Check out how Floyd Mayweather knocked out Victor Ortiz. Click on the picture.
Here is
Joe Posnanski's description:
This was a much-hyped fight in an era where few boxing matches break through the sports filter. Mayweather has never lost a fight but he apparently has never gotten his due for various reasons that are too complicated to get into here. Ortiz was welterweight champion under under one organization or another, though it is probably true that YOU are champion of some weight class and just haven't been told yet. There was a lot of effort to make this fight sound competitive, though people who know about boxing generally suggested that Ortiz wasn't in Mayweather's class. The only real mystery involved Mayweather, who had not fought in more than a year, still had his boxing skills. The gamblers thought so: Mayweather consistently stayed as an 8-to-1 favorite.
I did not pay the $483,439,268 dollars to get the fight on pay-per-view, but best I can tell from reports and discussion it went more or less according to plan. Mayweather battered Ortiz for three rounds, outclassed him, and even though the crowd was decidedly pro Ortiz, there was little to cheer. Then, in the fourth round, Ortiz had his first (and it turns out, only) moment of glory when he pinned Mayweather against the ropes, banged away, and this ended up, according to our own Bryan Armen Graham, "whipping the crowd into the white-noise wall of sound only championship fights can produce."
But it was the end of that round where everything broke down. Ortiz -- and I don't want to assign motivation here because we can't know really anyone's motivation, but frustration seems as likely as anything -- shoved Mayweather in to ropes and deliberately head butted him. The irrepressible referee Joe Cortez, who I believe has refereed every single fight of the last 20 years that Mills Lane could not attend, stopped the fight to give Mayweather a moment to recover and to take a point away from Ortiz. At that point Ortiz -- who was either mortified by what he had done or wanted everyone to think so -- went in to hug Mayweather and kiss him on the cheek. And in the next instant, they touched gloves, but Ortiz seemed to be waiting for Cortez to restart the fight. Mayweather did not wait. He crushed Ortiz with a left and then followed with a savage right that left Ortiz on the canvas for a long time after the fight was over and Mayweather was declared the new champion. All the while, the crowd screamed.
There has already been a lot of talk about it, about Mayweather breaking the bonds of sportsmanship, about Ortiz forgetting boxing's first rule (protect yourself at all times), about Cortez taking his eye off the ball. I don't think there's much really to be learned about life in all of that. But I have to say, this whole thing kind of cracks me up. Think about the absurdity of it all. Two men hit each other over and over again for sport. This is fine. They hit each other again and again for the roar of the crowd that smells blood and, in its exuberance, all apologies to Bryan, can create a white-wall of sound that probably was also produced by fights between Christians and lions. This too is fine. Then, one of the two men purposely cracks the other with a head butt. This is not fine, but the man is punished for this indiscretion with the removal of a point so it's all even. The culprit accepts this one-point punishment as just deserts and offers a hug and a kiss as an apology. The two men then touch gloves and the man who was head butted bashes the other in the face so hard that he cannot get up for a long time.
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