Michael McKinson says highly ranked welterweight contender Vergil Ortiz Jr. will never fight at 147 again. #1 WBO Ortiz (18-0, 18 KOs) had been scheduled to face McKinson in the main event last Saturday night on DAZN at the USC Galen Center in Los Angeles, but had to drop out after suffering a medical issue.
If what McKinson says is true, the 23-year-old Ortiz will miss out on a title shot against WBO welterweight champion Terence Crawford.
Ortiz has slowly been working his way into position for a title shot, and now that he’s finally in the perfect position to challenge Crawford with his #1 position, his body broke down.
If Ortiz moves up to 154, he won’t have an advantage over his competition as he did at 147 because the guys up there also have excellent power.
It’s believed by some fans that Ortiz’s problem was a result of the strain of draining down to the 147-pound limit to try and make weight.
McKinson (22-0, 2 KOs) defeated the replacement opponent Alex Martin (17-4, 6 KOs) by a dull 10 round unanimous decision last Saturday in the co-feature spot on the Alexis Rocha vs. Blair Cobb career.
The fans didn’t like what they saw from McKinson and Martin, booing both of them loudly during the contest, particularly in the last two rounds. The way that McKinson fought, it’s unlikely that Golden Boy Promotions will try and reschedule a fight between him and Ortiz in the future.
“I’ve heard there’s no way he’s making 147 again,” Michael McKinson said to iFL TV about Vergil Ortiz. “Whatever he thought of the performance, it really doesn’t matter because I don’t think he will fight at 147 again.
“And even if he does, I’m not relying on getting that fight, I’m not hoping on getting that fight,” said McKinson.
It’s completely unlikely that Ortiz will bother rescheduling the fight with McKinson because there’s no upside in fighting him. The boxing fans didn’t like what they saw of McKinson, and they won’t be excited about the prospect of seeing him and Ortiz fight.
Of course, if Ortiz won’t be returning to the 147-lb division, then it’s a moot point about whether he’ll attempt to reschedule the McKinson match.
“A lot of people think he would walk through me in six rounds,” said McKinson about Ortiz Jr. “There’s a lot of people tonight who actually approached me and said, ‘Listen we believed before the fight and we believe more so now we believe you’re all wrong for Vergil.”
It’s highly likely that a healthy Vergil would have made easy work of McKinson last Saturday night because he looked awful. There was no power at all with McKinson’s shots, and he looked timid, afraid of the power of Martin, who isn’t nearly the puncher that Ortiz is.
Ortiz’s plodding style of fighting will make him a sitting duck for the big punchers at 154. In Ortiz’s previous fight, he was knocked down and badly hurt by Egidijus Kavaliauskas last August. If Ortiz can’t take his power, he surely won’t be able to deal with the punchers at 154 like Tim Tszyu.