WHERE WERE THEY THEN? OSCAR AND FLOYD A DECADE AGO

by Ron Borges

Not everyone saw it coming 10 years ago but at least one man did.

When Floyd Mayweather, Jr. was a barely 130-pound, six-round fighter just a year removed from a disappointing finish at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Oscar De La Hoya was already a three-time world champion and a pay-per-view engine driving sales like no fighter his size since Sugar Ray Leonard. He would appear five times in 1997, all of them on HBO or pay-per-view, and hold two world titles in the process. By the end of that year, De La Hoya would be the welterweight champion of the world and the undisputed king of boxing's box office, which is the real title every fighter seeks.

Floyd Mayweather, Jr., on the otherhand, would fight 10 times that year against little known opponents like Kino Rodriguez, Bobby Giepert, Jesus Chavez (1-12-1) and Angelo Nunez, prepatory fights that would last a total of 28 rounds and eventually lead him, a year later, to his first title fight, a surprisingly one-sided stoppage of veteran champion Genaro Hernandez that gave Mayweather the WBC super featherweight title in eight rounds.

A year before the Hernandez fight, Top Rank matchmaker Bruce Trampler, who at the time was making fights for both Mayweather and De La Hoya under the aegis of promoter Bob Arum, was sure what he was seeing in the two of them. He was seeing a showdown to come, one that would turn out to take 10 years to make. It is a showdown that will finally come May 5 in Las Vegas in what is being projected to be one of the highest grossing non-heavyweight fights in boxing history and the groundwork for it, Trampler insists, was laid a decade earlier during those days when Mayweather watched with hungry eyes as De La Hoya became much more than a fighter. He became a phenomenon at a time when a 20-year-old Mayweather was toiling in relative obscurity.

It is a familiar story in boxing, one played out between Leonard and Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Sugar Ray Robinson and Carmen Basilio and many other fighters twined by skill, weight and timing. One fighter seems to be touched by gods. The other, just as skilled but not as lucky, stands in his shadow and waits fo his moment to arrive. Such was the case in 1997 when Oscar De La Hoya began to rule boxing while floyd Mayweather, Jr. watched in agitated frustration.

"The night we turned Floyd pro at Texas Station (a small Las Vegas casino) I told Todd (duBoef, Arum's son-in-law and president of Top Rank), 'This kid has a chance to do something special,''' Trampler recalled. "You could see how gifted Floyd was. We had a different situation with Oscar then. Oscar was already past his formative years and into bigger fights. We'd have meetings to discuss opponents with him, Bob and his trainer. Oscar would sit there spinning a pencil while we'd give him scouting reports on the names we had in mind and tell him what we thought. He'd always say the same thing, 'Which one pays the most?'''

As long as De La Hoya was in the ring it didn't matter that much who the opponent was because he was the one driving the event, a phenomenon that began a year earlier with his stunning and bloody stoppage of Mexican legend Julio Cesar Chavez. After that four round TKO, De La Hoya became more than a boxer. He became a Latino matinee idol either loved or reviled depending on your Hispanic sensibilities. Women adored him. So did some fight fans. But hard-core believers in the Aztec Warrior approach to boxing, which is often face first and safety last, seemed peeved at his slick and less bloody style. Yet they all paid to watch him, some praying for victory others in the hope someone, anyone, would beat him. Floyd Mayweather, Jr. felt the latter emotion. The difference was, even at the age of 20, he believed he knew who De La Hoya's ultimate conqueror would be.

"Floyd was flying with Bob to a fight sometime that year (1997) and when they landed Arum calls and says, 'You won't believe who Mayweather wants to fight,''' Trampler recalled. "I said, 'Oscar.' That's always been in Floyd's mind. He's always been very envious of the esteem and the adulation Oscar has received. "Ten years ago, he was already saying he wanted to fight Oscar but I don't think Floyd was even on Oscar's radar at that time. He was much bigger physically. Floyd was fighting at 130. By the end of that year Oscar was the welterweight champion.'' He didn't begin it that way though. While Mayweather was fighting nearly every month all over the country to build up both his resume and his profile, De La Hoya entered 1997 after a seven-month layoff following his total destruction of the great Chavez, who had been his idol as a kid growing up in the barrio of East Los Angeles. Many Mexican nationals refused to forgive De La Hoya for battering their grand champion, who many believe is the greatest fighter Mexico has produced, yet still his popularity grew, even during his self-imposed absence. So, too, he said back then, did his love for boxing. Absence, it seemed, had made the heart grow fonder of fisticuffs.

