CINCO DE MAYWEATHER

by Ron Borges | Photos by Will Hart and Ed Mulholland

In the end, Saturday night turned out to be Cinco de Mayweather.

In a closely contested match in which neither man was able to master the other, Floyd Mayweather, Jr. won a loudly booed split decision over Oscar De La Hoya to claim the World Boxing Council super welterweight title before a sellout crowd at the Grand Garden Arena. De La Hoya was the aggressor throughout the night but Mayweather was the master defender, seldom feeling the full fury of De La Hoya's trademark left hook or stinging jab except when De La Hoya slammed him to the body.

The fight was so closely contested that had judge Jerry Roth's scoring of the final round agreed with judges Tom Kaczmarek and Chuck Giampa, who both gave the round to De La Hoya, the bout would have been a draw. Roth had not judged a De La Hoya match in seven years (nine fights), not since the night in 1999 when he had Felix Trinidad a 115-113 winner over De La Hoya in a fight few ringside observers felt Trinidad had won but who was handed a majority decision regardless.

After the bout was over a brief few minutes of confusion reigned when it was found that the Nevada State Athletic Commission had put the fighters in the wrong colored corners on the master scorecard. Momentarily Golden Boy Promotions' CEO Richard Schaefer thought that might have made De La Hoya the winner but commision executive director Keith Kizer said he had checked with all three judges and each agreed that the announced scoring was correct. After checking the individual scorecards, Schaefer said "I believe the scorecards are correct.''

Although Mayweather exhibited few of the flashes of brilliance that had become his trademark and seldom threw enough combinations to make his handspeed a factor, he insisted after his hand had been raised that he had clearly won a fight whose outcome few in the partisan crowd of De La Hoya supporters seemed to support.

"Look at the punch stat numbers,'' Mayweather (38-0) said. "Then you can see the new champion tonight. He was rough and tough but he couldn't beat the best. Oscar fought one hell of a fight but I stayed on the outside and made him miss. I just fought the best fighter of our era and I beat him.'' De La Hoya disagreed, insisting that he had landed "the harder, crisper punches.'' In addition he argued forcefully that had he not pressed the action there would have been no action.

"If I hadn't pressed the fight there'd have been no fight,'' De La Hoya said flatly and quite correctly.

Mayweather's father, Floyd, Sr., agreed with his former fighter rather than his son, saying, "I thought Oscar won. Oscar threw more punches and was the aggressior. My son had good defense and caught a lot of punches but Oscar pressed enough to win the fight.''

Had De La Hoya not inexplicably given up his height, and hence his jab and the ability to contain Mayweather along the ropes halfway through the fight, the night might have gone differently for him. But after eight rounds he suddenly began going into an odd crouch that made him shorter than his 5-8 opponent despite having a four inch advantage in height. When he did, De La Hoya stopped jabbing and lost control of Mayweather, who began to more easily find ways to spin away from him, avoiding the problems he had faced along the ropes early in the fight when he seemed to have a difficult time getting free of De La Hoya when he would corner him and begin to blister his body.

De La Hoya's crouch also allowed Mayweather to begin landing his own hard right hand more readily, right hands that may well have carried the night for him. Two of the three judges gave Mayweather four of those last five rounds, his advantage coming at just the same time De La Hoya went into his odd crouch, apparently to try and land with more power.

It was an unwise tactical decision and Mayweather took advantage of it often enough to keep his undefeated record intact by the thinnest of margins. For De La Hoya (38-5) it was another disappointing night in Las Vegas, where he has lost three fights by split or majority decision. He did manage to become the first fighter to raise a question about the outcome of a Mayweather fight as the new champion had previously won 37 times by either unanimous decision or a knockout but that was a small victory in a sea of disappointment for boxing's Golden Boy and not nearly what De La Hoya was looking for on a night when he was guaranteed over $23 million and became boxing's all-time highest grossing pay-per-view attraction.

For Mayweather it was validation of his long-held belief that he is the best fighter in the world. Already seen as the best pound-for-pound boxer on the planet before the fight began, Mayweather announced his retirement immediately after the fight, saying he had nothing left to accomplish while De La Hoya said he would return home to Puerto Rico to ponder his own future.

If either of them asked the crowd its collective opinion as it filed out, both would not have been talking of retirement, however. They would have been talking of a subject that will surely come up soon enough. They would have been talking about a rematch.