By Wayne Lloyd: Tonight at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, we welcome back boxing’s biggest star – the great Floyd ‘Money’ Mayweather (41-0); in a match up against boxing’s rising star and current WBC Welterweight Champion – Victor ‘Vicious’ Ortiz (29-2-2).
Many experts are predicting that Mayweather might have set himself too much of a challenge having been exiled from the sport for more than 16 months. The arguments of ‘ring-rust’ and ‘age’ are being touted as the principle reasons why Ortiz will finally provide Mayweather with the taste of defeat for the first time in his career.
Mayweather has also had to endure the external pressures of potential bankruptcy and a long custodial sentence caused by an avalanche of personal problems, which include a deformation lawsuit, four felony charges and two misdemeanor charges. Indeed, if this was any other fighter we might conclude that maybe this is a fight too far – but this is not any other boxer – this is Floyd Mayweather – and we always see the best of him when he is under such pressure. This fight will be no exception.
Floyd Mayweather is the greatest boxer of our generation and the greatest defensive boxer of all time. Against a raw boxer like Ortiz this will play a huge part in the final outcome especially when we consider that just 2 fights ago Victor Ortiz struggled to a draw against Lamont Peterson. In that fight he failed to come to terms with the speed and overall resilience of Peterson and now just 12 months on some are suggesting that he has the skills in his locker to beat Mayweather!! I find this hard to believe.
Simultaneously in just his last fight against Andre Berto he was put on the canvas on two separate occasions. If Ortiz failed to cope with the speed of Peterson and struggled to cope with the strength of Andre Berto (agreed he got back up and managed to defeat him) then I fail to see how anyone that knows boxing can believe he has a chance against someone that has dismantled De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton, Shane Mosley and Juan Marquez in his last four fights. Ortiz might have the heart and might be the naturally bigger fighter of the two but if we remove the hype of the occasion and look at the bear facts then I predict that this fight will not last more than 4 rounds.
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