Tweet
There's a great article on The Sweet Science, here, which points out why his background contributed psychologically to what happened. Some extracts:
Yet when you consider the life young Ortiz has lived who could blame him? After it was over my wife, a compassionate and reasonable person, said, “Maybe he’s just tired of being beaten. Maybe he just decided he didn’t want to put up with it any more.’’
Maybe he didn’t and who could criticize him for feeling that way? The sad fact is Victor Ortiz has been beaten on since he was a little boy in Kansas. Beaten by his father, psychologically abused by his mother, abandoned by both of them by the time he was 12. Beaten down, as he has said, until he felt like a dog.
The two people who were supposed to protect him from the world left him adrift in it. A society that is supposed to look out for waifs in such sad circumstances took three years to figure out he was a living with his sister and brother alone in a trailer that had no electricity, scrambling to get by while trying to do the right thing in the ring and in high school. You try that and see how many more beatings you want to take if you think you don’t have to.
Long before Victor Ortiz ran into Marcos Maidana he’d been beaten up plenty. Just not yet in a boxing ring. That was always the one safe place for him.
He had been protected by a powerful promoter and managed by experienced men from California and New York who knew how to move a young man into the position he found himself in last Saturday night – into a fight he was really ill-prepared for - without having him really tested.
Maybe he didn’t and who could criticize him for feeling that way? The sad fact is Victor Ortiz has been beaten on since he was a little boy in Kansas. Beaten by his father, psychologically abused by his mother, abandoned by both of them by the time he was 12. Beaten down, as he has said, until he felt like a dog.
The two people who were supposed to protect him from the world left him adrift in it. A society that is supposed to look out for waifs in such sad circumstances took three years to figure out he was a living with his sister and brother alone in a trailer that had no electricity, scrambling to get by while trying to do the right thing in the ring and in high school. You try that and see how many more beatings you want to take if you think you don’t have to.
Long before Victor Ortiz ran into Marcos Maidana he’d been beaten up plenty. Just not yet in a boxing ring. That was always the one safe place for him.
He had been protected by a powerful promoter and managed by experienced men from California and New York who knew how to move a young man into the position he found himself in last Saturday night – into a fight he was really ill-prepared for - without having him really tested.
Comment