De La Hoya Angered By Margarito

By Chris Williams: Oscar De La Hoya is reportedly upset with Antonio Margarito, according to the , angered about the issue involving Margarito’s hand pads for his knuckles. Both Margarito and his trainer recently lost their boxing licenses by the California State Athletic Commission after extra padding containing and an unknown substance was found inside Margarito’s hand padding before his fight with Shane Mosley on January 24th, 2009.

According to the LA Times, De La Hoya thought that Margarito’s excuse about not knowing about the extra padding wasn’t true, that generally fighters know what’s contained in their hand wrapping while it’s being tapped up. De La Hoya was reportedly put off by this, feeling that it was wrong and sickening, point out that the sport of boxing has risks involved with it.

Little do many boxing fans know, but before Oscar’s fight with Manny Pacquiao in December 2008, there was a lot of criticism made against De La Hoya for not facing Margarito, a bigger fighter, instead of Pacquiao, a former super featherweight, and much smaller than Oscar. People felt that De La Hoya should have taken that fight, given that Margarito had destroyed Miguel Cotto in July and was considered to be the man at welterweight.

There were those who felt that De La Hoya should have gone out on his shield by facing Margarito, in what would have been an almost certain knockout loss for Oscar. Instead, De La Hoya opted to take the smaller, arguably easier, Pacquiao and ended up getting knocked out for all his troubles.

The fight turned out to be just as tough as what De La Hoya would have faced if he had fought Margarito, and maybe tougher because Pacquiao was too small to take Oscar out as fast as Margarito would have, thus causing De La Hoya to suffer a log longer than he should have in getting beaten down into quitting on his stool after the 8th.

Margarito, almost a pariah in many boxing fans’ eyes, is sitting out for the next year waiting for his license revocation to expire before reapplying in 2010. It’s not certain he’ll get it back, but he’s not going to sit idly by and let this ruin him, and will with the help of his promoter Bob Arum, will be fighting on in Mexico. As of now, Carlos Baldomir is a possible opponent for the Summer.

As for the foreign substance that was found in Margarito’s knuckle pads, it still hasn’t been identified yet and who knows? It may never be. In that case, Margarito is being penalized for little other than a little bit of extra padding in his gloves.

It would have been interesting to see how a fight with De La Hoya and Margarito would have turned out if De La Hoya stepped up and fought him instead of the smaller Pacquiao. In hindsight, De La Hoya might have been better off facing him instead of Pacquiao.

At least with Margarito, there was room to discuss making the fight at a higher weight because of his bigger size. De La Hoya didn’t have that advantage against Pacquiao, because he was already coming up from lightweight to take the fight and he would have never gone for a fight at 150 to 154.

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