LAS VEGAS — Vergil Ortiz Jr. needed this.
The junior middleweight contender went to war with Serhii Bohachuk on Saturday night, going through hell, going the 12-round distance for the first time in his professional career.
Heck, this was only the third time in Ortiz’s 22 pro fights that he had gone past seven rounds. Before Saturday, his 21 pro victories had taken place over a total of 71 rounds.
“This is all a learning experience for him,” Ortiz’s trainer, Robert Garcia, told reporters after the bout. “He’s never done it before. He’s never been involved in those kinds of fights. So this is definitely going to help him. He’s going to learn a lot. He followed instructions. He did what he was told. There were those moments where we’d remind him, ‘You gotta be careful, that right hand, keep that left hand up,’ stuff like that. But at the end, we’re pleased with his performance.”
Ortiz was dropped twice, rising quickly and protesting each knockdown. He won narrowly on the scorecards by majority decision, two judges seeing it 114-112 while the third had it even at 113-113.
“This is the way boxing is. Not every fight is going to be easy,. Especially when it comes to title fights. They’re all going to be hard,” Garcia said. “Vergil is in a moment where he needed something like this to learn and to be ready for those big fights. Every fight has been — I can’t say ‘easy’ because it’s kind of offending his opponents — but he’s comfortably won all of his fights by knockouts. So this was a good learning experience for him, for me, for his dad, for the whole team. We have to learn from this.”
It’s not just that Bohachuk wasn’t going to go down easy, or at all. It’s that Bohachuk wouldn’t relent on offense, which posed an additional set of challenges.
“All we’ve seen from [Ortiz] is knockouts, making fights so easy, knocking everybody out. But getting into the type of war in the late rounds where he’s tired, he’s taking some punishment, but he still has the heart ,the mentality to finish strong and to listen, ‘You need these rounds,’ that says a lot about a fighter,” Garcia said. “There are so many fighters that we’ve worked with that won’t be able to do that in the ring because it’s just almost impossible.”
Follow David Greisman on Twitter @FightingWords2. His book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” is available on Amazon.
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