to life. That was bogus. My charge would have been obstruction of justice, that I knew a guy who was doing something and I didn’t turn report it. At most I’d have gotten three years probation."

Garcia admits he wasn’t wise about choosing some of his friends at that point in time, and was frustrated the local stories of him being exonerated were a lot smaller than those of his arrest.

"I had a buddy, a really good friend of mine in Lubbock, and he was into things that weren’t good," he said. "I knew about what the guy was up to but he was a friend of mine. The law says even if he’s your friend, you are required to report on the guy. The other 11 guys (who were an alleged part of a major cocaine ring in the Texas panhandle), I didn’t know any of them.

"They confiscated my car and then they found out I owed 40 grand on the car. They tried to tie in that I had my own home, but my dad had to co-sign for my house. They were going off the word of an informant and their informant was wrong."

With his name clear, Garcia is finally on the verge of his title opportunity, when Mike Brown, who beat Faber for the title, makes his first title defense on Sunday at the American Bank Center Arena in Corpus Christi, Tex. The match headlines a live TV special on Versus.

"I have to perform at the best of my ability," said Garcia, who stopped Jens Pulver in just 1:12 in his most recent fight. "My goal in every fight is to break my opponent. You’ve got a guy like Mike Brown, who I’ve never seen broken, so it’s a scary fight. The thought of that every day, that he’s not going to stop coming, makes me have to push myself. My prediction is one of us will break and it’s not going to be me."

Garcia (12-3) spends most of his time based at Greg Jackson’s camp in Albuquerque, N.M., noting that in a couple of years, he went from a guy who threw a hard punch and knew some jiu-jitsu to someone who is now a complete fighter.

It was Jackson, who coaches UFC light heavyweight champion Rashad Evans and welterweight champ Georges St. Pierre, who talked him into leaving the UFC at the end of 2007 to drop to 145 pounds, after he was only 149 pounds and lost via decision to Cole Miller in his final match as a lightweight in UFC.

Garcia, 29, actually made himself a name in the fight world with a loss. He was brought into UFC as a late replacement on April 7, 2007, for a show in Houston against Roger Huerta, and lost via decision in one of the more exciting fights of that year.

"I don’t feel I’ve peaked yet," he said. "I feel like I’m still learning a lot of things. There’s a lot of things I’m getting real comfortable with now. Being here at this camp ha helped open my eyes to a lot of things and there are still a lot of fights until I reach my full potential. I’m sure Mike (Brown) is still learning and he’s 33 years old and he’s the best fighter in the world at 145 pounds.

Even though the two are fighting for the championship and what would be the consensus No. 1 spot in the world at that weight, they are also fighting to get out of the shadow of Faber, who had held the championship for nearly three years.

Faber was champion when WEC, with the featherweight division being its marquee weight class, started on Versus in early 2007, and until Brown’s win on Nov. 5, had been the only champion to the point he was synonymous with the championship. Both men know that the winner will be facing Faber during the summer.

"I think he deserves a rematch because he’s one of the biggest names in the sport," said Brown, almost a complete unknown at the time of his win, since he had never previously appeared in a live nationally televised fight. "I wouldn’t mind fighting Urijah again because it’s what the fans wants and it’ll sell tickets and I’ll be happy to do it again."

Brown (20-4) noted that it wasn’t instantaneous after his win that he became recognizable.

"I get noticed more now," said Brown. "WEC shows fights over-and-over. At first I wasn’t getting recognized, but they keep replaying the fight (with Faber) and people notice me more. I’m more motivated now to train than I ever have been. I’m ranked by most people as No. 1 in the world, so now I feel I have to train like the No. 1 guy."

"I know Leonard is gunning for me and I have to fight him off," Brown continued." He’s a great fighter, a big puncher with solid Jiu Jitsu. He’s an "A" level top ten guy. I have to perform well and I can win, but if I don’t perform well, I’ll come up short."

Brown said that he’s fully recovered from a rib injury suffered in the Faber fight. He said the injury came when he was throwing a punch, but being filled with adrenaline, he didn’t even know he was hurt until after the match ended, and then, suddenly, the pain kicked in. In some ways, the injury was a blessing in disguise.

"I enjoyed spending the holidays with family and friends," he said. "I was good to relax over the holidays. It’s tough to train every day and be obsessed with diet over the holiday season."

Even though Lubbock is nowhere near Corpus Christi, where the fight is, Garcia jokes that he’s got the pressure of fighting in his home town.

"I go home for a couple of weeks to see my mom and my family and I’ve had a lot of people ask me for tickets," he said. "It’s kind of comical how people think that since we’re fighters we can just get tickets. I mean, everyone is asking for tickets."

Garcia’s involvement in MMA is a strange story. After high school in Plainview, Tex., he was planning on going to Texas Tech to play football as a walk-on. But after his high school graduation, he wound up at the Taco Cabana, and a guy walked by, put his hand in Garcia’s nachos and started eating them. He asked the guy to stop, so the guy did it again, and they got into a fight.

"I knocked him out, but then he asked me to come outside and do it again," Garcia said. "I didn’t know he had a knife. He stabbed me eight times, and punctured one of my lungs. We ended up at the same hospital and I found out he had either PCP or LSD in his blood stream. I couldn’t recover in time to play ball."

Instead, in 1998, he wound up at an early version of an MMA show in his hometown as a spectator. When there was an opening in the card, they asked if anyone in the crowd wanted to fight, and he ended up as a participant, and won his first fight. He then started training and fighting regularly.