Risking Mandatory Spot Worth It To Ramirez, Top Rank

By Keith Idec

The safest thing Gilberto Ramirez could’ve done is sit back and wait for his mandatory title shot.

Mexico’s Ramirez is the WBO’s No. 1 contender at 168 pounds, perfectly positioned to fight the winner of Saturday’s bout between WBO super middleweight champion Arthur Abraham and Martin Murray in Hannover, Germany. Rather than wait, Ramirez will fight Friday night against an opponent, the Netherlands’ Gevorg Khatchikian, with a good record (23-1, 11 KOs) that Ramirez admits he doesn’t know much about.

The 24-year-old Ramirez thinks the exposure he’ll receive boxing in Las Vegas the night before the high-profile Miguel Cotto-Canelo Alvarez fight Saturday night at Mandalay Bay Events Center is worth the risk.

“You always want to gain the most experience you can get,” Ramirez said through an interpreter on a recent conference call. “You know where you want to be, you know what you want to do. You need the experience. You need to fight these kinds of fighters. You need to show what you can do. It’s not just about getting a fight. It’s about showing what you can do, demonstrating to everyone your capabilities, so when the championship fight comes I’ll be ready for anything.”

The 10-round Ramirez-Khatchikian clash will be broadcast by truTV as the main event of a doubleheader from The Cosmopolitan (10 p.m. ET/PT). That was another reason Ramirez’s promoter, Bob Arum’s Top Rank Inc., made this fight for the powerful southpaw.

If he looks good against Khatchikian, it’ll help sell his title shot against Armenia’s Abraham (43-4, 29 KOs) or England’s Murray (32-2-1, 15 KOs).

“You’re looking to get more exposure, to drive up the price from the network, to drive up the value of the [title] fight itself, so that there’s no question that they’re gonna bid on it or support you in putting the fight together,” said Carl Moretti, Top Rank’s vice president of boxing operations. “We’re trying to keep the fight in the United States, on American television, which is the main thing.

“But obviously the risk is if you’re [on] lap 499 of the Daytona 500 and you get a flat tire, you lose. That’s the risk. But you’re trying to just build up the profile of the fight and the fighter, and the only way to do that is to fight a quality opponent on a major network, so everybody sees it, so that everybody knows it’s worth getting behind. … When you have confidence in the fighter, which we do in Ramirez, it’s not as great a risk as with some other fighters.”

The truTV telecast will begin with a 10-round lightweight fight that’ll match Saul Rodriguez Jr. (18-0-1, 13 KOs), of Riverside, California, against San Antonio’s Ivan Najera (16-1, 8 KOs).

Keith Idec covers boxing for The Record and Herald News, of Woodland Park, N.J., and BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.