De La Hoya-Pacquiao: Has Oscar Brought Shame Upon Himself?

By Chris Williams: Whether Oscar De La Hoya (47-3-2, 35 KOs) wins or loses on Saturday against Manny Pacquiao (47-3-2, 35 KOs), he will without a doubt most likely end up bad in doing so. Given his huge five inch height advantage and his bigger frame, he’s likely to take a lot of heat from the boxing public, his fans and casual fans who will wonder how a fighter with such a size advantage could be made to struggle against someone so much smaller than himself.

For this reason, De La Hoya is in almost a no-win situation, because even if he does win and win impressively, he’ll get little credit for having done so because he made the decision to dip far down into the lightweight division to hand select the much smaller Pacquiao to fight. If they were both the same size or perhaps only separated by one weight class, there wouldn’t be such as issue with the boxing fans.

But, the problem is, Pacquiao, who up until recently was a super featherweight (130 pounds), has fought four divisions below the light middleweight (154 pounds) De La Hoya. That’s like heavyweight Wladimir Klitschko fighting middleweight Kelly Pavlik. Sure, it would be interesting for a round, maybe two, but as soon as Wladimir starts throwing right hands, Pavlik will be eating the dust shortly after.

That’s the whole problem. Instead of fighting Pacquiao, De La Hoya should have shown a little more foresight and thought of how he would be perceived by the larger public in choosing such a small fighter like Pacquiao to get in the ring with.

I think it wouldn’t be such of an issue if it hadn’t been for the fact that De La Hoya has only won three out of his last six fights, with one of the wins being a highly questionable one over Felix Sturm in 2004. The other two wins that De La Hoya has racked up, victories over Ricardo Mayorga and Steve Forbes, hardly count because neither are what I consider to be top echelon fighters.

An argument could be made that De La Hoya hasn’t had a significant win for nine years dating back to his victory over Oba Carr in 1999. Since that time, De La Hoya has beaten fighters like Derrell Coley, Arturo Gatti, Fernando Vargas, Yory Boy Campas, Javier Castillejo, and the aforementioned Sturm. The victory over Vargas wasn’t that big of a deal because he had taken a lot of punishment in losing by a 12th round TKO to Felix Trinidad prior to his fight with De La Hoya and was in a sense, softened up for Oscar by Felix.

Like I said, the win over Sturm probably should have been a loss, because it appeared to many boxing experts that De La Hoya lost the fight and was given a gift victory. Wins over Castillejo, Gatti, Coley and Campas are hardly that big of a deal, because in my estimation, none of them would be able to go more than four or five rounds with the top fighters in the light middleweight division like James Kirkland or. Alfredo Angulo.

This is why De La Hoya should have chosen a good opponent, preferably his own size because it looks bad with him dipping well below his weight in order to find opponents. It doesn’t matter that there are few big named opponents in his division, he could still fight a top welterweight like Miguel Cotto, Paul Williams or Antonio Margarito with which to fight.

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