By Jim Dower: There’s no doubt that Oscar De La Hoya has done a good job in coming down in weight to the welterweight division weight limit of 147, down from his natural fighting weight of 154 in the light middleweight division. Before he started training, there were some that doubted whether or not De La Hoya could even do it. However, making the weight is one thing but being healthy enough, and having enough skills left in the tank is quite another thing.
At 35, like Manny Pacquiao’s trainer Freddie Roach recently said, De La Hoya is essentially a “part-time fighter” at this point in his career, and has been one for the past four years. In his prime, De La Hoya would probably have made short work of the much smaller Pacquiao, beaten him senseless in three to four rounds, and made it look easy.
However, that De La Hoya no longer exists, now slowed by age and inactivity and much more mortal than he was in his prime years ago. With losses against Bernard Hopkins, Shane Mosley and Floyd Mayweather Jr. in the past five years, De La Hoya has had to look long and hard for beatable opponents, one that he could look good against and prolong his diminishing career.
Being a part-time fighter was a choice that De La Hoya made mostly due to his need to work hard on his other business interests, namely his promotional Golden Boy. However, it was still his occasional huge money fights that enabled De La Hoya to continue to be free to support such an endeavor. It was only natural that De La Hoya would have a drop off in fights.
When he did start picking up the sport again after a two year layoff, he did surprisingly well in stopping former welterweight champion Richard Mayorga in a 6th round stoppage.
The win seemed to show that De La Hoya had more skills left than many people had originally thought, but it was still hard to tell how good he really was at this point due to the faded ability of Mayorga, which had dropped off significantly since defeated Vernon Forrest three years earlier in 2003.
With that win added to his large collection of victories, De La Hoya descended into a fight with Mayweather Jr. in May 2007, the fighter perceived by many boxing fans to be the best pound-for-pound fighter in the sport.
Again, De La Hoya fought well, although this time he came up short and lost by a close 12-round split decision. The fight was his for the taking, having won most of the first six rounds of the fight, but he seemed to get a little too over confident in the second half of the fight, and made a mistake of trying to slug it out with Mayweather.
De La Hoya was easily picked off by the shorter, faster more accurate punches from Mayweather and ended up losing by a close decision. Thinking that he would be getting a rematch with Mayweather, De La Hoya chose to fight the smaller Steve Forbes, a short Mayweather Jr. clone, who De La Hoya defeated by an impressive 12-round unanimous decision in May.
Instead of a rematch with Mayweather, De La Hoya had to go looking for another opponent when Mayweather suddenly retired. Without a whole lot of options available to him aside from fighting dangerous opponents like Antonio Margarito, Paul Williams and Miguel Cotto, all of who would probably thrash De La Hoya at this stage, he selected the 5’6” Pacquiao.
Without a lot of fights under his belt in the past four years, De La Hoya may find many of his skills will be called into question against the faster Pacquiao, who is still at the top of his game and perhaps the best pound-for-pound fighter in the game right now.
Like a car with a lot of miles on it, unaccustomed to being driven hard anymore, De La Hoya may be forced to fight much harder than he has in years by Pacquiao, who generally fights three minutes of every round unlike De La Hoya.
Without a whole lot of hard fights in the past five years, De La Hoya will be asking a lot of his aging body and it’s going to be pushed a lot harder than it has in years by Pacquiao, no matter how much bigger he is than the Filipino star.
If De La Hoya isn’t able to keep up to the pace that Pacquiao sets forth, it won’t matter how much bigger he is than him, he’ll lose and lose badly. A lose to Pacquiao right now would be a tremendous blow for Oscar given his huge size advantage going into this fight and it would probably make it hard for him to continue on as the mega star in the sport.
It would be his 4th loss in his last seven fights and the crowd, mostly ignorant about De La Hoya’s faded status as a prime time fighter, would finally start to catch on that he’s not the same fighter anymore and abandon him.
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