WORCESTER—Worcester boxer Jamaine Ortiz thought he beat Teofimo Lopez Jr. in their junior welterweight title fight Thursday night in Las Vegas. Unfortunately for him, the judges didn’t agree.
Lopez was awarded a unanimous decision at Michelob Ultra Arena to retain his World Boxing Organization and Ring Magazine junior welterweight titles. Judges Tim Cheathem and David Sutherland scored the bout, 115-113, and Steve Weisfeld scored it, 117-111. The decision was booed by the fans.
“I stuck to the game plan,” Ortiz told ESPN in the ring after the fight. “I was listening to my corner, my team. I was doing good. I thought that I was winning. That’s what I believed. I believe that I won the fight. What can I say? I came up on the short end of the stick once again.”
Ortiz, 27, fell to 17-2-1 with 8 KOs. He also felt he won his only other defeat, a unanimous decision loss to Vasily Lomachenko on Oct. 29. 2022, at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Lopez, a 26-year-old Brooklyn native who now resides in Las Vegas, improved to 20-1 with 13 KOs.
Ortiz’s trainer Rocky Gonzalez told the Worcester Guardian from the Las Vegas airport on Friday that he thought the decision was “BS because we clearly, clearly won the fight. Jamaine had him, just like we said, following him throughout the whole fight and we were controlling it. He was frustrated and we beat him with one hand basically. One jab controlled the whole fight.”
“I just felt like he couldn’t hit me,” Ortiz said in his post-fight interview on ESPN. “I was making him miss all night. I was countering, I was making him miss, I was hitting him with the jab, with the check hook. I just felt like he wasn’t landing no shots on me.”
Ortiz, a 7-1 underdog, was especially upset that Weisfield scored the bout 117-111.
“117-111? I don’t think nobody would agree with that,” Ortiz said. “Either way, him or me, 117-111 is just ridiculous.”
“I don’t know what those judges were watching,” Gonzalez said. “Everybody thought we won. He (Lopez) was upset and complaining before they said the decision because he thought he lost.”
Some boxing experts posted online that they also thought Ortiz won the fight. ESPN’s Mark Kriegel scored it a draw, 114-114, which would have enabled Lopez to retain his title. Kriegel gave five of the final six rounds to Lopez.
The bout was the main event in a Top Rank card televised live by ESPN during Super Bowl week in Las Vegas.
Ortiz was trying to become the first professional world boxing champion from Worcester since his mentor, Jose Antonio Rivera, captured his third world championship in 2006. Rivera, who attended Thursday’s fight in Las Vegas, won the International Boxing Organization welterweight title in 1997, the World Boxing Association welterweight crown in 2003, and the WBA junior middleweight title in 2006. He’s the only two-division world boxing champion from Massachusetts.
Ortiz, a 2014 Doherty High graduate, had hoped to become the first boxer born and raised in Worcester to win a world title in pro boxing. Rivera was born in Philadelphia and lived in Puerto Rico and Springfield before moving on his own to Worcester at age 16 to train as a boxer at the boys club.
Ortiz threw Lopez off his game by surprising him by fighting as a southpaw. The move limited Lopez to only 12 jabs. Ortiz made sure to stay away from the more powerful Lopez and forced Lopez to chase him for much of the fight, a strategy praised during the broadcast by ESPN analyst Mark Bradley Jr. Lopez didn’t land many powerful punches, but neither did Ortiz.
Ortiz landed several counter jabs to help keep Lopez away and his footwork was impressive, but he didn’t do enough to impress the judges.
Ortiz landed only 20 percent of his punches and Lopez landed only 21 percent of his. After the bout, ESPN boxing announcer Joe Tessitore praised Ortiz for his defense, but not his offense. He called it a “lackluster offensive performance” for both fighters and declared it “was not an entertaining fight.” Of course, Ortiz wouldn’t have cared if he had won.
Ortiz threw more punches, 409-364, and landed more, 80-78. Both landed 15 punches in the 12th and final round, but Lopez landed many more to the body, 33-12. Unfortunately for Ortiz, challengers usually have to knock out the reigning champion to win a title fight.
“I was just so convinced,” Gonzalez said, “because we were frustrating him and I didn’t want to change the game plan and when that bell rang to end that 12th round I was like, ‘I can’t believe we’ve got a world championship.’ I was so excited. It was crazy how quick that changed.”
Ortiz suffered a cut over his left eye from an inadvertent head butt in the seventh round and referee Harvey Dock stopped the fight briefly so Ortiz’s training staff could get the bleeding under control.
Ortiz was disappointed with the result, but he’s not ready to give up on his dream of becoming a world champion.
“I always stay true to who I am,” Ortiz said. “Obviously, we just go back to the drawing board and make some adjustments and come back for another title shot.”
Gonzalez said Ortiz will have to see which fight promoter Jimmy Burchfield of CES Boxing presents him with next.
Ortiz moved up from his 135-pound weight class to Lopez’s 140-pound class because highly ranked boxers in his lightweight division refused to fight him.
Lopez also defeated Ortiz by decision in the 132-pound, three-round final at the National Golden Gloves in 2015 when they were amateurs.
Gonzalez said more than 100 fans from the Worcester area traveled to the fight and he thanked them for their support. One of the fans, Bobby Harris Jr., arrived just in time because he had to take a later flight on Thursday after his JetBlue plane collided with another JetBlue plane on the tarmac at Logan Airport in Boston. Gonzalez bumped into Harris at the airport on Friday.
Lopez did not mention Ortiz by name during his post-fight interview with ESPN in the ring. ESPN interviewer Bernardo Usuna was obviously not impressed with the performance of Lopez during the bout and kept asking him what he could have done better. Lopez was booed during the interview.
“I am champion, I am king,” Lopez said.
Ortiz and many of the fans on hand didn’t agree.
Bill Doyle has been a professional journalist for 47 years, most of them as a sports writer for the Telegram & Gazette. He covered the Boston Celtics for 25 years and has written extensively about golf, boxing and local high school and college sports. He also worked for the campus newspaper when he attended UMass-Amherst. He can be reached at billdoyle1515@gmail.com
