By Sam Singh: Following my recent article on measuring Joe Calzaghe against all time (available at: http://www.boxingnews24.com/2010/10/joe-calzaghe-measured-against-all-time), I feel compelled as an avid boxing spectator to review the career of Oscar De La Hoya, and, in doing so, voice my firm support for his achievements.

In stark contrast to Cliff Rold, a respected writer within the boxing world who is a member of the Ring Magazine Advisory Panel and the Boxing Writers Association of America, I oppose Rold’s verdict on De La Hoya in his estimation that De La Hoya should not be regarded as an all-time great.

In my direct response to Rold’s article on measuring Joe Calzaghe, I made my stance on Joe Calzaghe very clear in that he is nowhere near all-time great status. On the contrary, Rold’s verdict on Calzaghe was that the Welsh prize-fighter should be regarded as an all-time great.

On the career of Oscar De La Hoya, Rold deems De La Hoya not to be an all-time great and instead claims De La Hoya as hall-of-fame worthy. I, however, oppose Rold’s estimations and agree with the view adopted by ESPN who rank Oscar De La Hoya as 39th in their greatest fighter of all-time rankings.

To summarize De La Hoya’s career, he fought 23 former/current world champions in a staggering 29 world championship fights to became a 10-time world champion in 6-weight divisions. If these achievements do not merit all-time great status yet prize-fighters like Calzaghe are deemed to reach all-time great status then something is seriously wrong.

Of course, all prize-fights have their share of easier fights but as I highlighted in my article on Joe Calzaghe, a closer look at the Ring magazine’s official annual ratings for each respective weight class and its best contenders for a given year show that 16 of Calzaghe’s 21 championship fights came against opponents who were not ranked within the Ring’s top-ten contenders for the 168lb division when Calzaghe fought them. This totalled a staggering period of five years.

I emphasise these statistics because when you place Oscar De La Hoya’s career under analysis through the same official Ring annual ratings we find a stark contrast in that De La Hoya consistently fought the very best prize-fighters of his time, fighting the very best contenders of the weight classes he was competing in.

Surprisingly, however, many like Rold deem De La Hoya to fall short of all-time great status and use his defeats as a deciding factor in determining his career achievements against all-time greatness.

My argument is that if you take a closer look at his 6 defeats you find that his first loss against Felix Trinidad ended in a clear robbery in a fight where De La Hoya clearly won the first 8-rounds. His second defeat came to a prime Shane Mosley where he was split-decisioned in a fight which could’ve gone either way. His following defeat was again at the hands of Shane Mosley who later admitted in a court of law that he was on performance-enhancing drugs in their close rematch. His fourth defeat came to Bernard Hopkins at middleweight, a weight De La Hoya was not naturally grown into. This was followed by his defeat to Floyd Mayweather in another split-decision loss closely followed by the clear defeat to Pacquiao at 147lbs, a weight De La Hoya grew out from in 2001.

Verdict: Oscar De La Hoya quite rightly deserves his ESPN ranking as one the greatest fighters of all-time and his career must be looked at with perspective to truly respect his great achievements.