Now that Floyd Mayweather has beaten Oscar De La Hoya for a junior middleweight title, he’s off to the talk shows, appearing on Jay Leno and Craig Ferguson and acting like the superstar-boxing-god he’s always aspired to be. Now, he probably feels he could crush both Sugar Rays, Roberto Duran, and Barney Ross all in the same night, without one of them landing a blow.
I don’t know whether that is true or not. One thing I do know – and Floyd Mayweather should know – is that de la Hoya will crush him any night of the week if the boxing powers dispensed with PunchStats and used pay per view statistics to judge their fights. Outside his family, and maybe even not including them, not one of the 2.15 million who put up their hard-earned money for the pay per view telecast did it to watch Mayweather. It was all Oscar’s show but not his night in the boxing ring.
The funny thing is I think a lot of people did use pay per view numbers as a basis for scoring. A lot of people, including many boxing writers and most puzzlingly one of the judges of their fight on Saturday, saw Oscar as winning or coming out even with Mayweather after twelve rounds in Las Vegas. I don’t want to say they were wrong since we all see different things in fights and rate different aspects of the sport more highly than others.
But I think the fight was close for some because many wanted Oscar to do well. (And my calling him “Oscar” shows that I’m a lot like those people scoring it close.) Some might have stopped looking at what was happening in the ring and started to give Oscar rounds on the basis of his looking fierce, throwing punches in bunches, landing a series of arm punches to the body during a clinch, and simply staying in there with the younger, better fighter. De La Hoya was given credit the same way Muhammad Ali was given credit against Jimmy Young and in his rematches with Kenny Norton; the same way Sugar Ray Leonard was given credit against Marvin Hagler and in his rematch with Thomas Hearns. Just being in there was enough for some to give him the victory or a draw to retain his belt.
Coming into the fight, I thought De La Hoya was going to find a way to pull it off but then after watching “24/7,” I changed my mind. When I wrote about why, I said Mayweather would win a one-sided fight. This, to my eyes, is what happened. Knowing that Mayweather is a defensive master, I spent each round looking carefully at what was landing on Mayweather, seeing what was blocked and dodged and missed. After the twelve rounds I could find only two rounds that I could give to De La Hoya, the second and the eighth. He won the second on aggression and the eighth by using a jab to Mayweather’s shoulders and body, a jab that put Mayweather off balance and should’ve been used throughout the fight. As for the other rounds, only the 6th and the 7th were close in my eyes, and the rest were for Mayweather. I know many say there were early rounds for De La Hoya, but I don’t see it that way. I think he was competitive in those rounds but not the winner. But to be fair, I must confess I wasn’t at the fight live.
Even though he lost, De La Hoya acquitted himself well. At 34, he showed he has lost a step or two and cannot get the punches off in the way he once did. And by the end of the night, he simply followed Mayweather around the ring taking shots to the head and throwing nothing back in return. But every exchange was exciting, every time De La Hoya stepped in to throw his wild flurries and during every round he made competitive, I wondered whether a miracle would occur.
It was the same kind of feeling I had watching Mike Tyson against Lennox Lewis, knowing Tyson was losing but thinking he could come up with that knockout punch. This time, though, the dominating boxer wasn’t the heavy-fisted Canadian but the feather duster Mayweather, so De La Hoya stuck around for 12 rounds and probably would’ve lasted another dozen. Now, like Barney Ross after being pummeled by Henry Armstrong, De La Hoya should know enough is enough and stick to running his promotion company.
De la Hoya has had a wonderful career, ranking not ahead of Trinidad, Mosley, Hopkins, or Mayweather on my list but either a little bit behind them or among them. No matter what, though, he is a real anomaly in boxing: a box office superstar without the great victories enjoyed by his obvious peers, Sugar Ray Leonard and Muhammad Ali and without the meltdowns of Mike Tyson. So, maybe he is a perfect model for what boxing needs: a good boxer willing to face the toughest fighters out there and win, lose, or draw, not embarrass the sport. If it is true boxing needs the best boxers to face the best, De La Hoya has laid out the blueprint.
Mayweather, then, the best boxer in the world (but not the pound per pound best unless Pacquiao retires from boxing for a career in politics) needs to pick up where De La Hoya left off. He needs to avoid a rematch with De La Hoya despite what money it will generate because it will stall the sport for another six months and we already have Hopkins-Wright to bore us. What he needs to do is pick a division and use his stature as the best to let others shine.
De La Hoya stayed at welterweight for many years and gave Quartey, Trinidad, and Mosely a chance to make some big money. And that’s what Mayweather should do. He should shrink his 148 pound frame back down to 147 and allow the stars fighting quietly there to have their crack at him: Mosley, Williams, Margarito, and Clottey are all fighters I would like to see attempting to make the “Pretty Boy” ugly. And the fight we would all like to see is Mayweather-Cotto. If De La Hoya could do as well as he did with a body attack on Mayweather, imagine what Cotto would do.
If Mayweather does the right thing, returns to 147, and begins a round of fights with those guys, he will create anew what we had 10 years ago at 147. A group of guys fighting each other to determine who is the best. Even if he does the right thing and brings the talent out at 147, I don’t ever expect him to be another Sugar Ray Robinson. There will only ever be one of those. But he could be one fighter among a company similar to the quartet of De La Hoya, Trinidad, Quartey, and old-man Whitaker. He, along with Cotto and Margarito and Mosley, could make some sweet music in the ring and the only instrument they’ll need is a bell.
