It was siesta, or lunch time, in Badalona, Spain, a suburb of Barcelona, when I wandered out of the Olympic boxing venue in the summer of 1992 with a couple of scribe friends and a legend of the corner, Lou Duva, for lunch at a nearby Chinese restaurant. (Hey, you couldn’t eat paella every day!) Lou promised to give us his take on the U.S. Olympic boxing team, which he was scouting for his stable.
There were a number of promising pugilists on the U.S. squad. There was a lanky light welterweight from Augusta, Ga., named Vernon Forrest, who was a favorite to win gold. There was a light middleweight from Houston with a world title named Raul Marquez. And there was a world champion from Los Angeles named Oscar De La Hoya.
Duva most wanted De La Hoya, whom he’d worked with as an amateur. “He could be a good one,” I recall Duva said of De La Hoya, who won the gold medal.
That turned out to be an understatement of massive proportions.
If there has been a prize fighter who has left a more indelible mark on the fight game since then than Oscar De La Hoya — who said Tuesday he’d laced up his gloves for the last time — I don’t know him.
And that is a conservative estimation. Why not go back the last quarter century, from about the time Sugar Ray Leonard’s career peaked with a comeback-from-injury decision over Marvelous Marvin Hagler in 1986?
After all, Mike Tyson was a flame out. Roy Jones Jr. never had a dance partner. Lennox Lewis was Larry Holmes on Ritalin. Pernell Whitaker was undone by advancing age and bad luck, including a questionable loss on points to De La Hoya.
I don’t recall exactly when New York boxing writer Michael Katz pinned his “Chicken” De La Hoya tag on Oscar, but by the time De La Hoya met Whitaker in 1997, it was more rubber than real. He’d walked through Rafael Ruelas, Jesse James Leija and — for the light welterweight title, his third weight-class crown — his idol, Julio Cesar Chavez.
And starting in 1999, De La Hoya fought everybody at every weight he could meet. Beat Ike Quartey to retain the welterweight belt. Lost it to Felix Trinidad and Shane Mosley. Broke Fernando Vargas in a grudge match for the light middleweight title. Lost that to Mosley in a rematch. Stepped up to Bernard Hopkins, the best middleweight since Hagler. At 34, tried a younger Floyd Mayweather, and last December at 35 tried a younger, smaller Manny Pacquiao.
