By Dan Ambrose: Referee Joe Cortez was quick to point out that it wasn’t his fault that former WBC welterweight champion Victor Ortiz wasn’t ready to keep fighting after Cortez took a point away from Ortiz last Saturday night in the last seconds of Ortiz’s fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
“I told them the fight was back on and I put my hands down in the middle and said come on let’s go,” Cortez said in an interview at sportsradioreviews.com. “Then I looked at the timekeeper and being the captain of the ship, I made sure that my timekeeper had his clock running. I was surprised he [Ortiz] would put his hands out again to say I’m sorry.”
I don’t think anyone has too many problems about Cortez telling the fighters to start fighting again. I think where boxing fans have an issue is how long Cortez turned his attention away from the two fighters to stare at the timekeeper. Cortez spent too much time looking over there at a crucial point in the fight. With Cortez taking his eyes off the fighters, it left no in control of the fight during those important seconds.
Ortiz may have been fooled into thinking that time wasn’t back in because Cortez had his body and eyes facing the timekeeper instead of the two fighters. Ortiz didn’t think that the action had resumed and kept his hands down when he should have obviously kept them up. But Cortez definitely restarted the action because you can here him say “let’s go.”
But taking his attention off the two fighters was where things got messy. I think he could have done better. If it’s going to take Cortez that long to check on the timekeeper then he needs to work out a system to speed this up, because he can’t be staring at the timekeeper when the action is going on right in front of him. If that’s the case then maybe we need two referees to work the fight when Cortez is working – one to stare at the timekeeper to make sure he’s restarted the time properly and the other to watch the actual fight.
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