By Scott Gilfoid: Golden Boy Promotions CEO Oscar De La Hoya thinks that his fighter WBA interim heavyweight champion Luis Ortiz (23-0, 20 KOs) would flatten the talented WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder (35-0, 34 KOs) with a shot and that he wouldn’t be able to get up from the punch when/if the two large heavyweights fight in the future. And get this get; De La Hoya believes that Wilder would never even agree to fight the Cuban Ortiz in the future, as he’s someone that Wilder would choose to steer his career around.
Right now, the 6’4” Ortiz, who De La Hoya says is 33 rather than his listed age of 36, is traveling in a different path with Wilder. Ortiz is the interim WBA champion and is looking to get a title shot against either Wladimir Klitschko or Ruslan Chagaev.
Wilder and Ortiz can only fight now if Ortiz is able to beat Chagaev or Wladimir to pick up one or more of the world titles. Until then, there’s no point in Wilder facing the aging Ortiz, who looks to me to be a lot older than his listed age of 36.
“Ortiz will give problems to any heavyweight. We know Deontay Wilder will never fight Ortiz. If he gets hit by Ortiz, he’s not getting up,” De La Hoya said via the latimes.com.
De La Hoya shouldn’t be jumping too ahead of himself by assuming that Ortiz will get past his next #5 WBC, #6 WBA Bryant Jennings (19-1, 10 KOs), who Ortiz faces two months from now on December 19th at the Turning Stone Resort & Casino, in Verona, New York. That’s a real tough fight for Ortiz, and I could definitely see him losing that fight.
De La Hoya brags that Ortiz has had 350 amateur fights, but what he forgets is that Ortiz is not a mobile fighter. He’s a big 6’4”, 237¾ fighter, who moves like he’s got rust in his knee joints. Ortiz is strictly a stationary heavyweight, and absolutely needs to fight heavyweights that can’t move around the ring.
If you put Ortiz in with a mobile guy like Wladimir or Deontay, he’s going to find them jabbing him to pieces and moving constantly. Ortiz also isn’t the fastest guy, so he would be at a huge disadvantage in the hand speed department if he were to face a talent like Wilder. Heck, even Wladimir is faster than Ortiz. I hate to say it, but De La Hoya has an old fashioned heavyweight in the form of Ortiz, and he reminds me of Riddick Bowe after he started to get old and was unable to move around the ring well.
“This fight here with Jennings is a perfect heavyweight fight and a perfect test. If he knocks out Jennings, which Klitschko couldn’t do, we have a real contender. If he wins, we want to go after [three-belt heavyweight world champion Wladmir] Klitschko.”
The southpaw Ortiz has been facing incredibly bad opposition since he turned pro in 2010. He’s been facing nothing but 2nd and 3rd tier heavyweight opposition for some reason. The guys that Ortiz has been fighting would make any guy look great in comparison. I mean, Ortiz is facing the kinds of guys that Shannon Briggs has been fighting.
Briggs, 43, has scored a mess of 1st round knockouts since launching his comeback last year. Ortiz isn’t even doing what Briggs is doing by knocking his fodder opponents out in the 1st round. It’s taking him longer to do the job. That tells me that he doesn’t have the mobility, hand speed or the youth to get the job done.
In Ortiz’s last fight, he stopped 38-year-old Matias Ariel Vidondo in the 3rd round on the undercard of the Gennady Golovkin vs. David Lemieux fight on October 17th on HBO PPV from Madison Square Garden in New York. Yeah, Ortiz looked good, but look who he was fighting. It was just a terrible opponent.
Ortiz has got a really tough road ahead of him in the next couple of years, and I don’t see him doing well in a fight against Jennings. But if he does beat Jennings and eventually get a fight against Klitschko, which could take another two years or more, then the 38 or 39-year-old Jennings would have the chance of facing Deontay in a unification. I can’t imagine Ortiz’s poor mobility improving by that point, and that would make things even easier for Deontay to beat him. Ortiz’s aging body is working against him in accomplishing all the things that De La Hoya wants him to. I see Ortiz as an other Johann Duhaupas type plodder, and a really easy fight for Deontay. In fact, I think it would be too easy. De La Hoya would then see his heavyweight Ortiz sent back down in the rankings to the point where I doubt his career would ever turn around.
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