American Son

by Oscar De La Hoya

  I had fun with him. We made a bet that if he won, he would get an extra $200,000. If I won, I could cut off that trademark curl of hair he had hanging down on his forehead. And I could do it right in the ring in front of the world.

  After beating Camacho by unanimous decision, I went over to my corner, grabbed a scissors, confronted him, and said, “Hey, a bet is a bet.”

  “Come on, man, please,” he said, begging me to let him keep his precious curl. “This is who I am. I’m like Samson. If you cut that off, I’ll lose my strength.”

  Camacho didn’t sound too macho at that moment. I took pity on him and let him keep his locks.

  That was my last fight with Manny.

  The problem wasn’t what he did during my two fights with him in my corner, but what he didn’t do in preparation for those fights. Manny did wonders for my jump shot. It seemed all we did was play basketball. If it wasn’t basketball, it would be Ping-Pong.

  I like Manny. He has a good heart, but that wasn’t enough to please my father, who couldn’t deal with his laid-back approach. Not just the hours playing basketball, but the fact that he trained me only four days a week. I had Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays off. That was a radically different approach from the one I was familiar with. With other trainers, it was six days a week with a light routine on Sunday, consisting of watching film and taking long walks. But we were always active.

  With Manny, if I was tired, he told me to take a day off. Rest is better for you anyway, he would say. That was his theory with sparring rounds as well. Fewer can be beneficial to the body. It didn’t feel like a real training camp with Manny.

  None of this felt right to my father, who was old school. He wanted to see me spar and run and sweat. Lots of sweat. Dead time? Run some more.

  Even the way Manny worked the mitts bothered both my father and me. He would hold them very high and kind of flap them at you. It didn’t work for me.

  But I will always hold Manny in high regard for bringing back the aggression that had slipped away under The Professor and for reintroducing me to my right hand.

  After beating Wilfredo Rivera and Patrick Charpentier rather easily and winning my rematch against Chavez, both in 1998, I had a classic battle against Ike Quartey of Ghana in February of 1999. I wasn’t that concerned about him, even though he was unbeaten at 34–0 with a draw and had twenty-nine knockouts. Not concerned, that is, until I was on the receiving end of his punches. It felt like he had bricks in his gloves. Every blow stung. In the sixth round, Quartey knocked me down with a left hook.

  I knew then that I couldn’t worry about the damage he was capable of doing. I couldn’t worry about getting my nose broken or having my features marred. I had to go get this guy. I got up and put Quartey down in the same round.

  It was still a close fight heading into the twelfth and final round. I shook off exhaustion and dug deep down inside for a final burst. It has been called one of the best rounds of my life. It was certainly one of the most satisfying. With the crowd roaring and my rhythm flowing, I felt a rush. It was as if everything was happening in slow motion. I could see each punch land, the sweat fly off the top of Quartey’s head, and his face become contorted.

  It seemed like the round took ten minutes. I kept waiting for someone to stop it. Quartey finally went down, but got back up and finished on his feet. I won by split decision.

  I got more than a victory that night. I also gained the confidence, for the first time in my career, that I could be as effective in the last round as I was in the first, that I had the stamina to fight for a full thirty-six minutes, if necessary.

  I needed all the confidence I could muster because I was going through a tumultuous time in my life. I would soon face Félix Trinidad, considered by many the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, in the richest nonheavyweight match in history. I was also facing the fact that despite all my success in the ring, I was still lacking the two things I had desired from the beginning, a family and financial security.

  It was time to grow up.

  XVIII

  SEARCHING FOR LOVE

  I had traded in my skateboard for a private jet, my neighborhood friends for an entourage, my meager-paying jobs for pots of gold, my few steady girlfriends for endless packs of groupies, my pitiful clothes for a wardrobe worthy of a GQ layout.

  What was there not to like? I was like a kid in a candy store. But I suddenly felt as if I was locked in that candy store, having gorged on the goodies until I was sick with excess.

  It all hit me one night in Vegas, an emotional uppercut that jarred me to my senses.

  The evening had not started out well. It should have been a relaxing trip to Vegas. After all, I hadn’t come for a fight, just to kick back and enjoy. I was staying in a huge, two-story suite at the top of the Rio Hotel, a ballroom-size area with a gorgeous view of the strip in both directions. This was going to be party central.

  But first, I wanted to spend some time in the casino, and as it turned out, some money on the tables. Playing craps, I lost $350,000.

  I didn’t have much time to think about it, however. By the time I got back to the suite, the party was in full swing, about a hundred people—many of whom I didn’t even know—drinking, laughing, and dancing to the blaring music. It was bigger and wilder than any of the clubs downstairs.

  It was wasted on me. I felt like a zombie as I wandered through a room full of strangers.

  I walked over to a huge window and stared out at a thousand twinkling lights in this place known as Sin City.

  As I looked around, everybody seemed to be moving in slow motion, like they were on a movie screen and I was in the audience as an uninvolved spectator.

