OSCAR RETURNS

May 5, 2006 - by Ron Borges

At 33, Oscar De La Hoya is one of the most successful prize fighters in boxing history, if the size of his prizes is the measuring stick.

As his May 6 return to boxing approaches after a self-imposed 20-month exile from the ring, De La Hoya is preparing for his 28th world title fight and to face his 22nd world champion. In those fights he has won some form of a world title in six different weight classes ranging from 130 pounds to 160 pounds, a spread of the scales even someone like the legendary Henry Armstrong would have been proud to call his own.

Most importantly, this being prize fighting, he has participated in 16 pay-per-view fights in which his presence has generated the bulk of the $439,300,000 those matches grossed. Saturday night, when he steps into the ring at the MGM Grand Garden Arena to face reigning World Boxing Council junior middleweight champion Ricardo Mayorga in a more than soldout building (the promoters ADDED seats last week because of the ticket demand), he is expecting to again do 500,000 buys or more on pay-per-view. Don King, Mayorga's promoter, is so confident of De La Hoya's upside potential that he agreed to not begin taking a share of the pay-per-view for Mayorga until it breeches 600,000, a figure that would be impossible for anyone else in boxing to reach, including all of the four present heavyweight champions.

Outside the ring, De La Hoya has become the face of a conglomerate known as Golden Boy Enterprises, a company that could not be more aptly named. Boxing has not only made him a millionaire fighter, it's made him a millionaire owner of his own promotional company, Golden Boy Promotions, and more importantly the CEO of a multi-headed corporation that owns office buildings in Los Angeles and Manhattan, shares of Spanish-language newspapers in L.A., New York, Miami and Chicago; a large stake in the sugar substitute Equal, a CD that was nominated for a Latin Grammy award, a children's book called "Super Oscar''; a development company that is building homes and retail centers on 10-acre sites in several areas around southern California and in July Banco Latino Americano, a bank geared toward servicing the Latino community in Los Angeles.

One could stop right there but De La Hoya hasn't. He also has a thriving charitable foundation that has built a cancer center in his mother's name in East Los Angeles that provides free mammograms to low-income women, created the Oscar De La Hoya Youth Center which exchanges free boxing lessons and other recreation with low-income kids if they remain in school and keep their grades at a satisfactory level, funds college scholarships for underprivileged students and recently he donated the land for a charter school in East L.A. that will be the first public school built in that community in more than 20 years.

So why is the guy still fighting? To De La Hoya the answer is as simple as he is complex. He is back in the ring because even after all his success in and out of boxing he remains the same guy he was when he won the gold medal at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. He is still someone who cannot accept losing, someone who refuses to go out of the sport that made all these things possible on his knees.

"I'm a competitive person,'' De La Hoya said several days before he will meet one of boxing's angriest and most unpredictable opponents. "What I want to do is bigger than boxing. I want to retire with my hand up in the air. As a champion. That would be remembered for many years to come.

"I was on the canvas in my last fight (a stoppage from a body shot against middleweight champion Bernard Hopkins, who now fights for De La Hoya's promotional company). I can picture myself on the canvas with Hopkins almost every night. I want that erased. Any athlete, (Michael) Jordan, Tiger (Woods), won't go out like that.''

And so he is back after nearly two years off, back to challenge the unorthodox, foul-mouthed and, some would say, certifiably insane Mayorga for the 154-pound title De La Hoya once held. But as much of a draw as he remains, questions now swirl around boxing's Golden Boy, a man who is still golden but a boy no longer.

De La Hoya is at an age where skills fade in the ring even if they are repeatedly honed, which his have not been in his last few years because of relative inactivity. As De La Hoya grew in both weight and stature, he fought less and less. Where once he was a feared puncher at 130 and even 140 pounds, that power began to disappear as he moved up in weight to face bigger men among the welterweight, junior middleweight and middleweight ranks. By the time he reached Hopkins, he was purely a boxer, a problem that became a catastrophy once Hopkins realized it and began to close the distance on him and punish his body.

"I didn't belong there (at 160),'' De La Hoya now admits, which is why he shrunk back to 154 pounds, a weight limit he will probably fall several pounds short of on Friday.

More importantly though to the wise men around the sport, Oscar De La Hoya sleeps on silk sheets now, which is a death sentence for a prize fighter. He owns a home in Puerto Rico, where he lives with his wife Millie and his new son, that would be considered a resort by many people. He is building an equally lush mansion in Pasadena, Calif., where he intends to settle down once boxing is over. These are not the spawning grounds of great fighters for they are not the addresses of a hungry man whose only success must be won by his fists and the willingness to leak his own blood as a sacrifice.

