AMERICA AT LARGE:A one-time homeless street waif would appear to have dispelled his personal demons, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

TWO AUTUMNS ago I’d been invited back to Lawrence to participate, along with Dr Robert Rodriguez, a former heavyweight champion, and an up-and-coming boxer whose promoters insisted on billing as Vicious Victor Ortiz, in a symposium devoted to Latin American boxing at the University of Kansas.

The programme had concluded on Thursday, but I’d made it a point to stick around through the weekend for Saturday’s football game against Iowa State. As I was on my way into Memorial Stadium that afternoon, I heard someone calling my name. I turned to behold a smiling Victor Ortiz.

He was with his girlfriend, a co-ed at the university, and he had trotted himself out in a blue KU sweatshirt. If you didn’t know better you’d have taken him for a carefree college student rather than a licensed practitioner of the hurt business.

Ortiz had grown up – grown up in a hurry, in fact – on the wrong side of the tracks in Garden City, Kansas, a town that for many years hasn’t known a right side of the tracks. The issue of a mother who had abandoned the family before he turned eight and an alcoholic, abusive father who eventually also disappeared, he was not, strictly speaking, an orphan, but he might as well have been.

At an age when his contemporaries concerned themselves with earning Boy Scout merit badges, he numbered himself among the vagabond homeless. On the run from foster homes nearly as dysfunctional as those of his birth parents, he found himself fending not only for himself but for his younger brother as well, and earned his pocket change dealing drugs on the street. His only solace seemed to be the local gym, and in 2003, the year he turned 16, he defeated all comers to win the lightweight title at the Kansas Golden Gloves.

He briefly moved to Denver, where an older sister had married, and continued to box at the local Salvation Army. Under the tutelage of onetime heavyweight contender Roy Lyle, he stuck around just long enough to win a Junior Olympic championship. Signed by Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions, he relocated to Oxnard, California, and made his professional debut at 17.

Over the next five years, the only blip on his record was a 2005 disqualification in a fight in Oxnard, occasioned when the teenaged Ortiz knocked out somebody named Cory Alarcon with a punch thrown after the referee had ordered the boxers to break.

He had been named Prospect of the Year by ESPN in the summer of 2009 when he met the hard-punching Argentinian 140lb-er Marcos Maidana in a nationally televised fight at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Both fighters went down in the first round, and Ortiz dropped Maidana to the canvas twice in the second, but by what were supposed to be the middle rounds the momentum had clearly shifted. Ortiz was cut in the fifth, and knocked down in the sixth. When referee Raul Caiz led him to his corner to be examined by the ringside physician, both his responses to the doctor and his body language suggested he wanted no more of the fight. It went into the record book as a TKO loss, but the generally accepted view of the outcome was that Ortiz just quit.

While he had not lost since, his apparent timidity in the Maidana fight and the clear absence of a killer instinct in coasting to a points win over 38-year-old Nate Campbell and a majority draw against contender Lamont Peterson in fights last year had led many to question his mettle. The “Vicious” nickname seemed to hang like an albatross around his neck, and it was invoked, when it was invoked at all, mostly in sarcastic terms by his detractors, which helped explain why Ortiz was a 4 to 1 underdog in his challenge to undefeated WBC welterweight champion Andre Berto on the grounds of the Mashantucket Pequod Tribal Nation in Connecticut last Saturday night.

When Ortiz removed the sombrero he had worn into the ring it was to reveal one of those faux-hawk hairdos. (He also had a pair of small Jayhawks emblazoned on the front of his trunks.) He smiled his way through the introductions, as he always does, but somehow before this one he even looked mean, and he wasted little time in demonstrating that, on this night anyway, he was determined to be Vicious Victor.

The first time Berto went down, early in the first, referee Mike Ortega waved off the apparent knockdown, but the champion was clearly buzzed, and a barrage of clubbing rights from Ortiz put him down again. Berto had to hold and clinch his way to safety to survive the round.

Then, in the second, Berto returned the favour, knocking Ortiz off-balance, and when his right glove scraped the canvas, Ortega ruled a knockdown and the fight was even on the scorecards. But two things were already apparent. One was that Ortiz intended to live up to the “Vicious” sobriquet. The other was that Berto, unaccustomed to the swarming aggression with which Ortiz incessantly attacked, was so discombobulated that he had no immediate answers.

“My plan going in was to smother his shots and just overwhelm him,” recalled Ortiz.

“I couldn’t keep me off him like I wanted to,” a rueful Berto would say afterward.

It was a bout that had “Fight of the Year” stamped all over it even before the wild sixth, in which both men went down. Berto had clocked the challenger with a right early in the round, and was chasing him around the ring, desperately trying to finish him off. Ortiz had backed to the ropes and seemed to be intent on self-preservation when he suddenly lashed out with a left and knocked Berto on the seat of his pants.

Six more rounds of roller-coaster action remained, and while both men had their moments, in the end (despite a one-point deduction for hitting Berto in the back of the head in the 10th round) it was the 24-year-old Ortiz who led on the scorecards of all three ringside judges.

It had not been a fight to please the purist, and, truth be known, Ortega could probably have penalised both boxers on at least half a dozen occasions – Berto for excessive holding, Ortiz for rabbit-punching and for leading with his head – but, to his credit, the referee made an apparently conscious decision to let them sort it out between them.

“I wasn’t expecting an easy fight,” said Ortiz. “I knew it would go the distance. I pictured myself with two black eyes – but I knew I would have the green belt.”

In rising to the occasion on the biggest night of his life, the onetime homeless street waif from Kansas would also appear to have dispelled his personal demons.

“People can say what they want,” Ortiz would shrug later. “I’m the guy who’s scared, who has no courage, who has no balls. Well, check it out, Bro: I’m the welterweight champion of the world.”