Alex Garcia, in His Pro Debut, Wins in First Round; Patterson Is Victor

Alex Garcia, the former national amateur super-heavyweight champion from San Fernando, made his professional boxing debut on Friday night and knocked out an overweight, laid-off pepperoni-stick maker from Portland, Ore., who had agreed to the fight just 18 hours earlier.

The end came at 2:52 of the first round at the Reseda Country Club after Garcia had battered 231-pound Cliff Melbourne, a full-blooded Sioux Indian, with stunning lefts and rights. He knocked Melbourne down with a right-left-right combination two minutes into the fight, but Melbourne got to his feet at the count of nine. Garcia, 207, caught Melbourne with a crushing right uppercut with just eight seconds left in the round, and Melbourne crumbled to the canvas, where he stayed for a full minute.

“I didn’t want to take this fight in the first place,” said Melbourne, who fell to 0-7 as a professional but has piled up a 12-2 record in Portland bar fights in a so-called Tough Man Tournament. “But when you’re out of work and you’re getting evicted from your apartment and you have no money, sometimes you do things you don’t really want to do.”

Garcia, 26, won 21 of his 25 amateur fights and advanced to the super-heavyweight final in the World Amateur championships in Reno in 1986. He was stopped in the second round by Cuba’s Teofilo Stevenson.

“I have to treat them all the same,” Garcia said. “Any heavyweight can knock out any other heavyweight. If I go in and just play with the guy, he might catch me. I’ve got to take the guy out as fast as I can.”

Garcia’s trainer and manager, Blinky Rodriguez, admitted the fight was a mismatch.

“The way the other guy looked, that’s not our fault,” he said. “We just signed to fight somebody. We didn’t pick this guy.”

In an earlier bout, featherweight Tracy Patterson, the adopted son of two-time heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, stopped Gene Salazar at 1:36 of the third round to run his record to 17-0 with 9 knockouts.