American Son

by Oscar De La Hoya

  I came down from the mountains a few days before the fight and stayed in a hotel next to the Forum. There was a constant stream of well-wishers in and out of my room in those final days, but all the people and the talk and the hype failed to shatter my calm. I knew I was prepared and was confident I could succeed at this level. I was like a caged animal that had been watching his prey for some time and was ready to pounce.

  When they finally opened my cage and let me out into the exhilarating atmosphere of the Forum, I have to admit I was surprised. Despite all the buildup, I still thought this fight wouldn’t be much different from what I had experienced in the amateurs, a few hundred people in the seats with family and friends in the forefront loudly cheering me on. Maybe there would be as many as a thousand on hand.

  When I walked out, heard them playing “Sangre Caliente,” a song I had requested, and saw the crowd of over six thousand…that’s when I got nervous.

  Among those in the crowd was my grandfather Vicente. What was going through his mind? He had felt the thrill of being a fighter himself, the excitement of watching his son take that same pressure-packed walk into an arena as a prizefighter, and now he was watching a third-generation De La Hoya carry the name into the ring.

  I can only guess how my grandfather felt because we never discussed it or much of anything else connected to boxing. He wasn’t one to get into a boxing stance and tutor me on the fine points of the jab or the left hook. He wasn’t one to analyze my career. All he ever said to me was, “Good job.”

  He would just sit in his seat and beam. But his very presence reminded me I was being entrusted with a precious family tradition.

  Once I got into the ring, that feeling faded. Beating Williams wasn’t what was on my mind. I was thinking about the after-party. I was thinking about how I would get even more money for my next fight after winning this one. That gave me a feeling of elation as I listened to the referee’s introduction.

  Williams was an afterthought.

  I was introduced as the Golden Boy, a nickname I had been hearing since Barcelona. When I stepped off the victory platform at the Olympics, my uncle Vicente, was among the many friends and relatives awaiting me.

  “Hey, Golden Boy,” he said.

  Vicente explained that, to him, I still had the face of a young boy, but now it had a shine to it, supplied by the bright medal around my neck.

  Like that medal, the name would hang on me for a lifetime.

  When I started fighting professionally, John Beyrooty, a sportswriter for the old Los Angeles Herald Examiner, picked up the name and put it in print. It turned out there had been a boxing movie called Golden Boy starring William Holden, and then the name had been passed on to a colorful Los Angeles fighter named Art Aragon.

  Now it was mine.

  Before the first round was over, Williams was officially an afterthought. After two knockdowns, I landed four more punches—double jab, right hand, left hook—and he was out.

  In making a leap from the amateurs to the pros, a leap I had heard so much about, I thought it was going to be more memorable, more difficult.

  When my hand was raised, I thought, Is that it? I should have turned pro a long time ago.

  XI

  NEON WARRIOR

  While that shiny gold medal put a smile on the faces of my family and friends, to my opponents, it was a beacon to zero in on and destroy. By beating me, they could win gold in their own right in terms of larger purses along with a brighter future. So while I was using my early fights to hone my skills, the man in the opposite corner was strictly looking for blood.

  I had to be careful.

  At least I was getting fair reward for my efforts.

  Bob Arum was first presented to me as the man who was going to financially back Mittleman and Nelson, enabling them to make good on their offer to me. Beyond that, I didn’t know who Bob was.

  But I came to appreciate him very quickly. While Mittleman and Nelson were in arrears with my first purse, that changed when Bob took over as my promoter. I’d be told what my purse was going to be, and sure enough, when the fight was over, that’s what I’d get.

  My second fight was against Cliff Hicks in Phoenix. I was on the undercard with Michael Carbajal in the main event.

  After showing in my first fight that I had the power to be successful at the pro level, I next wanted to demonstrate I could be a two-fisted fighter. Having relied primarily on my left hook in the past, I concentrated in training camp on using my right hand more frequently and effectively. It paid off. I knocked Hicks out with the right, again in the first round.

