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By Lyle Fitzsimmons - In hindsight, I suppose I shouldn’t blame Victor Ortiz.
I was happy to get an interview last week because I genuinely like him, I think he’s a pretty good fighter and I also think – to a large extent – that he’s been unfairly hammered by an overfed media only too happy to pile on when a guy falls short of their arbitrary standards for machismo.
But then, when I got him on the phone and he was kind of, well… a jerk, I was angry.
It annoyed me because I wasn’t going to bombard him with the same questions about the Maidana fight and the Mayweather fight and the Lopez fight. Instead, I was genuinely interested in simply finding out where his head was at these days, and what he’s hoping to get out of his latest return.
In case you hadn’t heard, he’s fighting Manuel Perez on Saturday in Las Vegas, on the undercard of a show that’ll feature Amir Khan and Devon Alexander in the Showtime main event.
His fight with Perez was initially not planned for television, but subsequent updates from the network’s people tell me that the match will be indeed taped and, if time allows, shown in its entirety during the early evening broadcast carried by Showtime’s Extreme channel beginning at 7 p.m.
Anyway, instead of engaging in the thoughtful conversation I’d hoped to prompt, Ortiz’s answer to my initial “how are you feeling heading into this one” query pretty much bordered on the ludicrous.
“I’m gonna be one of the best of all time, just like Muhammad Ali was, just like (Julio Cesar) Chavez was,” he said. “I’ll be in the history books, for sure. Not that I’m not already, but I know what it takes to get there, I know I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again.”
Ummmm, yeah.
Though I’ll concede to not knowing quite how he’d be able to top such a claim for the rest of our chat, it turned out I needn’t have worried. Rather than subsequently articulating his confidence in a manner other than over-the-top historical hyperbole, he decided to hunker down into full-on “the whole world’s against me, so I don’t care what anyone thinks” mode. [Click Here To Read More]
I was happy to get an interview last week because I genuinely like him, I think he’s a pretty good fighter and I also think – to a large extent – that he’s been unfairly hammered by an overfed media only too happy to pile on when a guy falls short of their arbitrary standards for machismo.
But then, when I got him on the phone and he was kind of, well… a jerk, I was angry.
It annoyed me because I wasn’t going to bombard him with the same questions about the Maidana fight and the Mayweather fight and the Lopez fight. Instead, I was genuinely interested in simply finding out where his head was at these days, and what he’s hoping to get out of his latest return.
In case you hadn’t heard, he’s fighting Manuel Perez on Saturday in Las Vegas, on the undercard of a show that’ll feature Amir Khan and Devon Alexander in the Showtime main event.
His fight with Perez was initially not planned for television, but subsequent updates from the network’s people tell me that the match will be indeed taped and, if time allows, shown in its entirety during the early evening broadcast carried by Showtime’s Extreme channel beginning at 7 p.m.
Anyway, instead of engaging in the thoughtful conversation I’d hoped to prompt, Ortiz’s answer to my initial “how are you feeling heading into this one” query pretty much bordered on the ludicrous.
“I’m gonna be one of the best of all time, just like Muhammad Ali was, just like (Julio Cesar) Chavez was,” he said. “I’ll be in the history books, for sure. Not that I’m not already, but I know what it takes to get there, I know I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again.”
Ummmm, yeah.
Though I’ll concede to not knowing quite how he’d be able to top such a claim for the rest of our chat, it turned out I needn’t have worried. Rather than subsequently articulating his confidence in a manner other than over-the-top historical hyperbole, he decided to hunker down into full-on “the whole world’s against me, so I don’t care what anyone thinks” mode. [Click Here To Read More]
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