By Manuel Perez: With his prime well behind him in the rear view mirror, Oscar De La Hoya (38-5, 30 KOs) continues on with his once excellent career when he fights Steve Forbes (33-5, 9 KOs) on Saturday night. One wonders why after making tens of millions of dollars over his career, involving De La Hoya winning a number of championships, he would want to continue fighting when he’s lost three out of his last five bouts and looked bad in a fourth bout which he should have lost as well. I suppose the reasons are simple: Yet even more money, especially in his upcoming bout with Floyd Mayweather Jr. in September, which is more money than he can quickly make in his promoting business.
Aside from that, I can’t see any real reason to stick around, considering that he’s now losing virtually all his fights against top opponents. It’s like having an old race car with a shot engine and then continuously putting into a race against new cars, and coming in last each time out. Or, like an old race horse that can no longer get around the track and is beaten badly every time out. What sticks in the minds of fans isn’t what the racer or the car used to be, but rather than dull image of them getting blown out by younger talent. Clearly, a time comes when you got to walk away from the sport, and for most fighters, if they’ve made decent money in their career, they get a clue early on to hand up the gloves as soon as they start getting beat with regularity.
In De La Hoya’s case, he’s been a slow on the update, it seems, for he’s been taking a pounding in his bouts since 2003, starting with his loss to Shane Mosley. Since that time, De La Hoya has had only one what I call a legitimate win, beating Ricardo Mayorga in May 2006. His other win, a gift decision over Felix Sturm in 2004, was a clear loss for De La Hoya and one that he looked especially bad. You could even go further than that, suggesting that De La Hoya should have likely hung up the gloves in 2000 after being beaten by Shane Mosley for the first time. It was the second loss for De La Hoya in three fights, after losing to Felix Trinidad in a bout that De La Hoya ran from Trinidad in the last half of the fight.
Though 27 is a young age for a top fighter to retire, De La Hoya had already had a lot of tough fights in his career by 2000, ones that involved him taking a lot of punishment from top fighters in boxing. You could say that his physical age was at least 4-5 years beyond his chronological age at the time. Since then, it can only have gotten worse, though it would be difficult to tell immediately due to De La Hoya steering himself in against easier fighters after his initial loss to Mosley in 2000. Instead of taking on Trinidad again, something that the boxing world was clamoring for, De La Hoya chose the easier path of fighting Arturo Gatti, Javier Castillejo, a softened up Fernando Vargas (who two years earlier had suffered a brutal 12th round TKO loss to Trinidad in 2000, and Luis Ramon “Yory Boy” Campas, before finally taking on Mosley for a second time in 2003.
Naturally, De La Hoya lost the fight. As I fully expected he would. He then followed that fight with his infamous bout with Felix Sturm in June 2004. There was a lot riding on the bout – a potential bout with Bernard Hopkins – and De La Hoya came into the fight with a slight paunch, seeming to overlook Sturm. Considering De La Hoya’s lack of top opposition, including his three losses in recent years, he should have wizened up and came in top shape for the bout with Sturm. He didn’t, and took a brutal beating because of it. If there was any indication that it was time for De La Hoya to hand up the gloves for good, it was his fight with Sturm. However, instead of hanging up the gloves, De La Hoya made the mistake of fighting Hopkins, losing by a 9th round KO when Hopkins dropped De La Hoya with a single body shot.
Many people saw this outcome as almost a foregone conclusion considering De La Hoya’s poor showings in recent bouts. The loss to Hopkins had the effect of sidelining De La Hoya for almost two years, while he focused almost entirely on his new promotional outfit. During this time, he seemed to age overnight and grow larger around the middle. However, De La Hoya wiped himself into shape for his comeback bout with Ricardo Mayorga in 2006, stopping him in the 6th round.
As much as I’d like to give De La Hoya credit for having accomplished a lot with the victory, it meant little because Mayorga had been beaten twice in the three years prior to fighting De La Hoya, in particular Mayorga’s loss to Trinidad – an 8th round TKO – was especially brutal. Given all this, De La Hoya was essentially fighting a defanged cobra that had already been rendered harmless.
Another year went by, which led to De La Hoya’s loss to Floyd Mayweather Jr. by a 12-round split decision. By this time, there was no longer any doubt that De La Hoya needed to retire, because he was clearly not the same fighter he was earlier in his career when he was the best in the super featherweight, lightweight and welterweight divisions. When De La Hoya announced that he would be fighting Mayweather a second time, I was saddened by it, for I saw it as yet another loss for De La Hoya. There wasn’t even a chance that De La Hoya could win the fight given his decline in the past eight years. I did find the bout with Steve Forbes as being somewhat interesting, in that at least De La Hoya would have a good chance of winning due to his size and power advantage over the much smaller Forbes.
All in all, I see no reason for De La Hoya to continue on with his career, and I fully hope that Forbes puts an end to his career tomorrow by giving him another beating along the same lines as the one he experienced against Sturm in 2004. Hopefully, even without a knockout loss, De La Hoya will finally decide to hang them up after getting beaten by Forbes, who most people aren’t giving much of a chance. If a small fighter like Forbes can beat De La Hoya, it’s really a wake-up call for De La Hoya to walk away from the sport rather than facing more humiliating beatings in the future.
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