  Wham! Something just shook me. Tears began to run down my cheeks. I felt like I didn’t belong there. Who the hell am I? What am I doing? They’re all having fun, but I’m not happy. What kind of a life am I living? What have I become? This is not what I want. This is not for me. This is not what my parents taught me. I’m the kid who grew up with a solid foundation, the kid who had nothing as a child in East L.A. and I was happier then than I am now. I had become a different person because of the fame and the money and the women.

  I just lost $350,000 and I was standing there crying while the party went on around me.

  Nobody seemed to pay attention to my anguish. Nobody except Raul, who is always there for me.

  He took one look at my face and immediately started emptying the room. The partygoers wanted to know what was up, but I didn’t owe anybody an explanation.

  Shutting everything down didn’t help. I cried myself to sleep. The next morning, Raul and I checked out and headed home, even though we had been scheduled to stay for a few more days.

  Sometimes I just didn’t want to be the Golden Boy. No one is going to feel sorry for me. I know that. No one is going to shed a tear for a celebrity whose life consists of partying, womanizing, and high-stakes gambling.

  Run that by the average person and they’ll have only one question: Where do I sign up?

  After a while, though, you realize there’s no substance to your life, no family values. There are too many people around you who care only about what you have, not who you really are.

  In the midst of all those people, I was lonely. So lonely I would sometimes go to strip clubs more to talk to the women than anything else. Sex was always available to me, communication was not.

  I was reaching the peak of my career, fighting big-name opponents, getting great pay-per-view numbers, making big money, and enjoying a constantly expanding fan base. But all that wasn’t enough to satisfy my soul.

  After my high school girlfriend, Veronica Ramirez, broke up with me, another Veronica came into my life, Veronica Peralta. We went together for about four years until she caught me with another woman. The two came to blows before I separated them. I was single again.

  It’s not that I lacked for women after that. Far from it. I was fooling around and having a good time.

 
; I think it took that night in Vegas to motivate me to seek something closer to a normal home life. I wanted to know what it was like to settle down and have kids. I was anxious to find the right woman to make that possible.

  Part of my motivation stemmed from my desire to prove that I could be different with my kid than my parents had been with me. I was hungry for that. I wanted to show my father I could do it, that I could be that lovable, expressive person that he never was with me. I wanted a baby—didn’t matter if it was a boy or a girl—to love, and to tell that baby I loved him or her.

  I had had a girlfriend at the time named Toni Alvarado. We had been dating for a couple of years and had a wonderful relationship during that period. After a while, though, we had called it off because it wasn’t working out.

  She was an unwed mother with a two-year-old, a wonderful mother, very responsible, always there for the baby, always putting it first.

  When we started talking again, I started thinking. Why not make an arrangement with Toni? I told her I wanted her to have my child and I would, of course, provide the financial support, but there would be no strings attached. I told her, “I don’t want to have a relationship, I want to have a kid.” And that’s what we agreed to do.

  We had a boy she named Jacob. She had agreed to have a child with me, so it was only fair that she got to name him.

  When Jacob was born in 1998, I went into shock. I was ecstatic, but also uncertain. I knew I had come to a crossroads in my life. Seeing that precious infant hammered the point home. I had to choose which lifestyle I wanted, Oscar the high-living celebrity or Oscar the family man.

  I started to think that, perhaps, we could live together as a family, and down the road, who knows? Maybe there would be marriage. Or maybe I would continue to live in my place and she would live in her house, but I would still take care of my little boy.

  We wound up living separately, but I was over there all the time, telling Jacob I loved him, something I never heard when I was young, and even changing diapers.

  I felt so good. It was a big load off my shoulders. I had done it. I had had a child and had formed a loving relationship with him right from the start. When I was in town, I would see Jacob almost every day. And when I was up in Big Bear training, Toni sometimes brought him up to see me.

  I bought a house for Toni and the kids in Glendale and provided financial support, and she was fine with that.

  There was a period of about nine months when I didn’t see Jacob. I went back to dating other women, reverting back to my old lifestyle, which I found I had missed. I have to admit, my absence was irresponsible.

  I really missed Jacob, but I kept telling myself he’d be all right. He had a great mother and he knew I was his father. Toni was very supportive, never speaking badly of me to him. Whenever I fought, she made sure Jacob saw me on TV. He understood who I was and liked being the cool kid on the block whose father was a famous fighter.

  Other than that one regrettable period of absence, we have had a great relationship to this day. I feel very close to Jacob. And very proud. He’s a straight-A student, and plays soccer and baseball.

  He asked his mother one time if he could be a fighter like his father. She took him to the gym, but once he got hit, he didn’t like that, so he turned to baseball.

  If any of my kids wanted to box, I would obviously support them, but it would kill me inside. If they’re going to want to do it, they’re going to do it, so I would come out to watch them even though I wouldn’t enjoy it.

  After Toni, I met Shanna Moakler. She was an actress and a former Miss USA, strikingly beautiful, with blond hair and green eyes.

  We started dating and wound up having a child together.

  Our relationship eventually went sour, but that had nothing to do with the unborn baby. Even though the pregnancy had not been as elaborately planned as Jacob’s had been, I wanted to make this work for the baby’s sake. Marriage wasn’t out of the question.