  Two fights, two rounds. Not bad.

  My next opponent was Paris Alexander. I was about as concerned as I would be if I was fighting Paris Hilton. I didn’t study film of my opponents in those days or worry much about their style. I stopped Paris in the second round in a match fought at the Hollywood Palladium.

  In my fourth fight, I was facing an opponent named Curtis Strong, fighting live on network television in San Diego on a Saturday afternoon. It was a huge date for me at that point in my career, a great opportunity.

  Everything was going great until the Wednesday night of fight week. That’s when I felt this bump on the back of one of my legs. It really hurt. It felt hard when I touched it, so I figured it must be a bad bruise.

  I told Robert we should get a doctor to look at it. On Thursday night, a local physician agreed to make a house call at the cottage I was staying in.

  He told me I had a really bad ingrown hair on my leg and he wanted to operate.

  By that time, my leg had gotten so bad that I was limping, so I told him to go ahead and do the surgery. I couldn’t fight like that anyway. If we had to, we would postpone the match.

  I asked the doctor how he was going to do it. Were we going to go to his office, or to a hospital?

  “No, no,” he said. “I can do it right here in the room.”

  Uhhh, no.

  Next thing I know, he’s pulling out his bag, telling me to lie down on the bed, and giving me a towel to bite on.

  For some reason, I agreed to do it. Don’t ask me why.

  Right away, I was sorry. He literally carved out a hole in my leg the size of a nickel, three-quarters of an inch deep. I was in excruciating pain. He stuffed some gauze in the incision, put bandages on it, and taped the whole thing up.

  The doctor told me it was going to be painful for the next few days and he thought I should postpone the fight.

  Mittleman and Nelson, who were both in the room, blew up.

  “What are you talking about?” they said. “He has to fight.”

  I didn’t say anything while they were there. But once they left, I told Alcazar, “I can’t fight. I can’t even walk.”

  It was so bad, the doctor had left me crutches. How was I supposed to train?

  Robert had no answer. The next morning, Friday, I didn’t go on my usual run when I woke up.

  While I was sitting around the cottage, I received a call from Mario Lopez, someone I knew at that point only from seeing him as an actor on TV. He lived in San Diego and had heard I was there. He came over with his family and we took some pictures together.

  I told him I probably wasn’t going to fight because I had had surgery on my leg.

  He said if that was the case, why not go over to Tijuana? That sounded pretty good. We were practically next door.

  We didn’t get over the border until Friday night. It was pretty funny. Here I was still using my crutches.

  But we had a good time, I might have even had a beer or two, and we didn’t get back until four or five in the morning. It was so late, I wound up staying at Mario’s place.

  When I woke up, I went back to my cottage, and who was waiting for me there? Yep, both Mittleman and Nelson.

  They screamed, “What are you doing? What’s going on?”

  It was about seven or eight in the morning by then and the fight was at two in the afternoon.

  Didn’t matte
r where I had been or what time it was, they said, I had to fight. This was national television, they stressed. They told me they had talked to Bob and he felt the same way.

  They finally pressured me into going ahead with the match. I wore bicycle shorts under my trunks to make sure the gauze and tape didn’t fall off, a real possibility once I started sweating.

  I never did get any additional rest that day, but once the bell rang, it was like I had had eight hours of sleep. It was amazing.

  I was lucky enough to stop Strong on a TKO in the fourth round.

  Still, I wouldn’t recommend having surgery on your hotel bed.

  My fifth fight was De La Hoya–Mayweather. That’s right, before Floyd Jr., before the richest fight in boxing history, before an event that resulted in 2.4 million pay-per-view buys, there was another De La Hoya–Mayweather battle, cheaper to watch, harder to sell, tougher to remember.

  That’s because the opponent was not Floyd, but Jeff, a brother of Floyd Sr., my future trainer.

