WBC interim heavyweight champion Dillian ‘The Body Snatcher’ Whyte let Andy Ruiz Jr know today what he thought of his less than world-shattering victory over 40-year-old Chris Arreola last Saturday by calling him a “waste.”
The highly talked-about comeback for former IBF/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Ruiz (34-2, 22 KOs) last weekend against tune-up opponent Arreola (38-7-1, 33 KOs) was a near disaster for him, as the over-the-hill fighter surprisingly dropped him.
Arreola has been past his best for the last eight years since being destroyed by Bermane Stiverne in the first of their two rights in 2013.
“Andy ‘Destroyer,’ you are a waste. Man, you couldn’t stop Chris [Arreola],” said Dillian Whyte on social media in trashing Ruiz over his poor effort against 40-year-old Arreola. “Chris is light work now. S****.”
Interestingly, Whyte (28-2, 19 KOs) didn’t call out Ruiz, which would have been the logical thing to do. Ruiz wants to take two more fights before challenging the Anthony Joshua vs. Tyson Fury clashes winner.
Whyte would be an excellent option for one of Ruiz’s two matches, preferably his next one in the summer. Currently, Deontay Wilder and Luis ‘King Kong’ Ortiz are two names that are being mentioned as options for Ruiz’s next fight.
Since the Stiverne fight, Arreola had been obliterated by Stiverne in a rematch, a one-armed Deontay Wilder and Adam Kownacki.
That’s why it was a surprise to see Arreola dropping Ruiz in the second, hurting him in the third with a right hand, and giving him trouble the entire way.
Ruiz won the fight by a 12 round unanimous decision by 118-109, 118-109, 117-110. However, most boxing fans saw the Ruiz-Arreola contest a lot closer than the set of scores turned in by the judges.
The way Ruiz looked last Saturday, Whyte would be a step too far for the former IBF/WBA/WBO champion.
This would be a match-up for Ruiz if he were to take the fight with Whyte, and that’s why it’s unlikely that he and his promoters would agree to it. Whyte has already attempted to set up a match with Ruiz but to no avail. The interest wasn’t there.
Ruiz’s fans blame his performance against Arreola on his 17-month layoff from boxing as well as his 60-pound weight loss, but that might not be the true reason.
In reality, Ruiz was never the type of super talent that would roll over a heavyweight like Arreola. At 6’2″, carrying 30 lbs of excess fat on his 257-lb frame, Ruiz isn’t a big heavyweight. He’s more of a medium-sized heavyweight like the 6’2″, 225-lb Alexander Povetkin.
When you factor in that Ruiz is carrying around 30 extra pounds of fat on his frame, he’s the same size as Povetkin.
With Ruiz’s limited size, he’s not going to dominate fighters like Arreola, and he’s over-matched against the super heavyweights like Deontay Wilder, Anthony Joshua, and Tyson Fury.
Most boxing fans would agree that Ruiz got lucky when he stopped Joshua in their first fight in June 2019, taking advantage of the British heavyweight getting careless after he’d dropped him hard in the third. If not for Joshua getting reckless, he likely would have dominated Ruiz.
If Whyte wants a fight with Ruiz, now is the time to start calling him out because his schedule is open right now. Ruiz needs a high-quality opponent for his next contest on Fox Sports PPV. Fox likely won’t be agreeable to Ruiz fighting another lower-level heavyweight in the class of Arreola.
If Ruiz wants to continue to fight on pay-per-view, he needs to fight opposition that the American public has heard of before and respects. He won’t be able to trot out another old guy for his next fight and be taken seriously.
