Instant Justice – Mayweather vs. Ortiz

On Saturday night HBO will replay the Mayweather vs. Ortiz fight and two things will become clear: that Mayweather put on an offensive and defensive clinic worthy of his hall of fame career, and that Ortiz didn’t want any more of it. True fight fans will see a third round dominated by Mayweather’s clean punching – see Ortiz walk into a left hook like the one that basically KO’d Ricky Hatten in the 10th, shortly followed up with a snapping right to the head, clean and perfect. After that, Ortiz was fighting going backwards.

I heard Jim Lampley and Emanuel Steward say Ortiz was walking through Mayweather’s punches, but they were wrong. Ortiz had had enough. Suddenly he was fighting going backwards. Suddenly he was looking to foul his way out of the fight.

When the fourth round came, Ortiz was dominated again. He could push Mayweather into the ropes, but he couldn’t hit him and he was getting hit with clean punches. Then came the intentional head butts: the first one Cortez saw and gave him a warning for, the second one of the round that Cortez missed.  Swing at Mayweather - three, four, five shots in a row – all slipped, all missing. Then came the third, and worst, intentional head butt of them all. Nobody could have missed that one, and it opened a cut on Mayweather’s face.

Let’s be clear, sticking the crown of your head into a fighter in the clinch and jumping with your legs is bush league dirty fighting. It’s crap you see from four round fighters just out of the amateurs, not in world championship fights. And three intentional fouls aren’t “reflex”, they are desperation.

Then the over-the-top apologies started. Ortiz hugs Mayweather against the ropes and tries to kiss him. Cortez takes him to the center of the ring and takes the point, and while he is doing it Mayweather and Ortiz touch gloves. Then Cortez says "come on" or maybe “time in” and waves the fighters together from either side of the ring. Ortiz comes forward and tries to hug Mayweather again but the fight has already been restarted and Mayweather is all business.

Mayweather knocks him out, just as he should have done. Just as I wanted him to do.

Why was Ortiz trying to hug Mayweather again after all the hugging, kissing, and glove touching he’d already done? Simple, HE WAS DONE. Done with fighting a man that was outclassing him, beating him to the punch, and sending him to the inevitable knock-out that was coming.  And that explains his accepting reaction to the knockout.

And sadly, this is another case of self-inflicted injury for the boxing industry. We should be celebrating a dominant performance by a hall of fame fighter that first outclassed a younger, bigger man, and then sent him down after he was revealed to be a dirty fighter with too little heart. Celebrating the kind of instant justice that our twisted world rarely provides. Instead, we are shown a replay that starts 3 seconds too late to see Cortez wave the fighters together, and have to hear Larry Merchant make apologies for Ortiz, asking him as his leading question if Ortiz's third intentional head butt came "out of instinct". Endure seeing Merchant give Mayweather no credit for the repeated fouls he had received or his peerless boxing; instead make him out to be guilty of taking a “cheap shot”. We are asked to forget that a fighter must be warned before having a point deducted for head butts so that Ortiz could have just made his first "mistake", and let Ortiz off the hook for his B.S.

It was a great night for boxing. Mayweather may not make friends for his personal antics, but in the ring he is an amazingly disciplined boxer that is in my opinion the best I have ever seen, offensively and defensively. And that makes him one of the greatest boxers to ever live.

 And I’ll be watching it again on Saturday on HBO to see a masterful job of boxing and a punk trying to foul his way out of a championship fight hit the canvas again.  And I’ll toast the instant justice that it represents. Hell, it was beautiful!