Luis Ortiz Aiming For March 3 Wilder Fight Re-Set

Luis Ortiz is counting down to his next fight and in fact has not stopped training, according to his training, even as he was dealing with a detour right before he was to face Deontay Wilder.

To refresh your memory, Wilder, the WBC heavyweight champion, was to face on Nov. 4 the stiffest on paper test of his pro career, in the Cuban native Ortiz, a rumbler nicknamed “King Kong.”

But Kong done wrong, according to the WBC, when a pre-fight PED test popped positive, one month before the date night. The presence of a diuretic was found and Wilder vs Ortiz was scrapped. Wilder kept the date, taking on and taking out Bermane Stiverne in hurried fashion at Barclays Center on Nov. 4, in a tango which screened on Showtime.

Ortiz (28-0 with 24 KOs; gloved up Dec. 8 and won KO2 over Daniel Martz in Fla.) in fact showed up to the tussle, and scouted out Wilder from ringside. He’d been going back and forth with the WBC, which ruled that he erred by not declaring all the medications he’d been using, and that included high blood pressure medicaton which had a diuretic component to it. Ortiz and his people, incuding Florida based trainer Herman Caicedo, insisted Ortiz was not looking to game the system and wasn’t employing diuretics as a performance enhancer.

I asked Caicedo, is March 3 locked in versus Wilder (as first reported on Boxing Scene)? And have they started training for the Alabama slamma, Wilder, who was a man possessed in seeking to remove Stiverne’s head from his shoulders at Barclays Center?

“Yes,” Caicedo told me. “And haven’t stopped training.”

We are thinking see Wilder vs Ortiz, with the powers that be believing Wilder retains his ‘BC belt. Then, there’d be a push to make Wilder versus Anthony Joshua in summer or fall. Ortiz wants to mess that plan up.

Readers, what say you? Could the 38 year old Cuban chin check Wilder and treat the 32 year old like a pugilist Mothra?