Boxing badboy Ricardo Mayorga (left) will try his hand at MMA

By Jesse Heitz

Tonight, May 3^rd, former champion boxer Ricardo “El Matador” Mayorga will make his MMA debut against Canadian Wesley Tiffer at Omega MMA’s “Battle of the Americas”. The event is slated to be held at Pharaohs Casino in Managua, Nicaragua.

It appears that this fight has been ruminating for quite some time, but given the utter lack of media coverage, it seems that the fight between two 39-year olds, one being Tiffer, who hasn’t fought in four years, and the other being Mayorga, an old boxer who hasn’t fought in two years himself, hasn’t generated much fan interest outside of Nicaragua, where MMA is booming.

Yet despite the lack of any broad publicity here in the United States, the coverage of this fight that can be found does depict a bout that has all the right stuff to take the fight from the basement of irrelevance to something that could very well be interesting. It was reported by boxingscene.com that Mayorga confronted Tiffer at the airport, shouting,

“I wanted to make sure with my own eyes that you were coming. Look at me, I’m at 164 pounds. I just need to lose four pounds and I’m ready to win. I’m really angry. I’m from the country where women give birth to real men. You’ll get a reputation for the beating that I’m going to give you. I am the world champion. I will punish you and knock you out. Come on!”

In an interview published by mmamania.com, Tiffer seemed rather unscathed by Mayorga’s chatter, commenting,

“As a person I don’t think much of him. I think he’s a bum. He smokes and does a whole bunch of stuff. As an athlete, I don’t have a lot of respect for him. As a boxer, I have to respect him. I have to recognize he stepped in the ring with world-class champions in boxing. But other than that, I have to see him as another fighter.”

Tiffer continued by stating,

“They asked me in an interview if I’m going to exchange punches and I said, ‘Well, no. I’m not.’ He came into my sport, he came into my world. I didn’t go into a boxing ring and say, ‘Let’s wrestle.’ He came in here so I’m going to show him what it’s all about.”

“There’s a part of me that just wants to beat the [expletive] out of him. By taking his legs out and taking him down and just punishing him, it’s something I’ll take joy in and then submitting him. I’ll get more joy out of beating the [expletive] out of him for two or three rounds and then submitting him.”

In the end, this fight is yet another stanza in the continuing story of veteran boxers trying their hand at MMA. Will Mayorga, the former WBA/WBC Welterweight Champion and WBC Light Middleweight Champion, find himself getting embarrassed ala James Toney? In all honesty, I think the odds of such an outcome are quite high. We simply don’t know what kind of training Mayorga has been partaking in, and given that he came into the weigh-ins for a planned 160 pound fight at a very soft 175.9 pounds, we have to assume that he’s not taking this fight as seriously as he should be.

Yet, even if the outcome is predictable, it still might be worth the $9.95 it would cost to watch the event online. After all, can you place a price on being able to watch one of the most outspoken and disrespectful fighters in boxing history get humbled by a relatively unknown MMA fighter?