Victor Ortiz vs. Gilberto Sanchez Leon this Saturday in San Antonio, TX

By Boxing News - 12/08/2015 - Comments

ortiz1By Dan Ambrose: Former WBC welterweight champion Victor Ortiz (30-5-2, 23 KOs) comes into this Saturday night’s fight against journeyman Gilberto Sanchez Leon (33-13-2, 13 KOs) in poor shape career-wise in his fight on Premier Boxing Champions on NBC Sports Net from the AT&T Center in San Antonio, Texas.

Ortiz, 28, hasn’t fought in over a year after dealing with an injury from his last fight against Manuel Perez that sidelined him all this time since December of last year. Ortiz suffered a fractured left wrist in that fight, and it was an injury that required surgery and a lot of rehab for it to finally heal.

If Ortiz is smart, he’ll take it easy and not try and punch Leon’s lights out, because that’s how he’s gotten in trouble in his last two fights against Manuel Perez and Luis Collazo. The wrist injury that Ortiz suffered came from him in his final punch of the fight, and he obviously was putting everything he could into the punch.

In Ortiz’s fight against Collazo, he was hurt when he loaded up on a big shot and wound up getting nailed by a big left hook from Collazo. It would be in Ortiz’s best interest just to focus on fighting smoothly and letting the knockout come if it does come rather than him going out and trying to impress the boxing fans by looking to KO the 34-year-old Leon.

Leon is coming into the fight with five defeats in his last seven fights. He’s been stopped only once in those five fights by Diego Magdaleno by 3rd round knockout in 2011. The fact that Leon seems to have a good chin would suggest that it would be better for Ortiz not to try and KO him because he might run into something or suffer some kind of injury if he tries to take this guy’s head off.

Leon has never beaten anyone of note during his 17-year pro career, so Ortiz should be okay in this fight. But as flawed as Ortiz is as a fighter, I don’t think he’s safe against anybody. If Leon puts up a hard fight, he could get Ortiz to quit mentally like he did in his loss to Marcos Maidana and Josesito Lopez. A lot of boxing fans think that Ortiz also quit mentally in his loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. in 2011, when he head-butted him when the going got tough in the 4th.

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Ortiz then dropped his guard while apologizing to Mayweather, and was nailed by a left-right combination that surprisingly knocked him out. It’s still unclear whether Ortiz was really hurt by Mayweather or if he stayed down hoping that Mayweather would be disqualified by the referee Joe Cortez for the cheap shot combination.

The Ortiz vs. Leon fight is on the undercard of the light welterweight clash between two former world champions Antonio DeMarco and Omar Figueroa. Neither of those guys are considered major players at 140. If you add Ortiz with DeMarco and Figueroa, you’ve got a nice little card filled with yesterday’s fighters. I can’t see any of them ever winning another major world title, but I could be wrong.



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