LOS ANGELES – Two of boxing’s brightest stars in Vergil Ortiz Jr. and Ryan Garcia are both signed to Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions.
If you leave it up to the principals involved in making a potential fight between the upstarts, the pair of 23-year-old fast-rising contenders would meet for a fight sometime in the not-too-distant future.
Ortiz will next fight Michael McKinson on March 19 at the Galen Center in Los Angeles. Garcia is set to take on Emmanuel Tagoe on April 9 at the Alamodome in San Antonio.
The unbeaten contender Ortiz is ready to break through with a welterweight world title shot, but division champions Errol Spence Jr., Yordenis Ugas, and Terrence Crawford are unlikely to face him next.
Ortiz (18-0, 18 KOs) is open to exhausting every option to face a star opponent, including stablemate Garcia (21-0, 18 KOs).
“Me and Ryan have actually talked about this. If we end up fighting each other one day, or if the opportunity is there, we’ll take the money, fight a good fight, and leave it all in there,” Ortiz told BoxingScene.com in an interview. “It would be cool. That’s all I can really say about it.”
De La Hoya gave a more definitive answer when discussing the subject.
“Yeah, it’s crossed my mind,” De La Hoya told BoxingScene.com in regard to pitting Ortiz against Garcia. “But not now. Both guys are on different paths to greatness and to championship status, but at some point, they’re going to meet, and that’s going to be a super mega fight down the road. I can see that happening within a couple of years. That’s just right around the corner.”
In addition to waiting for the right time to make the fight, the fighters will also have to figure out the weight at which they’d potentially be fighting each other.
Ortiz currently fights at 147 pounds while Garcia campaigns at 135 pounds.
Garcia recently said that he would be fighting at 140 pounds “very soon.”
Manouk Akopyan is a sports journalist, writer and broadcast reporter. He’s also a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America and MMA Journalists Association. He can be reached on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube at @ManoukAkopyan, via email at manouk[dot]akopyan[at]gmail.com or on www.ManoukAkopyan.com.
