Ryan Garcia wants Arman Tsarukyan to know if he’s more than welcome to come and collect the money supposedly owed to him.
But he’s going to have to fight for it.
The saga between Garcia, the boxing superstar, and Tsarukyan, one of the UFC’s top pound-for-pound fighters, began this past April when Garcia featured Tsarukyan on a Kick stream. According to Tsarukyan, he bet $40,000 that Garcia could not drop one of his teammates with a body shot. After a pair of attempts, Garcia was unsuccessful, but Tsarukyan said the wager was never honored.
Garcia replied that he was “scammed” and later explained to Complex how he feels Tsarukyan manipulated the challenge in his favor.
“There’s no way I will ever pay him,” Garcia said. “Here’s the reasoning why, people, they didn’t catch this part of the stream, but [Tsarukyan] told me himself—because I was going to hit him—he told me, these were his words: ‘No, brother, it’s unfair, because if you hit me, I’m a fighter, I know how to take it, so it’s not fair.’ So I was like, ‘OK, cool, cool, cool, that makes sense.’ We know how to take punches, whatever. And then this random dude that I thought was a security guard comes up and I’m like, ‘Oh shit.’
“They want me to hit him, I’m like, cool. I knew something was up. And then I hit him, obviously, I was like, ‘You know what?’ One, I didn’t really want to lay it in to my fullest because I don’t know, and they only let me hit in a certain spot, too. So it was just really weird. I only hit him twice, I was supposed to hit him three times. I was like, ‘No, this is not right. I don’t like how this is going.’”
Garcia doesn’t think Tsarukyan sending out another fighter—as opposed to an untrained individual—in his place was in the spirit of the contest, so he doesn’t feel he has to pay up. Initially, Garcia told Tsarukyan he would give him the $40,000, but apparently he didn’t mean it.
A subsequent spar with Tsarukyan’s teammate didn’t sit well with Garcia either.
“I was like, ‘Alright, I’ll give you the 40,’ but in my mind I was like, ‘Nah, I feel like I got played, whatever. Anyways, I just want to fight you,’” Garcia said. “I was like, ‘Let’s just fight, body shots.’ So I went at it for real with body shots with a big-ass motherf*cker that was actually a real fighter, so I showed, like, ‘Bro, I’m right here. You drop me. You’re a real fighter. Let’s go. You’re 200 pounds, I’m 160, you’ve got 40 pounds on me.’ So I’m like, you know what, I feel like I got played. You come try to take the money from me. That’s it. Come get it.”
Tsarukyan has since offered $100,000 for Garcia to go eight rounds of boxing with him, or $1 million if he can survive a round of MMA.
It doesn’t sound like Garcia is interested in any of that at the moment, but he’s happy to let Tsarukyan know where his money is.
“It’s in my pocket,” Garcia said. “No, it’s not. But come through.”
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