For each fight, I returned to Big Bear to train, but with my next match in Beverly Hills against Angelo Nuñez, my training site was moved to an El Monte gym near where Robert lived. Being back so close to home, I could have slept in my own bed, but Robert was afraid that would make me too comfortable so close to the fight, so I was put up in a hotel in Hollywood.
If Robert, or anybody else around me, had known what was going on, they would have preferred sending me home. Every night after training, I would go back to my hotel, invite my girlfriend over, and have her spend the night. At one point she was with me for two weeks without going home. What a training camp.
I wasn’t worried. I had fought nine times and had eight knockouts. I had started to think I was invincible, so I slacked off.
I soon learned how foolish I had been. When I stepped into the ring against Nuñez, I was not 100 percent. Not close to it. I was feeling bad, weak.
I felt even worse when I learned the fight, a black-tie charity event in the ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, would be watched by a celebrity-filled audience, including Danny DeVito and Tony Danza. Great, here I was with a chance to show the hometown stars I was a rising star myself and I might have blown it.
When I struggled in the first few rounds, Robert was exasperated. “What’s going on?” he asked me in the corner. “Wake up. This is not you.”
No kidding.
For the first time in my career, I started to panic. In the past, I had always remained confident because I knew I had the talent to overcome whatever was thrown at me. But this time I had overcome myself because of my late-night antics.
I could feel the fatigue draining me. Once again, I reached back for my 45 and wham, just like the Carter fight. Again, a crushing blow. Again, a skin-shattering cut, this time over the left eye of my opponent. Again, the fight was stopped, this time in the fourth round. Again, my hand was hurting.
As I sat in my dressing room, my left hand immersed in a bucket of ice, I felt more relief than elation. If that cut hadn’t opened up, who knows what would have happened.
I never told Robert about my secret roommate, but the important thing was, there would never again be anything to tell. I had dodged a bullet that would have resulted in a self-inflicted wound. I was not invincible. I would not soon forget the helpless feeling of trying to fight through fatigue on weakened legs. It would be a while before I violated the rules of training camp again.
I had another unpleasant experience in my next fight, my ninth and last match of 1993. For the first time I involuntarily visited a place I had sent so many others to—the canvas.
Moving up to the semimain event, I was facing Narciso Valenzuela in Phoenix. He didn’t have a great record (35–13–2), but fifty professional fights meant a great many lessons learned.
I learned one myself when I got caught with a left hook and went down. I wasn’t there long. It was a flash knockdown. I wasn’t hurt, just embarrassed. And angry.
I felt like it was do-or-die. After I got up, I charged at Valenzuela, threw what seemed like a dozen combinations, and knocked him out, still in the first round.
At the time I thought the knockout was the biggest thing to occur that night. Looking back, I realize the more significant moment happened afterward, a moment I couldn’t appreciate until later. I was told to stay in my trunks because someone wanted to shoot some photos of me. Still sweaty, I was led over to a short, older man.
“I want to take a few pictures of your face, capture this moment as you come out of a fight,” he told me. “My name is Richard Avedon.”
I didn’t know who he was, didn’t dream he was a world-famous photographer, didn’t understand what an honor it was for him to focus in on me. This was a man whose subjects ranged from Pablo Picasso to Jacques Cousteau to Lena Horne. And now he was turning his lens on me. I had transcended boxing without even realizing it.
The Valenzuela fight was my last under Mittleman and Nelson. I fired them because I was fed up.
I was given a suite for a fight in Phoenix and they weren’t. Next thing I knew, they were in the suite and I was in the room meant for them. It must have slipped their minds that I was the one doing the sweating and the bleeding. I would be given meal tickets prior to a fight and they would take them.
It got so bad, Robert and I met with Bob to complain about Mittleman and Nelson. Bob was sympathetic, but, he said, as my promoter, he was reluctant to get involved with my managers. Ultimately, he agreed to do so and told Mittleman and Nelson I was extremely unhappy. They laughed it off, told Arum he was either making up the complaints or imagining them, and assured him everything was fine.
