Worlds Apart: Boxer Victor Ortiz Quits, Humiliated

An interesting essay from Ron Borges of TheSweetScience.com fame reared up over the weekend. In it, Borges vilifies boxer Victor Ortiz for quitting against Marcos Maidana during an HBO telecast Saturday, admonishing the 22-year-old for “not going out on his shield.”

“He made a wise choice if he was in any profession but prize fighting,” Borges wrote. “It is what separates real fighters from those guys in MMA who flail away with their elbows when they get a guy down but are allowed to quit without recrimination by using a more sanitized phrase when they can’t take it any more. In MMA they say he tapped out. Tap out in boxing and they say you quit … which is what happened Saturday night.”

For Borges, the better part of valor is apparently to dine in battle until you’re engorged with intracranial bleeding. Only sissies quit: the Real Men fight until they drop dead, as evidenced by boxing’s 146 fatalities since 1990.

What happened to boxing’s worldview that morphed their sense of competition from a grueling prizefight into a duel to the death? Why is it so abhorrent to advocate personal responsibility among athletes? Borges implies Ortiz was simply chickening out, not having sustained enough catastrophic physical damage to warrant a relief. (I get the sense a boxer could have an eyeball dangling from his socket prior to walking out, and he’d still be mocked for having “no heart.”)

The problem is that Borges has no idea if Ortiz was seeing double; if his head felt like someone had stuffed a pressure hose into his ear; if his peripheral vision was going dark. Prizefighting is a contract to risk bodily damage for a purse: it is not a moral agreement to be beaten to death if you can help it.

Tapping out, a concept Borges finds disingenuous, is what keeps families intact and allows athletes to remember their own phone number well into middle age. An MMA canvas may look like a slaughterhouse floor, but no one is being butchered. Boxing inverts that premise: the ring is sterile and the gloves offer the illusion of safety. There are 146 horror stories that prove otherwise.