Carlos Ortiz vs Sugar Ramos

A fifth-round stoppage was followed by an order for the champion to leave his dressing room and resume fighting, turning a lightweight title contest into a dispute over who held the championship. Carlos Ortiz’s defence against Sugar Ramos at El Toreo de Cuatro Caminos in Mexico City on 22 October 1966 ended amid crowd disorder and conflicting rulings. Referee Billy Conn awarded Ortiz a technical knockout, but a World Boxing Council official subsequently declared Ramos champion when Ortiz refused to return to the ring.

Ortiz had regained the lightweight championship from Ismael Laguna in November 1965 and successfully defended it against Johnny Bizzarro the following June. Ramos, a Cuban established in Mexico, had previously held the world featherweight championship. He won that title against Davey Moore in 1963, made three successful defences and lost it to Vicente Saldivar in September 1964. His challenge to Ortiz brought together two experienced champions, with Ramos seeking a championship in a second division. Both weighed 135 pounds for the scheduled fifteen-round contest.

Ramos produced the first decisive blow early in the second round, dropping Ortiz with a lead right hand. The champion rose promptly and received Conn’s mandatory eight-count. Later in the same round, Ramos sustained a cut above his left eye. The challenger had demonstrated that his right-hand power remained effective at lightweight, but the injury introduced a difficulty that would determine the outcome before the scheduled distance. The fight continued through the third and fourth rounds without a stoppage.

In the fifth, Ramos was bleeding heavily from the wound. Conn intervened at one minute forty-five seconds and declared Ortiz the winner. The stoppage provoked an angry reaction from the predominantly pro-Ramos crowd, estimated at 35,000, with bottles, coins and stones thrown towards the ring. What had been a contest between the fighters became an argument between the referee, the ringside medical officer and the championship authorities.

Conn maintained that Dr Gilberto Bolaños Cacho had advised him to stop the contest. The doctor disputed that account, saying he had permitted the fighting to continue, although he acknowledged the possibility of a misunderstanding between his English and Conn’s Spanish. WBC representative Ramón Velásquez overruled the referee and demanded that the bout resume. Ortiz had already returned to his dressing room and declined to fight again. After an ultimatum expired, Velásquez declared Ramos the winner. The World Boxing Association rejected that ruling: its president, Robert Evans, accepted Conn’s decision and continued to recognise Ortiz as champion.

Two days later, WBC president Luis Spota declared the championship vacant and ordered a rematch, explaining that Velásquez’s declaration had been an emergency measure to quiet the crowd. The recorded result remained a fifth-round technical knockout for Ortiz. The fighters met again in San Juan on 1 July 1967, when Ortiz stopped Ramos in the fourth round without a repetition of the controversy. Their first meeting had left the championship authorities divided; the second settled their rivalry in the ring.

I’m wary of judging every exchange from that poor footage, but the reports make one thing clear: Ramos gave Ortiz a proper problem. Ortiz had regained his crown from Ismael Laguna, while Ramos brought a former featherweight champion’s pedigree and strong support in Mexico. This was a serious challenger, not someone brought in to make the champion look tidy.

That lead right, which dropped Ortiz in the second, is the technical point that matters. A straight right can punish a boxer before he gets his jab established, and Ramos made his power count. Ortiz rose quickly, but this wasn’t a comfortable defence. Ramos’s cut above the left eye eventually brought Billy Conn’s intervention in the fifth.

My view is straightforward: ordering Ortiz back after he’d returned to his dressing room was no way to settle a championship. The doctor disputed Conn’s account, so the stoppage deserves scrutiny. The crowd’s anger, though, couldn’t decide whether Ramos was fit to continue.