Mittleman and Nelson knew full well, however, that everything wasn’t fine. When I kept asking questions, they asked themselves, who could control me?
The answer was obvious: my father.
They cut him in on the action, giving him 10 percent of their take, with the understanding that he would keep me in line.
It worked for a while. Not knowing about the secret arrangement, I listened to my father when he tried to calm me down.
But it only worked for so long. Then, toward the end of 1993, Mittleman and Nelson made their final mistake. Worried by the knockdown administered to me by Valenzuela, they brought in a trainer named Carlos Ortiz, a former champion with a brawling style.
They drove him up to my Big Bear training camp and told me he would work with Robert. Robert was fuming and I was just as unhappy. Especially when Ortiz tried to change my style in sparring to a face-first approach. Receive ten punches, then move away. That might have worked for a toe-to-toe fighter like Ortiz—he won championships at 140 pounds and twice at 130 and paid for it judging by the scars on his face—but it wasn’t going to work for me.
Not only was I getting hit a lot, but I hurt my left hand, which ultimately forced me to cancel my next fight. I’m not exactly sure when the injury occurred, but I know I worked extensively on the heavy bag under Ortiz, something I wasn’t accustomed to. The heavy pounding might have caused the problem.
What I had always appreciated about Robert was that he worked with the successful style I had already developed rather than trying to change me into his image, as Ortiz was attempting to do.
Robert and I started to ignore Ortiz and then, one day, we just refused to show up at the gym.
Mittleman and Nelson got the message: Ortiz was gone.
Then they got the whole message: They, too, were gone.
They started to get the hint when I made it plain I no longer wanted them in Big Bear, and then stopped talking to them altogether.
I called my father and told him.
“But they could ruin your career if you try to get rid of them,” my father warned. “Look at what they are doing for you.”
Oh, and by the way, he admitted, I also have a piece of you through them.
I wasn’t really angry with him. I understood. Those guys had not talked my father into being against me, but merely into keeping me in line.
The line ended right there. We wound up reaching a settlement with Mittleman and Nelson.
Bob agreed with my decision to cut them loose.
“It had gotten to the point,” Bob said, “where we were arguing more about meal tickets and suites than fights. It was hard to imagine. You have an Olympic gold medalist and you take his suite? How stupid is that?”
XII
STARVING FOR RECOGNITION
These days, it seems, after fighters win a few matches, they already start talking about titles, start measuring themselves for championship belts.
I wasn’t like that. Yes, I wanted to eventually place a championship belt beside my gold medal, but because I felt I was still learning my way around the ring, still adding to my arsenal of pugilistic weapons, I was content by the end of 1993 to remain an undercard fighter. I was undefeated through eleven matches and had won ten by knockout, but there was plenty of room for growth in my mind.
The problem was the potentia
l growth in my weight. In my eleven pro fights, I had varied from 131 to 138 pounds. With my height at a little over five-ten, I figured I could eventually go as high as middleweight (160 pounds) as I aged. So if I could win a title at 130, I had a chance to pull off an unprecedented feat: championships in six weight classes (130, 135, 140, 147, 154, and 160).
I was still skinny enough to get down to 130 pounds, but not for long, even if I starved myself. So there was some urgency to get that initial title fight at 130.
First, I had a match scheduled against José Vidal Concepcion in Madison Square Garden, but that match had to be canceled because of pain in my left hand, the result of my disastrous sparring sessions under Carlos Ortiz.
When I called Bob Arum to tell him I couldn’t fight, he went wild, as only Bob can, spewing out four-letter words and demanding I get in the ring anyway.
When he saw that wasn’t going to work, he sent me to my orthopedic doctor, Tony Daly, who determined I had a hairline fracture. My parting gift from the Carlos Ortiz school of boxing.
