Boxing is one of the very few sports in which no lead is safe. Ask Big John Tate, or Meldrick Taylor, or Laurent Dauthuille. As long as there is time on the clock, the fighter getting his ass kicked has a chance to win – or, more to the point, the fighter kicking ass has a chance to blow his lead.
This applies to the making of fights, too.
This past Saturday night, in the immediate aftermath of Vergil Ortiz Jnr’s two-round destruction of Erickson Lubin, the prospect of a fight early next year between Ortiz and Jaron “Boots” Ennis appeared to be building an insurmountable lead.
But every lead in this sport is surmountable.
And there’s an all-too-real chance that boxing will blow this one.
Ortiz did his job as a fighter, and then some, hurting and halting Lubin after absorbing, according to CompuBox stats, a grand total of three punches in just under four-and-a-half minutes.
Then, when DAZN’s Chris Mannix asked Ortiz what’s next, he proactively called on Boots to come join the interview. Ennis said it’s the only fight he wants, and proceeded to talk some trash. Ortiz agreed it needs to happen and talked a little trash himself. They did the stare-down for the cameras.
You couldn’t have scripted it any better.
And then Ortiz’s promoter, Oscar De La Hoya of Golden Boy Promotions, opened his mouth.
“This can be a great negotiation,” he told BoxingScene’s Lance Pugmire.
That’s a bizarre way to describe a negotiation. There are no “great” negotiations. Negotiations merit one of two adjectives: They are either successful or unsuccessful.
And the less the public hears about a negotiation, the better. A negotiation is much like a referee, in that the best ones are the ones you don’t notice.
De La Hoya went on to insist that the contract has to be “favorable” to Ortiz. From an outsider’s perspective, this seems a clear case of a fight that should have an even purse split. Both fighters are rising stars, both have proven capable of selling regionally, but neither is a superstar yet. Neither side has a particularly strong case for getting anything above 50 percent of the purse.
Hopefully, Oscar is just talking the talk to give his fighter a little extra leverage, but will ultimately agree to balanced terms if that’s what it takes. And the same goes for the Ennis side and promoter Eddie Hearn of Matchroom Boxing.
Ortiz says he wants this fight. Ennis says he wants this fight.
And boxing fans want this fight.
Actually, scratch that. Boxing fans need this fight.
And so, in turn, everyone who makes money off of boxing needs this fight if the sport is to reverse its current trend of shedding fans.
(No, I don’t have numbers to back up that assertion that the fan base is shrinking. But, logically, right now – between internal economic factors, external economic factors and mediocre matchmaking factors – how could it not be?)
I’m sorry to sound negative. The reality is, the first 10 minutes or so after the Ortiz-Lubin fight finished left me feeling the most positive I have about boxing since the night of Terence Crawford vs. Saul “Canelo” Alvarez almost two months ago. I was beginning to envision the bounty that awaited fans in the first quarter (or so) of 2026.
It was – and maybe still is – shaping us as our reward for surviving a mediocre 2025, including a downright dismal (so far) fourth quarter of 2025.
I don’t need to recount here the various factors that have made recent weeks so dreadful. Again, we could all benefit from a moment of focusing on the positive perspective, which is this: There’s hope around the corner.
There’s a possible Teofimo Lopez-Shakur Stevenson showdown for the lineal 140lbs title, which, just like Ortiz-Ennis, is a dream matchup of magnificently talented fighters aged 27 and 28.
There’s a probable Ryan Garcia-Mario Barrios welterweight fight, which, individual shortcomings aside, is a 50-50 fight between two guys who have proven capable of creating high-action, high-drama punch-outs.
If we inserted those two fights plus Ortiz-Ennis into the final eight weeks of the 2025 calendar, that trio of bouts would stand out as the most mouth-watering, second-most mouthwatering and probably fifth-most or sixth-most mouthwatering fights on the schedule.
The point is, business is showing signs of picking up next year.
But not without Ortiz-Ennis. Not without this centerpiece of the theoretical early 2026 schedule that features two in-their-prime mega-talents with a combined record of 59-0 (53 KOs).
How often do fights come along where the odds are basically even, where the expert picks end up split 50-50 and where many of those experts making their picks change their minds multiple times in the buildup to the fight?
Ortiz-Ennis shapes up as one of those rarities.
At this moment, the cost of DAZN keeps going up. The number of DAZN pay-per-views and the associated fees keep rising. And much of the fan base is growing frustrated and refusing to pay extra money for the sort of B-level bouts that once were part of their standard DAZN subscription. Yet not a single hardcore fan would question the decision to put Ortiz-Ennis on PPV, and very few hardcore fans would dare miss it, despite the financial sacrifice required.
There’s merely the matter of the fight, ya know, happening.
And happening without updates on “great” negotiations or not-so-great negotiations.
The only negotiation update we welcome is the one announcing that negotiations are complete.
Look, we’ve been down the road of failed Ortiz-Ennis discussions once already.
A full year ago, the word was out that the boxers reached a “verbal agreement.” But then came reports and rumors of who was willing to sign the contract and who wasn’t, and of what weight limit the respective parties wanted the fight to be at – which, inconveniently, did not align between the two camps. Before long, Ortiz-Ennis was off (even though it was never really on).
To paraphrase a former U.S. president who himself managed to paraphrase a well-known aphorism by combining it with a lyric by The Who: Fool me once with your failed fight negotiation, shame on you. Fool me twice with your failed fight negotiation … can’t get fooled again.
The Ortiz-Ennis fight is bigger now than it would have been a year ago. The degree of marination that has occurred thus far has been of the productive variety, we all have to admit.
But you don’t marinate something twice. Marinate a fight twice, shame on you. Can’t get marinated again.
Yet here we are, with the stage set perfectly, the timing just right, the boxing public drooling … and De La Hoya starts promising the most big, beautiful negotiations you’ve ever seen, followed by Ortiz dropping names of other opponents he may prefer to Ennis.
Yep, Ortiz is saying an all-Texas fight against Errol Spence Jnr is the one he really wants.
There’s every reason to suspect that’s just a negotiating tactic, an extra piece of ammo to make Ennis accept a 45-55 split or some such division.
That had better be all that it is. Because boxing fans are hitting a breaking point.
It’s one thing to charge more money for an enhanced product. It’s another to charge more and deliver less. And it’s another still to charge more and deliver nothing.
Again, there’s a scenario potentially developing where boxing’s 2025 fall famine is about to give way to a 2026 feast, where we’re reminded just how exceptional this sport can be when the focus shifts away from money grabs involving “influencers” and unretiring icons and toward old-fashioned 50-50 fights between boxing’s best and brightest.
Make Ortiz-Ennis without drama and without further delay, ideally in combination with a fight like Lopez-Stevenson, and the short memories will kick in and folks will pretend the recent dead period never happened.
Boxing fans need Ortiz-Ennis. Frankly, boxing fans deserve Ortiz-Ennis. And Golden Boy, Matchroom and DAZN will deserve their money if they make the fight.
That’s the deal. The boxing fans who have lasted this long understand their fandom will cost them some money. Give the people what they want, and the people will give the promoters and networks what they want.
An Ortiz-Ennis fight would shift fans’ entire perception of the state of the sport. So don’t screw this up, boxing.
The Ortiz-Lubin outcome set you up with a 110-99 lead with one round to go.
In any other sport, it’s game over.
In boxing, we have to sweat out the final three minutes, one excruciating second at a time, knowing we’re always one wrong move from disaster.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.