"I have a love for the sport now like I had when I was six years old,'' De La Hoya said two days before he would open the year on January 18, 1977 defending the WBC junior welterweight title he'd won from Chavez by easily outboxing formerly undefeated ex-lightweight champion Miguel Angel Gonzalez. "How I felt surprised me. I wanted to be in the limelight again. I missed performing. I missed fighting. I've never been away from boxing for seven months.''

That De La Hoya followed his victory over Chavez by beating another widely respected Mexican champion was no accident, as nothing in his career has been. It was part of Arum's Grand Plan to make him what he would soon become and remained for the next decade - the biggest name in boxing.

"When Oscar fought Mexican nationals, you'd expect Mexican nationals to be with their countrymen, not Oscar, and they were, but they still bought,'' Arum said at the time. "When Oscar fights a (Pernell) Whitaker or a (Hector "Macho'') Camacho (who is Puerto Rican), you expect them to be with him and they are and they buy. It's natural.

"Let's be candid. When Gerry Cooney had 'Danny Boy' playing when he fought, nobody said anyone was pandering to Irish-Americans. Now we play mariachi music before Oscar fights and guys make comments but you fish where the fish are. Right now the fish are in the Southwest and the West Coast.''

The greatest fisherman of that time proved to be De La Hoya, who would pack the Thomas and Mack Center at UNLV for Gonzalez and again on April 12 when he won a hotly disputed but unanimous decision over Whitaker that made De La Hoya the welterweight champion two fights after having won the 140-pound title from Chavez. Although many at ringside favored Whitaker, two judges had it 116-110 for De La Hoya and the third 115-111, scores Carl Moretti, who was then the matchmaker for Whitaker's promoter, felt reflected what he'd seen that night as well.

"Amongst ourselves we felt Oscar understood it was the right time to fight Pete,'' Moretti recalled. "He certainly wasn't fighting Pernell in his prime. They felt they needed something to sell and Whitaker was the guy at the time. They felt they could beat him. They turned out to be right. A couple years earlier we wouldn't have been concerned about De La Hoya but it was the right time for him and not the right time for Pernell.

"They could have given the fight to Pete but Oscar was busier and he had that 'Oscar momentum' going for him and it carried him through. I could understand how they gave it to Oscar. In a way, Pete let it slip away, which was enough for the judges, but I didn't leave in awe of Oscar. Clearly he knew how to fight. He was real good. But I didn't think he was an awesome talent like a Ray Robinson. He's turned into a little more than I thought he'd be.

"He's fought them all and beaten most of them and his marketability outside the ring has rightfully overshadowed what he's done in the ring. I never thought Oscar Mania would go where it's gone. In 1997, he was still a fighter. Today he's in the main stream culture. Everybody's heard of Oscar De La Hoya and not for what they'd heard of Mike Tyson for. Arum was masterful the way he promoted him, using his good looks and the fact he's bilingual to turn him into a phenomenon.''

By the time he faced Whitaker he was the kind of phenomenon who dictated the terms. Although Whitaker had lost only once in his career and was still considered the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, he was a 3-1 underdog to De La Hoya at the Las Vegas sportsbooks and he was guaranteed $4 million LESS than his 24-year-old challenger. Perhaps that is why, in the days leading up to the fight, Whitaker voiced an opinion many Mexican fight fans only dared whisper when he said, "There's not a hard part to that kid. Look in his eyes. There's something there that says he's soft.''

That issue was raised in part because after Gonzalez closed De La Hoya's left eye with three rounds to go, the Golden Boy seemed suddenly reluctant to stand his ground. The more he moved away and boxed smartly, the more his detractors nodded their heads knowingly. Yet others, including the man who trained Gonzalez for that fight and later would train De La Hoya for a time, argued otherwise.

"You watch that kid,'' Hall of Fame trainer Emanuel Steward said. "About 30 or 40 seconds after the fight starts, something happens to him. he becomes a stone killer. That kid wants to hurt you.''

He also wanted what Mayweather was dreaming of. He wanted to be a star and he succeeded beyond his own wildest dreams that year. The process began at the 1992 Olympics, blossomed after his bloody disposal of Chavez in 1996 and grew into an obsession by the end of 1997, an obsession that allowed him to set what was the record at the time for pay-per-view buys in a non-heavyweight fight that April despite the fact Whitaker had not been a big ticket seller or pay-per-view draw prior to meeting De La Hoya. After a quick knockout of David Kamau in two rounds in June that packed the Alamodome in San Antonio, De La Hoya came back on Sept. 13 and broke his own pay-per-view sales record for a non-heavyweight fight of 785,000 that he'd set against Whitaker back at a soldout Thomas and Mack Center against Hector Camacho before ending the year with a stoppage of Wilfredo Rivera in eight rounds in Atlantic City, a pre-Christmas fight (Dec. 12) designed to give him East Coast exposure .

