By Dan Ambrose: WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman says that the Deontay Wilder vs. Andy Ruiz Jr eliminator will be ordered at the convention in Acapulco, Mexico, next week.
Assuming both fighters are willing to agree to the fight, we’ll soon see Wilder (43-2-1, 42 KOs) and Ruiz (35-2, 22 KOs) squaring off in a WBC title eliminator to decide the mandatory challenger to champion Tyson Fury.
Wilder looked like pure 24k gold with his first round knockout last Saturday night against Robert Helenius at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.
After moving around the ring for much of the round, Deontay connected with a powerful short right hand that laid Helenius out on the canvas.
“In the convention, all the final eliminatory rounds that include Ruiz-Wilder will be ordered,” said WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman to Marca about Deontay Wilder vs. Andy Ruiz Jr to be ordered next week at the convention.
“Andy Ruiz is a boxer of great diversity; he is a brutal puncher. But the styles make the fights, ‘El Destroyer’ is much shorter than Wilder; he can be complicated.”
Ruiz, 33, cannot afford to allow the 6’7″ Wilder to rain right hands down him because he’s already shown chin problems in his fights against Luis ‘King Kong’ Ortiz and Anthony Joshua.
The stubby Ruiz, who had his 15 minutes of fame with his upset win over Joshua in 2019, has looked like the ham & egger fighter in his last three contests.
This is the middle-of-the-road fighter that Ruiz had always been before pulling off a miracle win over a careless Joshua in their first fight in June 2019.
As long as Wilder doesn’t get reckless the way Joshua did, he’s likely to blast the chubby-looking Ruiz out in one or two rounds when they meet for the soon-to-be-ordered WBC title eliminator.
Ruiz is just another example of an average fighter getting lucky by beating a guy way out of his depth and then immediately losing the titles in his first defense.
“He will kill Andy Ruiz when they fight. Ruiz needs to give me a rematch. Give me a rematch, Andy,” Luis ‘King Kong’ Ortiz told Blue Blood Boxing TV about his belief that Deontay will destroy the former unified heavyweight champion Ruiz. “I told them it would be easy money.”
Ruiz beat Ortiz last September by a narrow 12 round unanimous decision. Despite knocking Ortiz down three times, Ruiz barely won the fight.
