Early Life
Ortiz was born and raised in Garden City, Kansas, the third of four children of Mexican immigrant parents. When he was seven years old, Ortiz's mother abandoned her family for a relationship with another man. Shortly thereafter, Ortiz began boxing at the insistence of his father, an alcoholic who often beat his children following his wife's departure. In an interview, Victor said, "I hated that lady. I drew her a card once with a little rose on it and I gave it to her. She just threw it down and said 'What do I want that shit for?' That's when I picked up boxing. Then my Dad started screwing up, drinking."
Ortiz' father also abandoned the family five years after their mother left, which forced Ortiz and his five siblings into the Kansas foster care system. Ortiz was twelve years old at the time. His older sister would become a legal adult in 2002 and moved to Denver, Colorado. Ortiz and his younger brother left Kansas and moved in with her.
Read more about this topic: Victor Ortiz
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“The law is only one of several imperfect and more or less external ways of defending what is better in life against what is worse. By itself, the law can never create anything better.... Establishing respect for the law does not automatically ensure a better life for that, after all, is a job for people and not for laws and institutions.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)