It had been a year in which he had his eye closed by Gonzalez and opened to the possibilities his growing popularity provided him. He got knocked down by Whitaker and got up to win and then knocked Camacho down for the first time in his career in a fight in which two of the three judges felt De La Hoya won every one of the fight's 12 rounds. By that time, De La Hoya had also cornered the market on fight fans while Mayweather was working in the obscure vineyards of boxing in places like Biloxi, Grand Rapids and Boise, still toiling in the dark shadows of preliminary fights, some of which were fought on De La Hoya's undercards.

Mayweather fought 10 times in six states that year while the now four-time champion De La Hoya (130, 135, 140, 147) was shattering revenue records. Still a year away from his first world title fight and only two fights into his professional career when the year began, Mayweather was already growing restless at what he was seeing his stablemate accomplish, a restlessness that would eventually lead to a one-way feud with De La Hoya that when it is finally settled is expected to challenge the pay-per-view numbers De La Hoya put up against Whitaker, Camacho and later another Hispanic boxing idol, Felix Trinidad.

Although no longer involved with either fighter, Trampler saw this all coming long ago. Saw it when even Bob Arum did not.

"I used to tell Bob back in 1997, when Floyd was fighting all those preliminaries every month, that the big fight for Floyd would be Oscar,'' Trampler said, "Bob would say, 'He's 130 pounds! Are you crazy? Get out of here!' But here they are. It just took this long for their weights to get close enough (at the 154-pound junior middleweight limit insisted upon by De La Hoya).''

A decade since Trampler made that promise to Arum, Mayweather is no longer a preliminary fighter learning his trade by fighting once a month against kids no one ever heard of. He's a undefeated, 30-year old four-time world champion (37-0, 24 KO) himself who has been dominate in nearly every match he's been part of from Angelo Nunez to close 1997 to Carlos Baldomir to close 2006.

De La Hoya, on the other hand, has been bruised by boxing in the ensuing years. He's no longer undefeated (38-4, 30 KO) and has in fact lost some of his biggest challenges (twice to Shane Mosley, who spent three weeks serving as his sparring partner for the Mayweather fight; once in a highly questionable "loss'' by decision to Trinidad and suffered the only stoppage of his career when he unwisely moved up to challenge middleweight champion Bernard Hopkins after having started his career, like Mayweather, at 130 pounds).

Yet some things remain the same. De La Hoya is working with his sixth trainer, having declined to pay Mayweather's father, Floyd, Sr., the $2 million he was asking because he was not sure the father would be fully focused on teaching him how to beat up his son. So De La Hoya will work for the first time with veteran trainer Freddie Roach, a familiar story with De La Hoya, who hired Jesus Rivero in 1995 after he struggled against John John Molina and then fired him after he had footwork problems dealing with the left-handed Whitaker in 1997 and replaced him Steward. Steward is now long gone as well and so is Floyd Mayweather, Sr., although that seems more an unavoidable right of birth than De La Hoya being at odds with anything technical.

The other thing that has not changed with the passage of 10 years is that Oscar De La Hoya remains boxing's biggest drawing card. Together he and Floyd Mayweather, Jr. will make more than any two 154 pounders in history and that will primarily be because of the presence of boxing's Golden Boy in the ring at the MGM Grand Garden Arena, just as it was 10 years ago when he squared off with then WBC welterweight champion Pernell Whitaker. There was no question then who was bringing eyeballs to television sets and fans to the arena and there is none today, just as there is no doubt that the obsession Mayweather will bring so publicly into the ring on May 5 is the same one he voiced privately 10 years ago to Bob Arum on a private plane over Las Vegas.

"Some things are different for both of them today than they were 10 years ago but a lot of things are the same,'' Trampler said. "Oscar wasn't married then. He was young, healthy, fresh so he fought five times. Now Oscar makes an annual appearance (actually 364 days since his last fight). But he's still the biggest name in boxing.

"Floyd rarely misses a day in the gym. He's the young, hungry guy De La Hoya was when he fought Whitaker. Oscar is Pernell Whitaker now and Mayweather is in the role Oscar was 10 years ago.''

As the years pass things change in boxing, as they do in life, but the more they change the more they stay the same. The roles may be reversed on May 5, 2007 from what they were on April 12, 1997, the night De La Hoya defeated Pernell Whitaker to cement his place at the top of the boxing world, but the story is as old as the Fight Game itself. Young lions chasing old lions.

Ten years later, the pup who was Floyd Mayweather, Jr. is now ready to roar. Waiting to meet his challenge will be the same fighter Mayweather was obsessed with a decade ago when Oscar De La Hoya was first becoming what he still is today - the man by whom all other champions are measured.