Former unified heavyweight champion Andy Ruiz knew he would face fellow heavyweight contender Luis “King Kong” Ortiz on Sunday night in Los Angeles. And, in the end, Ruiz was able to do enough with three knockdowns to earn a narrow unanimous decision nod.
Ruiz outscored Ortiz 113-112 on one card and 114-111 on the other two for the main event of the Fox Sports/Premier Boxing Champions pay-per-view from the Crypto.com Arena in downtown Los Angeles.
The winner by unanimous decision is “The Destroyer” Andy Ruiz! ????#RuizOrtiz pic.twitter.com/iRJpRYeLyW
— FOX Sports: PBC (@PBConFOX) September 5, 2022
It didn’t look like it was going to be a long fight, as home region favorite Ruiz, who had previously stunned former unified heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua by seventh-round TKO in June 2019, looked like to the same fighter at the beginning of this fight. .
That’s when he dropped the 43-year-old Cuban with a hard right hand in the second round and then kept up the pressure before dropping him a second time, making it look like referee Thomas Taylor might stop the fight.
To Ortiz’s credit, though, he hung on, lasted the round and actually started scoring his own big left straights from the southpaw position. Still, Ortiz couldn’t sustain success and Ruiz continued to catch him with hard right hands.
This included another knockdown of another big right hand that had Ortiz briefly in trouble, again.
But, just like earlier in the fight, Ortiz survived and was actually scoring punches in the later rounds of the fight. Ortiz, with a badly swollen left eye, actually won two of the last three rounds of the fight on all three judges’ scorecards, including the twelfth and final round.
But, in the end, Ruiz had done enough, especially with knockdowns in the first seven rounds, to earn the decision victory.
The win improves Ruiz to 35-2 with 22 KOs and puts him in position now to fight the winner of next month’s Deontay Wilder-Robert Helenius fight for a WBC high-stakes contender bout in 2023. Ruiz lost the WBA/WBO/IBF titles almost as quickly as he won them, when Joshua beat him by decision in their rematch in December 2019. He had only had one fight since then, a decision over veteran Chris Arreola in April of last year.
Ruiz told Fox Sports after the fight: “I stay active. I don’t want to be waiting that long until he fights. I want to fight at least 3 or 4 times a year. I’m ready man. I’m hungry. I want to bring that championship belt to Mexico.”
As for Ortiz, who lost twice before by knockout to Wilder, he drops to 33-3 and is now probably off the biggest stage forever.
