It’s Official! De La Hoya vs. Pacquiao Set For December 6th — Boxing News

By Boxing News - 08/28/2008 - Comments

delahoya53673.jpgBy Manuel Perez: Earlier today, the mega-bout between Oscar De La Hoya (39-5, 30 KOs) and lightweight Manny Pacquiao (47-3-2, 35 KOs) was officially announced and will be taking place on December 6th in Las Vegas, Nevada. As a Mexican, I always wanted to see Pacquiao get his backside handed to him, but not like this. This fight is a joke and I personally feel ashamed to see De La Hoya, 35, resorting to taking a fight with a fighter so much smaller than him like Pacquiao. I could excuse De La Hoya for taking a fighter one level above or below his junior middleweight class, but for him to take a fighter three divisions below him at lightweight is just wrong.

Heck, Pacquiao just recently moved up from super featherweight to defeat a tough but limited David Diaz for his World Boxing Council lightweight title. Other than money, something De La Hoya already has way too much of, what is there to gain from beating a fighter as small as Pacquiao? It’s a fight that is a throwback to a gladiator match in which a giant is pitted against a much smaller fighter, just for the enjoyment of a ravenous audience that enjoyed seeing mismatches of this type.

You know what’s going to happen, you just know it; Pacquiao is going to be too small, too over his head in trying to deal with the much bigger De La Hoya and is going to get taken apart by the surgeon-like shots from De La Hoya.

While he’s getting up there in age at thirty-five, Oscar has more than enough left to beat a fighter as small as Pacquiao without much problem. I sure hope Oscar feels like it was worth it to take this fight of all fights as his last bout of his career, because it looks bad from my perspective. Instead of going out on a high note by taking on the toughest possible opponent, someone like Antonio Margarito, De La Hoya will be taking on perhaps the easiest opponent he can find.

That’s not to say that Pacquiao isn’t a good fighter because he certainly is. He’s the best there is at 130-135, and I have no doubts that he would literally wipe the deck with De La Hoya is he was only 5’6″ 130 lbs like him, but given the fact that De La Hoya outweighs him by 25 lbs and is used to fighting much bigger opponents, this fight is really something of a joke. Certainly, the fight will sell big, because Pacquiao has a huge audience worldwide and other more casual boxing fans will get caught up in the marketing for the fight, and end up purchasing it. But, it’s still not worth it.

De La Hoya has accomplished a lot in his career, especially the early part of his boxing career when he was fighting top fighters, but it seems as if the last five years have been a deviation from that. He’s fought a couple of smaller fighters in Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Steve Forbes, and has fought a faded fighter in Ricardo Mayorga, and then lost a fight to Bernard Hopkins when Oscar attempted to move up in weigh to middleweight.

Missed in all this, however, was that De La Hoya perhaps didn’t even deserve the fight with Hopkins in the first place given the fact that De La Hoya had taken a savage beating at the hands of middleweight Felix Sturm one fight earlier, yet still got the close decision. Some fighters have all the luck, I guess, especially if their nickname is “Golden Boy.”

I guess it won’t really matter whether De La Hoya losses or not to Pacquiao, because he’ll be paid so much for the fight, I suppose he’ll be crying all the way to the bank. I just wish De La Hoya had thought of how others would perceive him and thought of going out on a high note by taking on a real challenge instead of someone so much smaller than him. I’ve always liked De La Hoya and have thought well of him for most of his career. However, this is a bit too much for me to swallow and I can’t accept it.



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