  The baby was born in 1999, a girl we named Atiana. I was in the hospital, but not in the delivery room, for the birth. While Shanna’s family was friendly to me, I always felt like the outsider.

  I made a real effort once they came home from the hospital. I moved Shanna and Atiana from Shanna’s condominium to a luxurious penthouse on Wilshire Boulevard. I wanted the good life for my daughter. There were many occasions when I slept over in that place in order to spend time with her. I tried to make it work for several months, but there was too much tension, too much friction.

  The relationship deteriorated so badly that Shanna and I just stopped talking to each other.

  By then, Shanna and the baby were living in my house in Bel Air.

  “This is my house,” she said. “I’m not moving out. My daughter deserves the best.”

  It was going take a lawyer, or the police, to get them out.

  We had never settled on a figure for financial support, so Shanna came up with her own figure. She slapped me with a $62.5 million paternity suit.

  I stayed away from the house while she was there. It took about a month to resolve the issue and bring the moving vans. We settled on a figure for support based on what I was earning.

  She didn’t need my house anymore. She got more than enough money to buy a very nice house of her own.

  Through all the turmoil, I have been able to maintain a good relationship with Atiana, which was my main concern. The first few years of her life, I saw her a lot. I was there for her all the time. Then there was a period when I didn’t see her often, which was very unpleasant for me.

  I don’t think Shanna exposed Atiana to our problems. The times we were all together, Shanna was very good at masking her feelings. Nor was there any evidence that she bad-mouthed me to Atiana. Whenever I see my daughter to this day, she runs over, gives me a hug, and tells me she loves me. Shanna and I have joint custody and there’s never any problem when I want to see my daughter. Shanna and I went through an ugly period when we were young, but we learned from it.

  I eventually had a third child, Devon, out of wedlock as well.

  While I’m so proud of those kids, I’m not proud of having three children with three different women, none of them my wife. But I was always a responsible father, taking care of the children’s financial needs, seeing them as often as I could.

  There were other women who claimed I had fathered their children. I acted responsibly in those cases as well, consenting to blood tests that revealed no biological link.

  But I did have the three kids and still not the family life I wanted. What kind of existence was that? I had dug myself into an even deeper hole, for which I can only blame myself. Yes, I wanted to have children I could love, children who would love me, children I could forge a bond with, but it had not happened the way I had envisioned it. My life was still out of control.

  People expect you to be this perfect person, and nobody’s perfect. I certainly wasn’t. I made a lot of mistakes as I dealt with the pressure of trying to balance my two worlds, the world I had known in East L.A. with my family and the world I found myself in as I gained worldwide exposure.

  It was a double-edged sword. Sometimes, I wanted to be left alone to be with my family and live a normal life. But if I did that for too long, I missed the attention, missed signing autographs and being in the spotlight. You have to learn how to juggle the two worlds, a task it took me years to master.

  I had been running around with a bad crowd. I hadn’t been listening to my father or my brother or my oldest, closest friends from childhood. I had been listening to guys who only wanted to go clubbing and drinking, guys who kept reminding me I was Oscar De La Hoya and the world was mine. Often, I would go out with fifteen to twenty friends gambling or to a strip club. We were just young and stupid.

  I knew it was time to get smart. I came to realize I couldn’t simply go out looking for that certain special person to spend the rest of my life with. I understood you can’t force the issue. I knew it didn’t work that way. I
was confident that if I waited, the right person would come into my life. I had to slow down my frenetic lifestyle once and for all and let it happen.

  And, sure enough, like the answer to a prayer, there was Millie.

  XIX

  TITO

  Unless you lived in Puerto Rico, it is difficult to understand how big Félix Trinidad was in his native land during his prime.

  One of his schoolteachers, Carmen Carattini, who had lost her son Hugo in a motorcycle accident, said of Trinidad, “God gave him to me. I have lost a son, but I have the son of Puerto Rico.”

  Two cultures, Mexican and Puerto Rican, two undefeated fighters, the two top promoters in the game, Bob Arum and Don King, all coming together in Vegas, the boxing capital of the world, for a nonheavyweight showdown that brought back memories of Ray Leonard and Thomas Hearns, or Leonard and Roberto Duran, or Leonard and Marvin Hagler.

  I couldn’t wait.

  Before I could think of the man in the other corner, I had to think about my own corner. Manny and The Professor were long gone. I needed a new trainer to partner with Robert.

  Bob Arum suggested another big name, one who wouldn’t vary from the more orthodox methods of training, Gil Clancy.

  Gil, a Hall of Famer himself, had trained Hall of Fame fighters like Emile Griffith, had worked with everybody from Muhammad Ali to Joe Frazier to George Foreman, and had also been a fight manager, a matchmaker, and a television analyst.

  Hiring Gil was great for Robert because Gil, seventy-five years old and retired for twenty years with the exception of one fight, made it clear he had no interest in becoming my head trainer. He wasn’t about to relocate from his home on the East Coast, nor did he want the heavy workload at that point in his life. He would assess my status in training camp either by phone or on an occasional visit and be in my corner for the fights. It was the only time Robert didn’t feel threatened by another trainer, which made for a looser atmosphere in camp. Robert still got to be the boss.