By Matt Stein: He’s 36-years-old, enormously wealthy, the head of the successful promotional company Golden Boy Promotions, married to a beautiful woman, and coming off of a humiliating 8th round quit job against Manny Pacquiao on December 6th, so why on Earth would Oscar De La Hoya (39-6, 30 KOs) want to continue fighting?
Is it greed, ego or ruthless ambition? I have little doubts that he loves the sport of boxing and has the best intentions for the sport, but he needs to face the truth that it’s a young man’s sport. And while 36 isn’t all that old for normal person, it often is considered quite old for a boxer.
Some fighters, the rare ones with good genes like Bernard Hopkins and Nate Campbell, are able to fight well beyond their 35th birthday. Unfortunately, that’s not the case with De La Hoya, who hasn’t looked really good since beating Oba Carr in 1999. Sure, De La Hoya has looked good in parts of a lot of his bouts since then, but more often than not, he’s only been able to fight hard for the first five to six round, building a big lead up, and then cruising to victory.
In the cases where he’s scored knockouts, De La Hoya has been helped out by the fact that he was facing a lesser threat. His victories over Luis Ramon Campas, Fernando Vargas, Arturo Gatti, Javier Castillejo, Ricardo Mayorga and Steve Forbes were less impressive than they should have been because in each case, these fighters have been beaten shortly before his fight with them and softened up. In the case of Felix Sturm, De La Hoya was given a decision victory in the worse decision I’ve ever seen.
So for me, it’s easy for to decide whether Oscar should retire or fighting on. He’s rich, and is no longer a factor in the welterweight or light middleweight division and has no business fighting on. I can’t see him beating any of the top welterweights, light middleweights or middleweights, so he’s wasting his time if he wants to continue boxing.
There’s always the option for him to search for an opponent among the super featherweights, lightweights and light welterweight divisions, but I couldn’t see him beating Nate Campbell, Jorge Linares, Andriy Kotelnik, Timothy Bradley, Kendall Holt, Andre Berto, Miguel Cotto or Joshua Clottey.
In each case, I see De La Hoya suffering a beating about as bad, possibly even worse, than in his loss to Pacquiao. Hatton, 30, is an option because he, too, appears to be slipping fast as a fighter and appears to have only a short while left in the sport.
Better yet, he’s probably about to take a savage beating at the hands of Manny Pacquiao in May, so this would set up the perfect fight between two recent pulverized opponents – De La Hoya and Hatton – of Pacquiao. The winner of that fight could then crow to the media that they’re still relevant as a fighter, when in all probability, both of them have been out of things for quite some time.
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