Erislandy Lara and Danny Garcia finally appear to have secured a date and a site for their long-discussed middleweight title fight.

BoxingScene.com has learned that the 12-round championship bout between Lara and Garcia is expected to be part of a Showtime Pay-Per-View broadcast December 9 at MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas. The Cuban-born Lara (29-3-3, 17 KOs) and Philadelphia’s Garcia (37-3, 21 KOs) have long known that they’ll fight each other next, but the date and location have changed several times.

Their fight for Lara’s WBA middleweight title will be contested at a catch weight of 155 pounds, one pound above the junior middleweight limit and five pounds beneath the middleweight maximum of 160 pounds. The 40-year-old Lara will make his first title defense since Kazakhstan’s Gennadiy Golovkin gave up his WBA “super” middleweight championship and the WBA elevated Lara from his previous status as its secondary 160-pound champion.

The WBA approved Lara’s optional title defense against Garcia five months ago. The Panama City-based sanctioning organization previously ordered Lara to make a mandated defense against Australia’s Michael Zerafa.

Representatives for Lara and Zerafa later came to an agreement to allow Lara and Garcia, both of whom are affiliated with Al Haymon’s Premier Boxing Champions, to fight next. The Lara-Garcia winner must face Zerafa (31-4, 19 KOs) in his subsequent bout or he will be stripped of the WBA middleweight title.

Lara, a former WBA and IBO 154-pound champion, has fought twice at the middleweight limit. He’ll end an 18-month layoff against Garcia that began after Lara’s eighth-round stoppage of Ireland’s Gary “Spike” O’Sullivan (31-5, 21 KOs) in May 2022 at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

The 35-year-old Garcia, a former WBA/WBC 140-pound and WBC 147-pound champion, will officially fight as a middleweight for the first time in his 16-year pro career. Garcia made his debut at the junior middleweight limit of 154 pounds in his last fight – a 12-round, majority-decision defeat of Jose Benavidez Jr. (28-2-1, 19 KOs) in July 2022 at Barclays Center.

Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.