Andy Ruiz vs. Luis Ortiz - As time goes by

Particulars: 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 weird state of boxing that many or most great matches fans crave are delayed. Delayed to a point where the dudes finally fighting them are past their peak, or best case, the fighters are the same, but public interest is on the wane.

Ruiz vs. Ortiz is NOT such a fight. Few demanded it, and as a Fox PPV – 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, a punch away, a couple of times, from making Deontay Wilder an irrelevance.  

Then we have Andy ‘Doughboy’ Ruiz, the guy that beat Joshua and, had he but trained, would easily have defeated him again. And in his pathetic, disrespectful (to himself and all fans) condition of the second fight, he still came within 2” and 10 seconds of more conditioning, of rendering Joshua, if not an irrelevance – overrated, “not as good as we thought,” pick your favorite boxing about-face. In short, throwing a factory’s worth of strawberry jam on Ant and Eddie Hearn’s faces.

Fighters Grades: (Speed, Power, Defense, Reach, Age, Stamina, Experience)

Andy Ruiz: B+B+ B- C+ B- B+ B+ Total: C+ (3.0)

Luis Ortiz: B, B B B- C- B B+ Total: B- (2.8)

Reality Check: This should be the first fight of the last stage of Ortiz’s career, and if he loses, there should be no last stage. If Andy Ruiz loses in any situation except skullduggery, he becomes a gatekeeper and probably an infrequent one at that. He doesn’t exactly fight all the time.

If Ortiz is as good as the version of the second Wilder fight, Andy should have his hands full. 

He’s shorter, with a four-inch reach disadvantage. Of course, at 43, Ortiz may have become “older, overnight.” True, punchers seldom lose their punch, but Ruiz is explosively quick, and a plodding 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-belief.”

I’m still not sure he does. 

He is not 29 as he was when he destroyed Joshua. He’s 32. Quickness is almost always the first thing that goes in an athlete, and yes, that includes, cliches aside, heavyweight boxers. I have no reason to feel Ruiz is slowing down, but he’s on the cusp of it by normal standards.  

If he wants to challenge again for a championship and continue to support his huge, reported spending (his money must be running out) his window of opportunity is growing smaller - and will soon be the size of a postage stamp, not a window.

Leftie Ortiz is a pretty complete package. But – it’s a very different kind of package. He comes in completely sideways – I love it. He’s left-handed but often relies on throwing fake lefts that miss by inches and doing damage with his off-hand, the right. His style probably is not transferable! It’s a hybrid of rights and wrongs that was probably devised long 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 of Ortiz, some long-flowing strings of combinations.

Ruiz throws both an overhand and straight right. He’s capable of throwing arrow-straight punches with both hands. 

He looks for the right but is a fair jabber. He has an excellent left hook to the body. He’s quicker than Ortiz, who is himself, quick.

Fight and Prediction: Ortiz, Wilder aside, is an over-achiever with enormous experience in two different systems, Cuban Amateur and USA professional. Says here he rocks Ruiz a few times, and we get some terrific exchanges throughout. 

I could see a shopworn Ortiz succumbing earlier, but I don’t waffle on predictions. I see a fight in which both show flashes of brilliance, but Ruiz’s lower odometer is the difference.  

Andy Ruiz, TKO Luis Ortiz, 11.