The Most Significant Fighter of His Time

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.


De La Hoya lost six of his 11 most-marquee matchups since first dismantling Chavez in 1996. I was ringside for most of them and they can be parsed. His Trinidad loss was questionable. His first loss to Mosley, a split decision, was questionable, too.

But none of that detracts from what made De La Hoya, despite standing just 5-foot-10 and tipping the scales at no more than 160 pounds, such an overwhelming figure in boxing -- pugilistic personality.

It wasn't just that De La Hoya always came to fight, as his close losses evidenced. Other fighters of his generation respected the sport as much. It wasn't just that he was the best for a spell, as his ascension to Ring magazine's Fighter of the Year and Pound-for-Pound best fighter in the world by the middle and late '90s proved.

It was that De La Hoya brought an honorable excitement to the ring that appealed not just to hardcore fight fans, but casual ones. Women were attracted to his clean good looks, a burgeoning Mexican-American community that clamored for one of its own celebrated him, and cable TV programmers in need of a universal draw flocked his way.

De La Hoya the fighter had charisma. He was in the ring a Sugar Ray Leonard incarnate. He wasn't as good a fighter, but he was an even better draw. He was a mainstream star in a sport that doesn't have them anymore.

If there was one fighter who boxing should have freed up every now and then for free TV to grow itself again on the American sports psyche it was De La Hoya. To be certain, De La Hoya became the undisputed champion of pay-per-view broadcasts for a non-heavyweight in the history of his game.

During De la Hoya's 16-year pro career, he was on 19 HBO Pay-Per-View broadcasts that generated 14.1 million buys for upward of $700 million in revenue. He set the pay-per-view record with 2.5 million buys for his 2007 bout with Mayweather.

De La Hoya became boxing's stimulus plan.

"As an attraction, I don't see any way he could have been bigger," Bob Arum, who wound up beating out Duva to promote De la Hoya for most of his career, told New York Daily News boxing columnist Tim Smith the other day. "He was huge. He was 'the' attraction in boxing, certainly after Tyson."

The good news for boxing in the wake of De La Hoya's announcement is that he is only leaving the ring, and not the game. Several years ago, De la Hoya ventured into an arena other fighters before him have tried with lackluster success, promotion. He almost immediately picked up that aspect of the game as he did the fighting part.

De La Hoya's Golden Boy Promotions has left Don King Productions in the dust and is gaining on Arum's Top Rank as the fight game's leading promotion concern. His fighters and his cards are mimicking his charisma and respect for the game.

De La Hoya is continuing to be to boxing what Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were to the NBA, the great resuscitator.

Kevin B. Blackistone is a panelist on ESPN's Around the Horn, the Shirley Povich Chair in Sports Journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, and a former award-winning sports columnist for The Dallas Morning News. He currently lives in Silver Spring, Md.