By Bart Barry-
Saturday in Fort Worth undefeated welterweight prospect Vergil Ortiz made an entertaining match with fellow Texan and former 140-pound titlist Maurice “Mighty Mo” Hooker on DAZN. The match ended in round 7 when Hooker broke something between his right shoulder and hand, though not his middle finger – whose resilience he later confirmed energetically. Ortiz was winning when the match ended about exactly the way its 10-1 odds anticipated.
Vergil Ortiz is ready for Terence Crawford. He is no less likely to beat Crawford in 2021 than he’ll be in 2026.
Bud’s 3 1/2 years at welterweight are an embarrassment for our beloved sport. Some of it’s Bud’s fault, probably, for pricing himself out of whatever halfassed plans his promoter planned to make for him. Much of it is Top Rank’s fault for having no viable plan for Crawford at 147 pounds, building no one for him and finding every reason to avoid PBC as a fixed strategy.
Avoiding PBC hasn’t been a bad play for Top Rank these last few years. But PBC has every other welterweight worth watching, and as one of the world’s two best prizefighters Bud Crawford deserves an opportunity to make at least one superfight in the final year or two of his prime. He now says he’s moved on from that superfight with Errol Spence, which leaves him alternately courting a semiretired senator in the Philippines and scoffing at a title defense with Ortiz. Neither option is palatable. One pays much better than the other, but Manny Pacquiao is way too savvy to fight Crawford without a tuneup or two and incentives aplenty.
Bud was back in Lone Star State to see his stablemate look game but overmatched against Ortiz on Saturday. At ringside Crawford looked softer than he has in the past. That is, his smile felt genuine and his laughter too; gone was the dark anger that followed him like a raincloud. He knows posterity will blame Spence for their non-fight, he knows Pacquiao will be more washed than him if they do fight in the fall or next winter, and he believes, incorrectly, he’s had a first-ballot career.
Just because Bud has been near the top of abstract rankings for a couple years doesn’t mean his reign has been a good one. If he’s not going to make immediate matches with Ortiz then two of PBC’s top-3 welterweights his best shot at an enduring legacy is moving to 154 pounds, where he can play cleanup with the same poor competition he’s fought at welterweight and get even more credit for it. Crawford’s unlikely to move seven pounds higher as Canelo is to return to middleweight for a rubbermatch with GGG.
Then Vergil Ortiz is the best option. Ortiz’s promoter, Golden Boy Promotions, hasn’t a choice these days but to say yes to anything anyone with money offers, and Top Rank has lots of ESPN money to use on a meaningful fight for Terence Crawford. Ortiz has a very good jab, a gaudy record and unremarkable defense. Crawford, who’s fought thrice in two years (1-0 against contenders, 2-0 against Brits), should be rusty enough for Ortiz to scare him a bit more than Egidijus Kavaliauskas did 16 months ago.
Ortiz fights in the undissuadable, gladiator-academy style all Robert Garcia’s men favor (except for Robert’s little brother, Mikey, who has too much talent to’ve chosen Robert for non-fraternal reasons). Ortiz isn’t going to learn nuance under Garcia. He’s not going to learn much defense either. Instead he’ll get instruction on walking through punches and ignoring damaged eyes and hitting the other guy hard and whatnot. His greatest attribute against Crawford will be just how awful Crawford’s competition at welterweight has been (one-legged Jose Benavidez may very well be the greatest welterweight Bud ever fights).
Even grizzled aficionados fall for the all-by-knockout tag. Fought guys you’ve never heard of? guys in the wrong weightclass? guys with multiple losses? guys coming out of retirement? Suddenly it doesn’t matter because the wins were all-by-knockout. There’s plenty of this with Ortiz. The real tell to listen for is: “But none of those guys had been stopped before in their career!” That’s when you know a circusbarker, be he promoter or flunky, is pettifogging poor competition. Maybe Matthew Macklin has lost four times, and maybe there was that unfortunate episode at a lower weightclass seven years ago, but he’s never been knocked-out like that!
Mighty Mo was having none of it Saturday night. After tasting leather aplenty and taking a knee the round before, Hooker threw a cross in the seventh and broke some part of his hand, and that was that. Or wait, no it wasn’t.
After refusing to do that b-side thing where you favorably compare the man who just beat you less conclusively at 147 pounds than the guy who unbuttoned you at 140 Hooker explained something about both his hands being broken but one of them popping. The socially distanced Texas crowd, partisan Ortiz and partisan Latino, booed Hooker, and Hooker, himself a Texan, told them what they could do with themselves. It was fantastic comical. He then turned, tossed his middle fingers in the air like smoking pistols, stepped through the ropes onto the apron, and challenged a few thousand of his critics.
Even Bud Crawford had fun with that.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
