By Aaron Klein: In watching Oscar De La Hoya (39-5, 30 KOs) completely take apart his opponent Steve Forbes last Saturday night, I saw the blueprint that Oscar had crafted, with the help of Floyd Mayweather Sr – his trainer – to use to beat Floyd Mayweather Jr. in their upcoming September 20th bout in Las Vegas. De La Hoya showed none of the mistakes that cost him in his last May in his split decision loss to Mayweather Jr. Showing an excellent jab, which Oscar kept in Forbes face for the entire fight, De La Hoya chose his moments wisely in which to go after Forbes with sharp attacks.
This strategy effectively conserved De La Hoya’s strength, allowing him to fight hard for the entire fight and keeping him from running out of gas like he often does when going the distance with opponents. De La Hoya didn’t let Forbes encourage him to brawl more than he wanted to, something that Oscar has had a problem with in his fights with opponents like Shane Mosley and Fernando Vargas, both of whom could get De La Hoya to get out of his game plan quite easily just be landing a flurry of shots. Against Forbes, De La Hoya kept his cool, thinking about his game plan and not getting drawn into brawling until he was ready to. This is an important factor for De La Hoya, because it shows that at age 35, he’s still learning.
That may come to a surprise for some people, who figure that a fighter of that age knows it all, but that’s not the case. De La Hoya has gotten by a lot on his raw ability, but has shown major mental mistakes in losses to Mosley, Bernard Hopkins and Felix Trinidad. All of those fights were winnable for De La Hoya, if he had stuck to a game plan and fought with his head instead of mixing it up too much. The second area that De La Hoya showed vast improvement in was his conditioning. In terms of physical shape, he looks almost as good as he did in 1998-1999, perhaps his prime years in the sport.
After that, De La Hoya began to show symptoms of poor conditioning, often fading slightly late in his fights with Trinidad, Mosley, Hopkins, and most famously with Felix Sturm. Most people had naturally assumed that De La Hoya was never going to be able to work this problem out, probably thinking that it was something that would stick to him no matter how much conditioning he undertook. I never believed this, because I know that this was something that he could fix given a correct training regimen, one that included much more endurance training rather than focusing on strength and speed, which was what De La Hoya normally focused on in the past. He already has those qualities, and for this reason didn’t need to keep them as his main focus in training camps.
Instead, he needed to be working on his major flaw – his horrible endurance, which allowed for fighters like Mosley and Mayweather to pull away and defeat him by close decisions after De La Hoya tired out in the last few rounds of their bouts. However, De La Hoya seems to have finally gotten his conditioning right, at least as far as his bout with Forbes goes. One would hope that this will lead to similar good training for his fight with Mayweather in September. I can’t see De La Hoya doing anything different next time around, because Forbes style of fighting is almost a carbon copy of Mayweather, so naturally the training should be virtually the same for both fighters.
Mostly importantly, however, is that De La Hoya, along with his conditioning, has finally learned how to conserve his strength so that he doesn’t run out of gas. If Oscar can continue this trend in a bout with Mayweather, you can expect to see Oscar winning quite handily. If you remember the first bout, De La Hoya gave Mayweather tremendous problems in the first six rounds of the fight, hitting him often with his jab and ripping into him with hard combinations. At the half way point in the fight, De La Hoya had the lead and was in the position to walk away with the victory, if not for his sudden loss of strength in the last half of the fight. The good news for De La Hoya, is that he showed that he has finally gotten beyond that problem.
If he can keep it in that direction, I see him giving Mayweather a boxing lesson that he won’t soon forget. This will be De La Hoya at his finest moment, believe me. Most people, Mayweather included, won’t be giving De La Hoya any chance going to the fight. This will help Oscar, for with Mayweather underestimating him, he won’t be ready for the new and improved De La Hoya who will keep firing back at Mayweather, even late in the fight when most people will be figuring on De La Hoya fading as usual. Once that happen, Mayweather, a fighter who has become cocky and over confident due to a long string of easy victories, won’t know what do. He won’t be able to make adjustments, because he doesn’t have the size to begin with to dominate a fighter of De La Hoya’s size and pedigree. In the end, it will be De La Hoya walking away with his greatest victory of his career.
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