  At the time, though, it was huge for me, my first real test, I was told. Mayweather was twenty-eight, had been in twenty-seven fights and was 23–2–2. Eight years younger and having fought twenty-three fewer fights, I seemed like a mere boy going in against a savvy, skilled veteran. I was confident, however, that there was no such disparity in our respective skill levels.

  As would be the case fourteen years later, that De La Hoya–Mayweather match was also held in Las Vegas. It was the first time I saw the neon lights of a town that would become synonymous with my fights.

  My grand arrival in the lobby of a glitzy, high-rise palace, towering over the strip, a two-story penthouse suite awaiting me, was far in the future. When Mittleman and Nelson brought me to Vegas for that 1993 fight, they put me in a rinky-dink motel. Really nasty. My room was way in the back, practically out in the desert.

  Fortunately, the manager of the establishment recognized me. “Hey, champ,” he said, “what are you doing here? You’re a gold medalist. You should be staying in a suite in some nice joint.”

  He was under no illusions about the quality of his place.

  I tried to act like it was no big deal, but he was insistent.

  “Let me take care of you,” he said.

  That he did. The next thing I knew, I was in a penthouse suite in the Frontier Hotel, living like a king. I could order anything I wanted from room service. That was big stuff for me in those days.

  Mittleman and Nelson knew nothing about this until I was already settled in my luxurious new accommodations. They are my managers and I needed a motel manager to upgrade me.

  Once they found out about it, Mittleman and Nelson, who were still in that dump, told me they needed to move over to be with me.

  “Fine,” I said, “check with the guy at the motel. Maybe he can take care of you, too.”

  I had gotten a taste of the good life that would await me in Vegas in future years, but the city’s main attraction remained tantalizingly out of reach on that trip. Being only twenty, I couldn’t get into the casino.

  I tried, oh, how I tried. I would kind of slink in and sit down quickly at a slot machine so as not to draw attention to myself, but that’s exactly what I was doing. I was quickly escorted out. Gold medal? Undefeated fighter? Motel manager with connections? The pit bosses were not impressed.

  I had better luck in the fight against Mayweather. He had the family traits I would come to know so well: slick moves, fancy defense, sneaky fast.

  For the first few rounds, it was difficult for me to figure him out. I had come up against the first real challenge of my career. I stayed aggressive, plunged forward, and got to him in the fourth round, winning by TKO.

  Bob Arum and his matchmaker for his Top Rank Boxing organization, Bruce Trampler, were not putting me in against the typical lineup of stiffs most young prospects get to learn against. I was being moved fast, but that was fine with me. Having sparred with pros all the way back to my teens and having battled the best amateurs in the world en route to Olympic gold, I wanted new challenges.

  That I got. Less than a month after beating Mayweather, I found myself in Rochester, New York, facing Mike Grable, who was 13–1–2.

  That was the first time Trampler supplied me with tapes for Robert and me to study. As the talent level of my opponents continued to rise, it was time to stop focusing solely on myself.

  It had seemed strange traveling across the country for the first time as a pro to face Grable, but I soon felt like I had never left L.A. People recognized me from the Olympics everywhere I went in Rochester. When I entered the arena, it seemed like everybody was rooting for me.

  Grable was as good as his record, taking me to the limit for the first time as a pro. I won an eight-round decision. He was strong as a bull, and though I knocked him down twice and got a standing eight-count in the final round, I just could not knock him out.

  It would have been different if I had been able to wear Reyes gloves, which are geared for power. Instead, all they had were Ever-last, which I wore for the first, and last, time.

  No matter who I was up against in those early days, I felt I had a guardian angel accompanying me into the ring. That angel’s name was Cecilia Gonzalez De La Hoya. After every fight, I would thank my mother for watching over me, guiding me, and protecting me.

  With my next opponent, Frank Avelar, I ran into my first trash talker. He taunted me in the days before the fight, his confidence bolstered by a 15–3 record. Avelar mocked my Golden Boy nickname and vowed to knock me out. And it wasn’t only him. He had a big, noisy family there trying to get into my head as well.

