IBF won’t sanction Victor Ortiz vs. Carlos Molina fight

By Boxing News - 10/22/2013 - Comments

ortiz564By Allan Fox: The International Boxing Federation has refused to sanction the December 14th fight between IBF junior middleweight champion Carlos Molina (22-5-2, 6 KO’s) an former WBC welterweight champion Victor Ortiz (29-4-2, 22 KO’s), according to Dan Rafael. The fight is now off the card.

The Ortiz-Molina match-up was supposed to be a part of the Showtime pay-per-view card headlined by WBA welterweight champion Adrien Broner defending his title against Marcos Maidana at the MGM Grand, Grand Garden Arena, in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.

Dan Rafael said on his twitter:

This is a big hit for the card because there’s not much on the card to justify it as a PPV event other than the main event. The co-feature bout is Keith Thurman facing Jesus Soto Karass. There’s also junior middleweight contender Alfredo Angulo battling Jorge Melendez. Those are decent fights but neither of them are good enough to be a co-feature. Hopefully Golden Boy Promotions will find a good quality fight to put on the card in place of the Ortiz-Molina fight.

It was surprising that Golden Boy chose to match Ortiz immediately against Molina in his first fight back from a year and a half layoff. Ortiz has been out of action since sustaining a broken jaw in his loss to Josesito Lopez last year in June. Ortiz’s jaw was broken in two places in that fight, and it’s taken him a while to heal up. With Ortiz being out of the ring for such a long time it would make more sense for him to take a couple of tuneups before taking on champion like Molina or one of the other champions.

Perhaps the reasoning for Ortiz being matched up against Molina is that it would put Ortiz in an excellent position, should he have won the match, to get a big money fight against former WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez in early 2014. That’s a fight that would attract a lot of attention, and it would give Canelo an opportunity to redeem himself with the boxing public after his one-sided loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. last month. As good as Ortiz is, he probably wouldn’t match-up well against the heavier and bigger punching Canelo. It would be a do-or-die fight or Ortiz because he couldn’t afford to have another fight where he quits for whatever reason.

Molina recently captured the IBF 154 lb. title in a victory over Ishe Smith last month on the undercard of the Mayweather-Canelo fight card in Las Vegas. Molina is a good fighter but he doesn’t have an entertaining fighting style and he’s not highly popular. It’s unclear what Golden Boy can do with him other than having him hold down a belt until Canelo or Ortiz takes him on and captures it. There’s not a lot of options for interesting fights for Molina among the top 15 contenders the IBF has listed. There’s guys like Sergey Rabchenko, Damian Jonak, Jermell Charlo, Willie Nelson, Jonathon Gonzalez, Miguel Cotto and Glen Tapia. Cotto won’t fight Molina, but that would be an interesting fight if it were made. The IBF also has Austin Trout ranked at #5, but he’s facing Erislandy Lara for the vacant WBA junior middleweight title on December 7th.



Comments are closed.