By Steve Kim

Welterweight Shawn Porter faces Adrian Granados this Saturday night from the Barclay Center in Brooklyn, New York as the televised co-feature on Showtime. It figures to be a pretty good fight but it may not be the one that Porter was truly yearning for.

"No, it actually was not," admitted Kenny Porter, the father and trainer of the former IBF welterweight titlist, to BoxingScene.com. "Of course we wanted Keith Thurman. That wasn't going to happen for us. Keith had an elbow injury and some other stuff going on in his personal life. He got married, went to Kathmandu. I figured the next best guy - which the WBC said we could fight - was Danny Garcia.

"I figured,'OK, that's the next best thing. Let's get it, let's make it happen.' Nah. But that's who we we're going for and we attempted to get that fight together on numerous occasions and there was absolutely no response from the camp of Garcia - they wanted nothing to do with Shawn."

That is, according to the always out-spoken Porter, until they had signed on for the fight this weekend.

"The week after we signed to fight Granados, Garcia comes out and says,'I'll fight Shawn Porter, that would be a great fight. I'll knock him out, he's tailor made for me.' I just thought to myself, 'This dude is full of sh*t' because every phone call that could've possibly been made, was made to take this fight to be the main event here on this card in Brooklyn and he wanted absolutely nothing to do with it."

Porter says he has been given verbal promises of these marquee fights taking place in 2018. So the question now is his son properly focused for the task right in front of him?

"This will be the first time in a long time Shawn has fought this many times in one year. So he's in the best shape of his life. We hear people say that kind of stuff all the time but he definitely is in the best condition, physical and mental shape in his life for any sport he's ever played," said the father.

Steve Kim is the news editor for BoxingScene.com.