The evening’s second match featured Oxnard’s highly touted prospect Victor Ortiz (17-1-1, 12 KOs) in an excellent super-lightweight scrap with Texas’ Tomas Barrientes (27-11-1, 17 KOs) that saw five knockdowns – Barrientes down four times and Ortiz down once – and ended with an Ortiz right hand that caused Barrientes’ corner to wave the white towel at of 2:42 of Round 5, giving Ortiz his 12th career knockout victory.
After a first round in which Ortiz dropped Barrientes twice with right-hook-left-cross combinations from Ortiz’s southpaw stance, both men would go down in Round 2. Barrientes got dropped by an Ortiz combination; Victor Ortiz was felled by a balance shot that happened as he attacked Barrientes, neglecting his own defense. But Ortiz would rise from the canvas and dominate all of the fight’s remaining exchanges.
Victor Ortiz is one of the most talented young members of promoter Top Rank’s stable, and his performance Saturday night did nothing to jeopardize this lofty standing.
Top Rank’s “Blaze of Glory” show from the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas began with a 10-round super-featherweight bout between Filipino Bernabe Concepcion (20-1-1, 10 KOs) and Texan Benjamin Flores (14-3, 4 KOs). Though both fighters had their moments – and the early and partisan Mexican crowd passionately applauded Flores’ flurries – Bernabe Concepcion controlled the majority of the rounds, winning a unanimous decision by scores of 97-93, 96-94, and 97-93.