When Concepcion went ahead with that fight date anyway, against a replacement opponent, I watched it on TV. The cameras zoomed in on outraged fans who held up signs mocking me for my absence.
What could I do? Even with all my success, I wasn’t going to get into the ring with one hand tied behind me.
HBO had become interested in signing me to a long-term deal, which added still more impetus for a title fight. The name that kept popping up was Genaro “Chicanito” Hernandez, the WBA super featherweight champ.
Arum and Trampler weren’t sure I was ready for Hernandez, but they liked the idea of a title shot. As an added touch, I was to fight at the Olympic Auditorium, where both my father and grandfather had boxed.
My opponent would be 130-pounder Jimmy Bredahl, a slick southpaw from Denmark with a 16–0 record, and the prize would be the WBO super featherweight championship.
James Toney was fighting Tim Littles on that same card for the IBF super middleweight title, but the promoters made a big, old fuss about my fight, turning it into the main event. I couldn’t believe that, not with a guy like Toney on the card. It was exciting for me.
I had struggled again to make 130 pounds and, through my all-too-familiar starvation routine, had reached my goal by the time I arrived at the weigh-in the day before the fight. As it turned out, there was no weigh-in. Bredahl’s handlers had protested, and rightly so, that under WBO rules, the weigh-in must occur on the day of the fight.
Everybody on my side raised hell, but that was clearly the rule. It was a crafty move on the part of Bredahl’s handlers. They knew I had trouble making weight, and if they could get into my head by throwing off my schedule, by forcing me to starve myself for another seventeen hours, it could affect the fight.
Normally, after a weigh-in, a fighter replenishes his body with the proper food over the ensuing twenty-four hours, regaining valuable pounds, bringing himself back to full strength.
Not me. Not that time. I had to continue on my no-exceptions diet until morning, not a single morsel of food passing my lips.
I made weight all right, and then some. I came in at 128 pounds, but I was weak as hell. Art Aragon, the old L.A. fighter and the first to carry the nickname Golden Boy, once joked that he had lost so much weight in training, he was the first fighter to be carried into the ring. That’s how I felt. Even my complexion had changed, a yellowish tint making me look sickly.
When I got off the scales, I was ravenous. I wanted to eat anything I could get my hands on, even though I knew that wasn’t good for me. I gorged on a cheeseburger, fries, and a brownie with ice cream on it. Not exactly a weight watcher’s diet, but I didn’t care.
Strangely enough, it didn’t hurt me. By fight time, I felt great. Maybe it was the adrenaline fueled by the title shot, the HBO cameras, and the knowledge that I was fighting in the same building where two previous generations of De La Hoyas had fought.
That put added pressure on me because I didn’t want to disappoint my father or my grandfather. Not that I knew how they felt. Neither one of them had talked to me about their fights at the Olympic.
Walking into that building, I remembered being brought there by my father as a little kid. While he was watching the fights, I would join up with other kids from our gym and we would roam around the building, encountering groups of youngsters from other gyms, resulting in a lot of yelling back and forth over the superiority of our respective places.
The task at hand, however, brought me back to reality. Bredahl may have come in unbeaten, but he went out with a loss. The fight was surprisingly easy for me, considering my prefight weight problems. I knocked Bredahl down in both the first and second rounds, and on the advice of the ringside physician, the fight was stopped at the end of the tenth round, giving me my first professional title. I think the pressure I had put on myself over carrying the family name back into the ring at the Olympic had worked to my advantage.
The feeling of winning a championship belt couldn’t compare to the gold medal. That was the highest moment of my life and always will be. Still, in less than two years, I had reached my objective of turning pro by strapping a championship belt around my waist, and that was an impressive accomplishment. But not impressive enough to make me content. I wanted more. I wanted bigger fights, better opponents, more titles.
I loved boxing as a professional and the money wasn’t bad, either. For the Bredahl fight, my purse was $1 million.
