By Aaron Klein: The “Golden Boy” Oscar De La Hoya (39-5, 30 KOs) is expected to strike gold for the final time when he likely announces his decision whether or not he’ll be signing for to fight pound-for-pound boxing king Manny Pacquiao on December 6th in Las Vegas, Nevada. At this point, it’s either going to be the min-sized Pacquiao, who at 130 poses little problems to the much larger 154 lb. De La Hoya, or former one-time star from The Contender reality boxing television series Sergio Mora.

Obviously, Pacquiao is the easy choice here, since most non-boxing people have no clue who Mora is, and many of the boxing fans that know about him seem to care less about seeing him fight De La Hoya. However, this isn’t about picking the best absolute opponent, because if that was the case, De La Hoya would have picked either Antonio Margarito or Paul Williams, easily two of the best welterweights in the division bar none. In a head to head match up with a fighter as small as Pacquiao, both know doubt would wipe the deck with the diminutive Filipino star, and as old and as faded as 35 year-old De La Hoya is, he’ll likely do the same unless he runs out of gas.

If Pacquiao ends up being the choice for De La Hoya’s final fight on December 6th, then it indicated that Pacquiao was willing to accept the 65-35 or 60-30 (with the last 10% being decided on whoever ends up the winner) split. Pacquiao recently walked out of negotiations after De La Hoya refused to budge on his original 70-30 PPV purse split offer made to him. Rather than take the fight at those terms, which would have still meant a huge payday of 10-15 million dollars, Pacquiao decided that the split was unfair, for after all, he is by far the much better fighter at this juncture than De La Hoya.

In most cases, De La Hoya would have likely moved on and found some other willing participant that was interested in taking the fight. The problem is there are few big name fighters out there that De La Hoya can still fight competitively with – other than smaller fighters like Pacquiao and Ricky Hatton – and he badly wants to finish his career on a winning note. A fight against Margarito or Williams, fighters with enormous work rates, would be like De La Hoya signing himself into a terrible beating.

If De La Hoya were to stay at his own weight of 154, the light middleweight division, other than, say, Mora, he’d have big problems against up and coming fighters like Alfredo Angulo and James Kirkland, who would probably riddle him to pieces even easier than Margarito would. With nowhere else to turn to get an easy win, De La Hoya has set his laser sights on the smaller Pacquiao, who will bring in the big money while at the same time present little threat to De La Hoya due to his lack of size.

Though from the outsiders’ perspective, it’s not a particularly bold way of bowing out of the sport, De La Hoya has proven himself already against great fighters during his career like Shane Mosley and Pernell Whitaker, so he can afford to take an easy fight for his last bout. If it does end up being Pacquiao, the fight will likely bring in 100 million + in PPV numbers – not bad for a fighter that has lost three out of his last six fights.