On Monday afternoon I must admit that I had a pretty good laugh when I went to BoxingScene.com and found a hilarious picture of Marcos Maidana and Victor Ortiz, which can be seen to the direct left. Tagged under the article ‘Marcos Maidana fires back at Victor Ortiz’, the pic shows Maidana appearing to hold a baby-like Ortiz as if he were his own son with the words ‘World’s #1 Dad’ sketched on the bottom of the pic.
The picture is an obvious reference to Maidana’s June 2009 drubbing of Ortiz in one of the year’s most memorable fights. In that contest the two men traded knockdowns inside of the Staples Center in Los Angeles but Ortiz opted not to continue once the going got tough in the sixth round.
Ortiz was labeled a quitter by some but shattered those notions with his heroic performance a few weekends back when he upset Andre Berto in a thrilling way, capturing the WBC welterweight championship in the process. Since that performance Ortiz has seemed to take particular offense to Maidana, verbally thrashing him in public at every chance he gets.
Not knowing if the recent picture of Maidana and Ortiz was by Marcos or his team’s own doing, I reached out to his advisor Sebastian Contusri, who confirmed to me that they had nothing to do with the picture but still found it wildly amusing
“This pic was sent to Marcos’ twitter account a few days back. Marcos laughed real bad about it. But we don’t even know who created it. Marcos says he does not want to make any comments on him as it is not his style. But trust me, he had a lot of fun by seeing the pic.”, Contursi revealed.
Who knows if the two men will ever meet inside of the ring again but the public back and forthing is interesting enough. Maidana is coming off of a life and death war with Erik Morales iniside of the MGM Grand in Las Vegas earlier this month, a fight in which he struggled mightily before digging down to pull out the nod.
Maidana’s trouble with Morales coupled with Ortiz’s latest triumph have swayed the public’s perception of a rematch between the two but it doesn’t seem likely that we will be seeing them in the same ring together, at least for a while.