Soon, however, I let the success and the money and the accolades go to my head. I started to think of myself as this little celebrity. I got caught up in trying to build on that and market myself to attract an even bigger following.
My first title defense was against Giorgio Campanella in Vegas. I should have been focused on my opponent since he had a 20–0 record with fourteen knockouts. What was I focused on instead?
The music that would be played when I entered the arena and paraded into the ring. I chose “Hero” by Mariah Carey because that’s the way I saw myself. I wanted my entrance to be a big production and I played it for all it was worth, waving to the crowd, blowing kisses, shaking hands. You would have thought I was running for office.
I was so busy playing the role of the hero that I kind of overlooked the fact that there was a guy waiting in the ring to take my head off. Watching me strut in probably made him even more anxious to spoil my act.
Campanella got my attention in the very first round by hitting me with a left hook he seemed to throw from left field. It sent me crashing to the canvas.
Fortunately, it was only a flash knockdown, but it got me refocused. I came out angry in the second round, angry mostly at myself, but I took it out on Campanella. I knocked him down in the second and, in the third, hit him so hard with a left hook that rather than going down, he wobbled all over the ring. I had never seen anything like it. I feared I had somehow messed up his brain.
Campanella was able to continue after a standing eight-count, but before the round had ended, his corner threw in the towel.
I had a title, an unbeaten record, and a lot of fans in my little corner of the world. My next fight would be a chance to expand my horizons, both geographically and artistically. I was to fight Jorge Paez, El Maromero, one of the most colorful and popular boxers ever to come out of Mexico, for the vacant WBO 135-pound title. Even though the fight was in Las Vegas, this was to be my coming-out party in Mexico. It would give me exposure to die-hard fans below the border, present me with my first chance to be taken seriously in the land of my ancestors.
My reception, however, was not exactly what I had hoped for. Many Mexican fans saw me as the enemy. Paez was the established fighter, I was the young lion. He was a true Mexican fighter, I was a Mexican-American.
Paez would wear outlandish outfits and do somersaults in the ring, an entertainer as much as a fighter. That’s not to say he couldn’t fight. When I met him in July of 1994, he had a 33–4–3 record and could still hold his own, if not d
efeat, elite boxers.
He had me worried. For the first time I was facing an opponent I thought had a good chance of beating me. I think that had more to do with who he was than what he possessed in terms of skill. He was the first opponent I faced who I had watched and admired as a teenager. And it wasn’t just me. My whole family loved Paez. Now I was going against him.
It was hard to shed that image of being a teenager and watching someone you regard as a heroic figure. You become an adult, that figure ages, and reality catches up to the image. Still, it’s not so easily discarded from your mind.
For me, it only took a few punches to rid myself of that image. I was expecting a war—at least that’s what it looked like on paper—but when I went to my trusty 45, I caught Paez flush on the chin in the second round. He did a flip and landed on the canvas. This wasn’t one of his planned theatrical flops. This was a flop from which he couldn’t get up.
I had a second belt for a slightly bigger waist. I was a champion at 135.
While I had had my doubts about that opponent, TV boxing analyst Larry Merchant expressed his doubts about my ability to effectively handle my next opponent, Carl Griffith. Griffith had a 28–3–2 record with one no-contest and, according to Merchant, perhaps the right stuff to take the shine off the Golden Boy.
That made it personal for me. I told Larry, “If Carl touches me with one punch, ONE PUNCH, I will walk home from Las Vegas to Los Angeles.”
I flew home.
Griffith didn’t lay a glove on me. I knocked him down twice and stopped him in the third round with a clean left hook. From the ring, I glanced down at Merchant sitting ringside and gave him an I-told-you-so look.
There was a strange connection with my next opponent, a tough-as-nails fighter named John Avila. The last name was familiar because my half brother, a son my father had before he married my mother, is named Joel Avila.
“Oscar,” Joel Avila told me, “you know that’s your second cousin you’re fighting. He’s my first cousin.”
American Son Page 9
