Serhii Bohachuk’s Team Furious At Decision Defeat To Vergil Ortiz And Demand Rematch
The trainer and promoter for super-welterweight contender Serhii Bohachuk have expressed their anger after their fighter’s controversial majority-decision defeat to Vergil Ortiz last Saturday.
Bohachuk knocked down Ortiz twice in their bout at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas but still fell to his second career loss after two judges, David Sutherland and Steve Weisfeld, awarded the fight to the American 114-112. The third judge, Max DeLuca, scored it a 113-113 draw.
The result had important ramifications as Ortiz took Bohachuk’s WBC interim title to put himself in a position to challenge for the world title.
“I’m still upset,” said Manny Robles, Bohachuk’s trainer. “The decision should’ve went our way. Sometimes you’re watching a close fight and you try to find a way to say, ‘OK, well he got a 10-8, it’s a close fight, but what’s going to make the difference is a knockdown. In this case there wasn’t one knockdown. There were two knockdowns. And we still didn’t get the decision.”
Promoter Tom Loeffler agreed with Robles, saying: “We don’t agree with the decision. Every text that I’ve gotten and everything I’ve read on social media says Bohachuk won that fight. For us, we feel that he’s still the champion. We feel that he won the fight and should still be considered a champion.”
Robles directed his anger not only at the judges for their scoring but also the system for its lack of accountability.
“I’m sick and tired of this s**t, time and time again, how unfair they can be to these fighters. They put their lives on the line. Everything that they go through to get to this point,” Robles said. “These officials, I don’t know what the f**k they’re looking at. And not only that. Nobody holds them accountable.
“They interview the fighters. They interview the judges, the managers, the promoters. Everybody except the judges. They just go home and nobody tells them anything. Nobody questions them. Nobody puts them on the spot. I believe that’s got to stop. I believe they should be held accountable.”
Both Robles and Loeffler confirmed that they will push for the rematch and revealed they have the support of WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman.
However, unless the WBC mandates the bout, there is every chance Ortiz chooses not to entertain a second fight, and instead turn his efforts towards securing a lucrative showdown with WBA champion Terence Crawford. Ortiz’s promoter, Oscar De La Hoya, and boxing matchmaker Turki Alalshikh stated before Saturday’s bout that a win for Ortiz would lead to a bout with Crawford.
“If we press for a rematch, I think the WBC will support their champion. If there’s controversial scoring, I think they could mandate a rematch. We’ll see. Mauricio Sulaiman said that he would support Serhii,” Loeffler said. “We’ll see how it plays out. We’ll see what options there are. The great thing about the division, for Serhii and Vergil, is there’s other great fights out there for both of them.
“This is such a great fight, this could be done two times or three times like a Canelo-GGG type of trilogy. Unfortunately we had bad scoring in that trilogy, too. The difference there is that Serhii had two knockdowns. GGG definitely won that first fight but he didn’t have the knockdowns, so he couldn’t make as strong of an argument. This one’s [this argument is] a tough one to overcome. Serhii’s stock went up a lot.”
