It's the kind of place your GPS navigator might have to stop and ask directions to.Sitting on the wide plains of west Kansas roughly halfway to nowhere, there's little to distinguish the quaint Midwestern town of Garden City from the constellation of others just like it. Except, that is, when boxing's top prospect wins a bout, and "Garden City!" comes racing out of his mouth with a big enough boom you might think he was trying to talk to Kansas without paying the phone bill.
Because for Victor Ortiz, the otherwise anonymous Garden City is a place of memories.
It's where his mother left him when he was seven.
It's where his alcoholic father left him when he was 13.
It's where he parted ways with his 16-year-old pregnant sister, lived on his own for more than a year while still in middle school and moved ecstacy and marijuana to put food on the table.
It's where he learned to fight. It's where he learned to get beaten.
Garden City is his hometown.
And it's his reminder of everything that the world can do to hurt you and everything you can do to smile right back.
Garden City.
"There were bad times there, I know, but the people of that town gave me hospitality when I was trash, when I was nothing," says Ortiz (23-1-1, 18 KOs), who faces Mike Arnaoutis (21-2-2, 10 KOs) Saturday night on HBO's Boxing After Dark (10 PM ET). "I want to give certain people shout-outs and let them know I'm thinking about them. Saying that brings me back to those moments of hanging out with them."
Now 23, Ortiz is boxing's top prospect, a 140-pound crusher whose nickname "Vicious" only tells half the story. Partially because vicious only just begins to describe the boxer who could punch a Redwood into tomorrow's newspaper without the need of a mill, but because, as Ortiz says of the nickname he picked up at the Olympic trials, "It's vicious, with a smile."
That Ortiz smiled his way into a nickname may say more about the fighter's strength than any of the number of opponents he's left crumpled like yesterday's laundry.
Even with boxing's well-earned reputation as a sport of last resort, Ortiz's story is an endless combination of low blows you feel well after the punch has landed.
Born in Garden City, the middle of three children, Ortiz's childhood memories consist specifically of one. The day it ended.
"I was seven years old," he said, "I had just come home from school and she was gone. I was watching Power Rangers, had the red Power Ranger underwear on even though the Green Power Ranger, Tommy, was my favorite.
"And she just didn't come home."
Even at 7, Ortiz's relationship with his mother was conflicted.
"My mom," he says. "I can't stand her, never can, never will."
School offered no escape for Ortiz, where two names you will never find in a Ring Magazine set him on the way to boxing stardom.
"Omar Hernandez," he says, and "Aaron Hinojis. I got slapped and beaten up when I was seven. I remember it like I was yesterday"
His father took him to the gym to learn to fight. Within three years the fat kid would be tougher than a breakfast steak and twice as lean. By fifth grade, he would get both of those guys back.
"It was just something I had to do," he says. "It was very personal. I was the fat guy everybody picked on and called names. But if I could take it back, I probably would. I was a different person."
Three years later, Ortiz's father was gone too. An alcoholic, Ortiz's father's condition worsened after his wife left, so, still three years too young to drive a car, Ortiz was left all alone.
"It hurt," Ortiz says of the deterioration of his relationship with his father. "You could sense it even then, it was like a bird making its nest and never going back.
"He was a guy I wanted to grow up to be just like, that I idolized, that I said, 'I want to be like you,' But the years went by and he changed. I changed. Our family fell apart and here we are."
His sister was pregnant and left for Denver and only Victor and younger brother Temo were left to fend for themselves. Victor turned to the only way to make a dollar as a guardian-less teenager. He sold marijuana and ecstacy, though he insists he never used himself.
"I feel bad about that looking back and even at the time," Ortiz says. "I knew it was wrong, but to me it was survival of the fittest. I had to do what I had to do. I feel bad about it. I'm sure lives were ruined, but they had choices too, like I had. But they had parents to support them, a family. They chose to do drugs, they chose to be bad.
"But I still feel bad for supplying it. Every time it's mentioned, I regret it."
And when it got overwhelming ("Which was always," Ortiz says) there was boxing. And Ignacio "Bucky" Avila, a local trainer who worked with the promising young fighter and whose name now graces the leg of his trunks.
"He spoke to me, he lectured me, he called me over," Ortiz says. "He would make a trade with me. I mowed his yard, he gave me a Sonic [fast food] coupon. He put up with me and never complained."
And there was the Garden City he would later yell about, when a little humanity finally bloomed through a field of salted earth.
Bucky Avila, who passed away three years ago, was that Garden City
And the Fords were that Garden City.
After a year on his own with his brother, Ortiz was placed with a foster family. And to hear Avila talk about John and Sharon Ford, you'd think they were a Rockwell painting described in a Paul Harvey and recreated as a Sears family portrait.
"They were great to me, kept me on the straight and narrow," Ortiz says. "That's when I really changed a lot and realized I didn't want to be that angry person I was, always getting into trouble. With them and my buddy Brandon Carmichael, I saw how they were like and it kind of rubbed off on me. I thought, you know that's cool. They're well respected, and they don't have to act tough. I liked that way. Next thing you know, you've got me."
When he was 15, his then 18-year-old sister gained custody of him and moved him to Denver and a more active boxing community. In the 2003 Junior Olympic Nationals, he met up with Robert Garcia, who would invite him to train in Southern California's boxing hotbed.
When he finally swapped his headgear for a paycheck, Ortiz began a rapid climb to the top of the junior lightweight division, capped with a brutal first-round destruction of former light welterweight world champion Carlos Maussa in late 2007. Three more knockouts since, including a two-round battering of fellow prospect Jeffrey Resto on the De La Hoya-Pacquiao undercard, and "Garden City!" is getting yelled to larger and larger crowds.
At 23-1-1, Ortiz's record isn't perfect, but his reputation is. The draw is from a headbutt in a fight he was easily winning. The loss was a disqualification after Ortiz knocked Jason Alarcorn unconscious, ruled by the referee to be an illegal blow.
After a lifetime of heartache, you'll forgive him if he doesn't get too worked up over a couple numbers.
"It's just baby steps," Ortiz says. "Focus on the big goals."
After all, that's what Garden City is to Ortiz. Survival. And smiles.
Universally heralded as the prospect of the year in 2008, he has plenty of both these days. Now in the Golden Boy Promotions stable, Ortiz is on the doorstep of a world championship fight. Should he beat Arnaoutis Saturday night, he could court fights with the biggest names at 140 pounds.
Even his family life has stabilized. He gained custody of his younger brother when Victor turned 18 and Temo now lives with his boxing brother while studying business in college. His sister remains in Denver, but the pair are close. ("We're so cool," he says. "She used to be like a mother to me, now she's like a big sister again.")
They too, are Garden City.
"I've had my ups and downs, and I've learned a lot," Ortiz says. I grew up fast, but I grew up."
And while Ortiz says a relationship with his mother is out of the question, he hasn't yet made up his mind about his father, the man he idolized until his alcoholism came between them.
"I don't know," he says. "Maybe there's hope, maybe there's not, only time will tell."
