By Chris Williams: Photo credit: Sumio Yamada – Dan Rafael is ESPN sees Floyd Mayweather Jr. (41-0, 25 KO’s) out-boxing WBC welterweight champion Victor Ortiz (29-2-2, 22 KO’s) on Saturday night to pick up Ortiz’s World Boxing Council strap, not that Mayweather really wants the belt. Mayweather is more concerned with beating top fighters than in picking up worthless trinkets that require sanctioning fees to keep.
Rafael feels that Mayweather has the better inside fighting ability compared to Ortiz and will give him a lot of problems when Ortiz tries to engage. He also feels that Mayweather will be able to get away from Ortiz’s bum rushes fairly easy, saying “Mayweather is so poised in the ring that even if Ortiz rushes him early, which I expect, he’ll simply dart away. Ultimately, Mayweather will use Ortiz’s aggressiveness against him because he’s also a supreme counterpuncher.”
Rafael is 100 percent correct of course. Ortiz will no doubt rush Mayweather, but when he does, Mayweather will move and nail him with shots as he’s coming in. And on the inside, Ortiz is going to be at Mayweather’s mercy all night long with his fast accurate shots coming often. I suspect that Ortiz will forget all about fighting on the inside after the first couple of rounds and will focus entirely on just throwing jabs from the outside like he was told to do by Oscar De La Hoya. You’re not going to beat a quality fighter like Mayweather by jabbing him. It takes a lot more than that simple Plan B to beat him when Plan A quickly goes down the tubes in the first two rounds.
Mayweather will likely use a lot of lateral movement, Rafael points out to stay out of the way of Ortiz’s big shots. And with referee Joe Cortez working the fight, it gives Mayweather one more important advantage. Cortez is the same referee that worked the Amir Khan vs. Marcos Maidana and Ricky Hatton vs. Mayweather fight. In both of those fights, Cortez seemed to get in the way of Maidana and Hatton while they were attempting to work on the inside.
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