By Dan Ambrose: Moments after beating former WBC welterweight champion Victor Ortiz (29-4-2, 22 KO’s) after he quit after the 9th round complaining of a broken jaw, Josesito Lopez (30-4, 18 KO’s) ripped into Ortiz, saying “He tried to intimidate me, but it didn’t work. Victor has no heart.”

Those comments no doubt relate to Ortiz having quit in the past when he started to take punishment in his 6th round TKO loss to Marcos Maidana in 2009. Lopez might also be talking about how Ortiz seemed to crumble mentally in his fight last November against Floyd Mayweather Jr. where Ortiz head-butted Mayweather in the 4th round when the fight had suddenly turned completely one-sided with Mayweather Jr. hitting Ortiz at will.

The strange part about last night was that Ortiz was well ahead in the fight and still more or less dominating the action when he decided to quit in his corner after the 9th round. What stood out for me was that Lopez had landed some significant blows in the 7th, 8th and 9th rounds that had Ortiz, a good frontrunner fighter, reeling.

I still had Ortiz winning the 8th and 9th rounds, but he looked like wasn’t happy now that he was getting hit a lot more than he had earlier in the fight. The whole complexity of the fight changed when Lopez suddenly came alive in the second half of the bout.

Ortiz didn’t react well to taking shots and seemed to lose his self confidence. One can only imagine what would happened to Ortiz had he not quit after the 9th, because he still had three tough rounds ahead of him, and Lopez was finding a lot of success with his uppercuts to the head. Ortiz may one of those rounds.

We’ll never know because he took the exit rather than going out on his shield the way that top fighters prefer to go out. As soon as Ortiz quit, you could hear loud laughter from the boxing fans in the crowd. They were obviously laughing at Ortiz for him quitting, and I suppose that must have been hard for him to hear.

Ideally, he should boxed and stayed away from Lopez rather than quitting. He could have avoided most of Lopez’s shots for the next three rounds without any problems had he made up his mind to stay in the fight and endure an occasional shot or two. Now, Ortiz has lost out on a big money fight against WBC junior middleweight champion Sal Alvarez due to him quitting like this.