He prepared four months to face Mayorga but he did it at home in Puerto Rico this time, not up in the mountains above L.A., at the training camp on Big Bear Lake where he once used to secret himself for long months before a fight like this one. With a new baby in tow and a wife he owuld like him to retire, he chose to prepare in a place where he could chip golf balls in the backyard between sparring sessions.

De La Hoya has now become the most dangerous thing to a prize fighter - he's become rich. What that does, the old trainers will tell you, is making you soft. It takes away the urge to get up, as he did to win against Ike Quartey in a fight he considers among the most satisifying of his career and did not do against Hopkins, instead beating his fists into the canvas after he was counted out from a body shot he said paralyzed him but others, including the respected trainer Freddie Roach, questioned was forceful enough to drive a man to the floor and keep him there.

De La Hoya knows these doubts about him persist. He admits to having had them himself in the first few weeks of training for Mayorga. Most of all, he knows whatever Ricardo Mayorga wsa doing the past few months, he was not chipping golf balls. Yet he is back again where he insists he still is most comfortable. He is back in the bright lights of the arena, on the corner of Pain Street and Bloody Avenue, for at least one more time to do what he long ago no longer needed to do.

"Ninety five per cent of the fighters stay in this business too long,'' De La Hoya said. "I don't want to be one of those guys. It's dangerous to stick around too long. I'm a smart guy. I understand that. I don't want to be like those other guys but I have the perfect opportunity to make history now. I think Mayorga is the biggest fish out there and I'm ready for him. I'm anxious to fight again. I'm ready physically and I'm ready mentally. I have the opportunity to retire as champion and not ever come back again. That's huge.''

Not so huge, however, that he hasn't already hinted that if he beats Mayorga he wants one more grand moment: a fight on Sept. 16. That is one of several Mexican Independance days and a date he has fought on in Las Vegas many times.

It is a date with meaning for him and so already the fighter in winter is thinking of doing what all his predecessors but Rocky Marciano did. He's thinking of fighting "one more time'' after this time. It is the trap boxing so often leaves out for its most decorated heroes. The lure of "one more time.''

When De La Hoya was a young man he sat in a restaurant in Badalona, Spain, a suburb outside Barcelona where the Olympic boxing finals had just ended with him wearing a gold medal around his neck. At that time he didn't have the kind of money he has today, nor the fancy houses, gleaming cars, thriving businesses or a wife and three children. But he had the common sense that seems to fade in a boxer's mind with the passage of time.

That day, as he wore his medal and a smile, the two things that would help to make him rich, he said he would never fight past the age of 30. He would instead go to college and become an architect after acheiving greatness in professional boxing. He has, in a sense done that. He is the architect of one of the most remarkable careers in the history of boxing's often shady business and he is only one ballot away from entering the Hall of Fame, which he will do the first time his name appears on the eligibility list.

But he is also now a performer on the edge of staying too long on the stage. At 33, his skills have diminished some whether he sees it or not. Mayorga may be the perfect foil for him because he is a flawed and defensively loose opponent with great punching power but limited abilities to box or adjust his thinking in the ring. He is destined, people expect, to become the angry, snorting and bloody bull to De La Hoya's uncaped matador at some point Saturday night.

Yet the prize ring is a dangerous place to grow old, as De La Hoya acknowledges. The lure of one more fight has gored many men, including the greatest who ever fought like Sugar Ray Robinson, Roberto Duran and just about anyone else you can think of. It is not a place that hands out gold watches at the end of a long and meritorious career. It's a place that hands out beatings, an office where most of its greatest acheivers end up on their knees or wearing sunglasses at midnight because they tried one time too many to avenge defeat or re-live lost glory.

Oscar De La Hoya understands this but he also believes in the myth, and the reality, of the Golden Boy. He is 33, old but not decrepit for a prize fighter. He is coming back at least once more for the best of reasons. For the only reason that can still drive a man into the ring after he's slept on silk sheets many times over. He's back to spit out the bitter taste of defeat and have his hand raised one last time.

"Risking that in September by taking a fight where there's a chance I could lose, that's a big risk,'' De La Hoya said. "May 6 is my opportunity to retire on top. I've mentioned September as the ideal date for me to retire. Come May 7, I'll have to do a lot of thinking. Nothing is set in stone.''

Nothing Oscar De La Hoya's steely resolve to do in the ring what he has done in business. To balance the books. To win one last time.