  While Avelar and his family were annoying, I had a bigger problem for that Lake Tahoe fight: my weight. It was the first time I struggled to make 130 pounds since I had turned pro. It got to the point where all I would eat for breakfast was a couple of egg whites, followed over the ensuing hours by a minimal amount of water and a few oranges. That would be it for the whole day.

  My crash diet took care of my weight problem and Avelar took care of my motivation. He wouldn’t shut up at the press conference. I kept my cool, but deep down inside, I was so angry that all I could think about was knocking him out.

  Outwardly, I was polite and wished him luck. He needed it. I stopped him in the fourth round. His family didn’t have a thing to say after that.

  Back then, I wasn’t a main-event fighter, my match usually staged after the main event. Those fights are called crowd chasers, but in my case, they were crowd keepers because there were very few empty seats for my matches. My name was always on the marquee because there was no fighter better known than I was in the entire show.

  That wasn’t, however, the case for my next fight, a match against Troy Dorsey in Vegas. In the main event that night, George Foreman was fighting Tommy Morrison.

  I always fought whoever they put in front of me, but Dorsey was the first guy I thought might be a little too tough for me, considering it was only my eighth fight. It wasn’t his record that got my attention. He was 13–7–4. But he had been in there with guys like Jorge Paez, Jesse James Leija, Kevin Kelley, and Calvin Grove.

  Every time Dorsey threw a punch, he made a grunting sound that could be heard through much of the arena. He got that from his days as a kickboxer.

  I decided I had to quiet him down early. His kickboxing and the fact that he was used to going twelve rounds meant he was well conditioned. The longest I had ever gone was eight rounds, and that was on only one occasion. I didn’t want conditioning to be a factor late in the fight.

  It wasn’t. I came out aggressive, looking for an early knockout. It was a perfect approach against Dorsey, who had an in-your-face style as well, but was so cocky that he kept his hands low. With a target like that, how could you miss? I didn’t, getting in several clean shots.

  Nothing. I couldn’t move him. He just kept coming. And I kept swinging.

  Finally, I reached back, way back, like a golfer extending his backswing, and put everythi
ng I had behind a left hook that landed squarely on Dorsey’s right eyebrow, splitting it wide open, blood spewing.

  The ringside doctor ruled that Dorsey could not go on and I had a first-round TKO.

  But it was a hollow victory because that final blow injured ligaments in my left hand, causing damage that would plague me, on and off, for some time.

  Still, I was back in the ring two months later in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, to fight Renaldo Carter on the undercard of a Roy Jones fight.

  I had thought the difficulties with my hand were over when the pain subsided after a few weeks, but the week before the Carter fight, I reinjured it while sparring. I didn’t tell anyone, not even Robert. I figured I’d find a way to compensate.

  Robert, figuring my hand was still tender from the original injury, tried to add extra gauze when he put the wraps on in my dressing room prior to the fight. There is always an observer from the opposing camp to watch the process. Carter’s man alertly spotted Robert’s tactic and protested. Robert had to tear the wraps off and start all over again.

  Robert tried to shrug the whole thing off, telling Carter’s man it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. His guy was still going down. I tried to put up a brave front as well, but deep down, I was concerned because my hand was hurting.

  I really got worried once the fight started because I couldn’t throw my trademark jab. Every time I flicked my left wrist, the pain shot through me. What was weird was that there was no pain when I used that left hand to throw a punch I called “my 45,” because it came in at a 45-degree angle, somewhere between a hook and an uppercut. I guess it had something to do with the angle of my arm. All I knew was that in that position, my left hand could still be effective.

  With a dependable alternative, I gave up on the jab, relied on the left hook and the 45 punch, and used my right hand as well to produce on-the-button combinations. I knocked Carter down three times, stopping him in the sixth round.