By Eric Thomas: Former WBC welterweight champion Victor Ortiz is reportedly hospitalized tonight at the Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, awaiting surgery for a broken jaw received in his 9th round TKO loss to Josesito Lopez last Saturday night/

Ortiz’s manager Rolando Arellano said this to RingTV about Ortiz’s jaw injury: “It’s a broken jaw and he has bleeding internally inside of his mouth, so they have go in there and repair the breaks. Victor is in good spirits, other than his mouth. He’s on medication.”

Ortiz’s broken just must be a fairly bad one, because only the serious injuries of this kind require surgery. What they typically do is go and realign the fractures pieces of a fighter’s jaw by using wire and/or screws and metal plates to keep it together. In this case, it appears that bone fragments from Ortiz’s broken jaw may have torn a hole or a series of holes in Ortiz’s skin, causing bleeding inside of his mouth.

It’s going to take at a minimum eight weeks for Ortiz’s jaw to heal from the surgery and it’ll likely be a lot longer than that before Ortiz will be ready to get back in the ring again. He’s going to need a considerable amount of time off so that he doesn’t risk re-injuring his broken jaw.

In the future, Ortiz will have to learn to cover up better and keep his mouth closed while fighting. I noticed in watching Ortiz’s fight last Saturday that he had a habit of opening his mouth when fighting. As a fighter, you can’t do this a lot without risking suffering a jaw injury like the one Ortiz reportedly suffered.