Don’t follow boxing very often, but you want to know the gist of Saturday’s mega-fight between Floyd Mayweather and Victor Ortiz? Follow boxing all the time, and want one place that rounds up all the links about the welterweight showdown you could ever want? This Ultimate Guide to the Sept. 17 pay-per-view bout is for you, no matter what kind you are.
(P.S., by way of explaining picture above, it’s probably just a depth-of-field illusion. Either that or Mayweather is LITERALLY trying to get into Ortiz’ head, rather than the figurative term for his usual psychological warfare.)
We start, as always, with a review of this site’s coverage this week. I contemplated where Mayweather-Ortiz fits into the Mayweather proxy war with Manny Pacquiao; told you a bit more about Ortiz than you might’ve learned from 24/7 or various interview shows; broke down the keys to the fight, in two installments; analyzed the undercard; and provided a final preview and prediction. Then, in a roundtable, the site’s staff chimed in what they thought of the fight card and how it has been promoted.
Sometimes, though — and I believe this has been said before somewhere — a picture tells a thousand words. I’ve found that, for someone who isn’t familiar with the two combatants, the highlight clips below that HBO produces can be a good introduction, even if I usually question whether the fights chosen are the best reflection of those combatants’ careers. For hardcore fans, it’ll get your juices flowing. For the complete records of both men, BoxRec is the place. And if you want to get a sense of each man’s personalities, 24/7 is the place to go, even if it glosses over some things; here’s the much-talked about first episode. The final episode airs tonight, and replays for the entire series will appear all over HBO over the weekend, especially during an HBO Zone block of Mayweather-Ortiz programming Saturday that begins at noon and continues until 6 p.m.
