By Jim Slattengren: With Oscar De La Hoya’s retirement announcement yesterday in downtown Los Angeles, it’s a good time to pay tribute to a fighter from humble backgrounds that made the most of the talent he had. De La Hoya at one time held titles in the super featherweight, lightweight, light welterweight, welterweight, light middleweight and middleweight divisions during his 17-year-career, and won an incredible 10 world titles in his career. Although De La Hoya continued to win titles as he moved up in weight as he aged, he was never really considered to be the best in any one division.
What made De La Hoya so good was his flexibility, his ambition and his ability to make a mark in so many different weight divisions.
His best years were at super featherweight, lightweight and light welterweight, and after winning titles in those divisions, De La Hoya was never able to dominate the way he did at the smaller weights. De La Hoya, 36, was beaten a number of times by Shane Mosley at welterweight and also defeated by Felix Trinidad.
However, De La Hoya never let the defeats get to him and continued moving around different weight classes to capture different titles. In the last six years of De La Hoya’s career, he was clearly just a shadow of his former great self, yet he was still able to capture a light middleweight and middleweight titles during that time.
With De La Hoya putting more and more time on his new business, Golden Boy Promotions, Oscar began to fight less often in the last five years of his career. His weight sometimes fluctuated in between bouts and he was beginning to look more like a retired boxer/promoter than an actual fighter.
Still, De La Hoya was able to put things together enough to give Floyd Mayweather Jr. a lot of problems in their December 2007 bout, eventually losing by a 12-round split decision. For the part, that was pretty much the dying gasp for De La Hoya, because after taking a year off from boxing, he came back in May 2008 and struggled to defeat light welterweight Steve Forbes by a 12-round decision.
Always the showman with the clever idea, De La Hoya then chose to fight Manny Pacquiao, a former super featherweight, over the objections of many fans and writers in the boxing community. De La Hoya ignored the criticism and warnings, most of which stemmed on the fact that De La Hoya would stand to gain little in defeating such a small fighter and would more likely lose a lot should he lose to Pacquiao.
As it turns out, the boxing fans and writers appeared to have judged wisely, because De La Hoya took a terrible beating and ended up quitting on his stool after the 8th round. In losing the fight, though, De La Hoya made tens of millions of dollars for the fight, which had to soften the blow of defeat somewhat for him.
Already vastly rich before the fight, the money seemed to give De La Hoya very little comfort and he brooded afterwards for a long time about the loss. Instead of seeing the fight as a product of De La Hoya’s foolish efforts to diet down to the 147 – a move which left De La Hoya weak and unable to perform at his best – he seemed to become discouraged about continuing on with his career.
In a way, De La Hoya never really gave himself a chance to discover whether he did in fact have anything left of his skills, because Oscar let the Pacquiao fight be his last bout of his career.
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