By Jim Dower: After getting beaten nearly senseless by Manny Pacquiao in December, Oscar De La Hoya (39-6, 30 KOs) is contemplating hanging up the gloves for good. After 17 years as a professional boxer in which Oscar has won 10 world titles, he’s finally thinking hard about retirement from the sport. His loss to Pacquiao, a bitter pill for him to swallow perhaps because he was beaten by a smaller fighter and one that he had been expected to defeat, has caused De La Hoya to back away from the boxing public out of sense of shame.
Instead of seeing it as a loss that was possibly fueled by a bad diet on his part, Oscar seems to be seeing it as an indication that he’s lost it as a fighter. In that, there’s probably some truth because many boxing experts would agree that De La Hoya has been on a downhill slide for the past six years dating back to his second loss to Shane Mosley in 2003.
De La Hoya, 36, has been listening to advice from family members who mostly want him to retire. However, he’s still undecided whether he should hang up the gloves or not. The success of Mosley and Bernard Hopkins, both are older than him and both co-workers at Golden Boy Promotions, has Oscar wondering if he, too, might be able to still find success despite his old age.
However, the difference between those two fighters in Oscar is that they’ve stayed active during the past six years, whereas Oscar has not. Indeed, in the past six years Oscar has had exactly six fights. That’s a pitiful number for a fighter that is interested in staying among the top fighters in boxing. Clearly, De La Hoya hasn’t helped himself by fighting this seldom and his record, a poor 3-3, would suggest that the part-time fighting has hurt him.
It’s doubtful that De La Hoya could beat top light middleweights like Vernon Forrest or Sergio Martinez, but if he’s in good condition and not starved like he was against Pacquiao, Oscar might be able to give them a tough fight before losing. However, I doubt those are the type of fighters that De La Hoya is interested in fighting if he were to continue with his boxing career.
He, like Ricky Hatton, Joe Calzaghe and Hopkins, are more interested in taking on the top money making fighters in boxing rather than merely title holder. That’s a problem for De La Hoya, because he doesn’t likely have enough left to beat someone like Kelly Pavlik, who would have too much power for De La Hoya.
The light middleweight division, where Oscar is more suited to fighting, has no one popular enough for Oscar to fight. This leaves only the welterweight and the light welterweight and super featherweight divisions for Oscar to draw from for his next opponent. Unless one of those fighters were interested in meeting De La Hoya at 150 or so, I doubt Oscar would want to come back down to 147 again and risk being too weak to fight.
Comments are closed.