Deontay Wilder vs Chris Byrd

Many fighters regained or never lost their mandatory status after popping, they just used that as an excuse to save AJ from Ortiz. Eddie Hearn was surprisingly honest on Ortiz being a dangerous challenge AJ was not yet ready for at the time.

And lol at him ducking AJ, it was short notice and Ortiz went for Wilder II instead for his ACTUAL career high payday, which made more sense in every realm of logic.

 

It's funny seeing patterns emerge sometimes..

Like how it seems to be that people who rate highly protected and/or unproven fighters very highly almost always come out with this nonsense about being able to evaluate fighters without resumes.

Newsflash - you can't do it with any real accuracy without a frame of reference as to how good the opponent is...
Rating guys highly because they look great against poor opponents is inherently faulty logically.

You also tend to find people who dismiss resumes as subjective and worthless place a high value on org rankings and ring rankings, as if those had anything to do with how good a fighter actually is.

Funny how that goes.

 

Hilarious how often posters cling to some ranking or other as if it's mega important, but want to avoid talking about resumes and quality of opponents...

Funny, isn't it?

 

Except that AJ would've been a far, far bigger payday...

The only logic, with money high on the list, for fighting Wilder again is if he believed he could beat Wilder (not unreasonable) - then fight Joshua... But didn't believe that'd work the other way around.

 

Yeah, the WBA wanted to save AJ from Ortiz, lol. That's funny as hell.

Ortiz earned less for the Wilder II fight than he would have earned for the AJ fight. So again - alternate reality stuff.

 

You called Luis Ortiz a gatekeeper when he was ranked in the Ring top 5 for 6 years and top 10 for 8


Seems like you don't even follow your own criteria haha

 

The PED excuse is nonsense... Didn't Joshua fight Povetkin after he failed a drug test?

 

Nope, I just don't believe the myth of "avoided" fighters.

It's far more likely that a guy is greedy when it comes to cuts and doesn't bring in a lot of attention... So isn't worth bothering with.

Almost every so called avoided fighter that winds up giving in and taking the fights in the end winds up being not all that.

 

I don't think you read that post properly.

Ortiz didn't have the resume to be ranked that high - the ranking was a nonsense, and the resume is the evidence of that.

Resumes tell you FAR more than org rankings and ring rankings.
The eye test can tell you something only if the opponent is good - good resumes make that judgement FAR more reliable, poor/thin/empty ones make it far less so.

 

Povetkin became the WBA mandatory after he failed a drug test. Ortiz didn't.

 

AJ was the golden goose of HW for a while buddeh.

Except he would have been fighting on short notice. A clear disadvantage. Why do that when you can still get paid a ton and actually fight properly? And how is any of this worse than Eddie Hearn blatantly and publicly steering AJ away from Ortiz?

 

Yeah no. Fight against AJ was on short notice. Both matches were his career-highest paydays, only he wasn't in a blatant, unfair disadvantage in one of them.

Not surprised considering how resume-focused you are, I bet you were one of those guys who picked Whyte over Itauma because "Itauma beat nobody".

 

This doesn't mean WBA would "protect him" from anyone. Ortiz was a mandatory, got caught on PEDs, and after than did jack shyte to regain his status. He fought a bum and got a WBC title shot from Wilder.

Yeah, Ruiz was fighting on short notice too, so? And nobody steered Ortiz away from AJ. He blew his shot when he was a mandatory when he got popped. If he wasn't popped, he would fight AJ.

 

Some people follow the evidence, with caveats where necessary - and update opinions when new evidence comes to light.

Some expound on fantasies based on what they'd like to believe, without evidence, and then get on high horses to pretend they're right when exceptions roll in.

Itauma's record is thin - he hasn't beaten a non-shot gatekeeper yet... IF Whyte had been able to find anything left in the tanks, then it would've been a huge step up - which didn't mean Itauma couldn't have won even if Whyte wasn't completely shot, just that in that scenario it wouldn't have been right to expect it.

All irrelevant considering Whyte looked like shite in the end, but that is what it is.

 

He would have had a minimum of 6 weeks
His management team screwed up royally

Ruiz took it and look what happened