Detailed report: Sunday (NOT Saturday) September 4, 2022, from Crypto.com Arena, LA, California, and Fox PPV (ouch)! It’s Andy ‘Destroyer’ Ruiz vs. Luis, “King Kong” Ortiz, what else, VERY heavyweights.
Background: Blame it on Covid-19, but also on the strange state of boxing that many or most big matches are yearning to see delayed. Delayed to a point where the guys who finally fight them are past their peak, or at best, the fighters are the same, but public interest is waning.
Ruiz vs. Ortiz is NOT such a fight. Few demanded it, and as a Fox pay-per-view, even at $39.99, it’s an outrage.
All of the above aside, it’s a pretty good fight. We have Ortiz, a very old man by boxing standards, one punch away, a couple of times, from turning Deontay Wilder into irrelevance.
Then we have Andy ‘Doughboy’ Ruiz, the guy who beat Joshua and, had he trained, easily would have beaten him again. And in his pathetic and disrespectful (to himself and all the fans) condition of the second fight, he was still 2″ and 10 seconds away from more conditioning, from making Joshua, if not irrelevance, then overrated, “not so good as we thought.”, pick your favorite boxing attitude change. In short, throwing a strawberry jam factory in the faces of Ant and Eddie Hearn.
Fighter ranks: (Speed, Power, Defense, Range, Age, Stamina, Experience)
Andy Ruiz: B+B+ B- C+ B- B+ B+ Total: C+ (3.0)
louis ortiz: B, BB B- C- B B+ Total: B-(2.8)
Reality check: This should be the first fight of the last leg of Ortiz’s career, and if he loses, there shouldn’t be a last leg. If Andy Ruiz loses in any situation other than a trap, he becomes a gatekeeper and probably a rare one. He doesn’t exactly fight all the time.
If Ortiz is as good as the second fight version of Wilder, Andy should be very busy.
It’s shorter, with a four-inch reach disadvantage. Of course, at 43, Ortiz may have gotten “older overnight.” Sure, strikers rarely miss their punch, but Ruiz is explosively fast, and a laborious Ortiz would be in trouble.
I once wrote in an article for Ruiz-Arreola: “You don’t have to be Freud to see that, like Arreola, Ruiz doesn’t have that essential champion self-confidence.”
I’m still not sure if it does.
He is not 29 years old like when he destroyed Joshua. He is 32 years old. Quickness is almost always the first thing that happens to an athlete, and yes, that includes, clichés aside, heavyweight boxers. I have no reason to feel Ruiz is slowing down, but he is on top by normal standards.
If he wants to get back into contention for a championship and continue to support his enormous spending (money must be running out), his window of opportunity is getting smaller, and soon it will be the size of a postage stamp, not a window.
Leftie Ortiz is a pretty complete package. But, it is a very different type of package. It comes completely sideways, I love it. He’s southpaw, but often relies on throwing fake lefts that miss by inches and do damage with his left hand, his right. His style of him is probably not transferable! It’s a hybrid of hits and misses that was probably devised a long time ago for him in Cuba.
Ortiz is a good defensive fighter who can quickly go from defense to offense. Ortiz looks for two punch combinations. Don’t expect from Ortiz some long strings of combinations.
Ruiz throws both an overhand and a straight right hand. He is capable of throwing straight punches like arrows with both hands.
Look for the right but it’s fair talk. He has an excellent left hook to the body. He is faster than Ortiz, who is himself, fast.
Fight and prediction: Ortiz, aside from Wilder, is a winner with vast experience in two different systems, Cuban Amateur and USA Professional. Here he says he rocks Ruiz a couple of times, and we have some fantastic exchanges throughout.
I could see a worn Ortiz succumb sooner, but I’m not beating around the bush with predictions. I see a fight where both show flashes of brilliance, but Ruiz’s lower odometer is the difference.
Andy Ruiz, TKO Luis Ortiz, 11.
