Kevin Mitchell Boxing
In the movies, the fighters only bleed pretty. Slap in front of the camera means mascara, not knuckle. But not all boxers are squash-nosed pugs and, this Sunday, there are three at work on either side of the Atlantic who manage the rare feet of making both their opponents and young women everywhere go weak at the knees, if for entirely different reasons.
Oscar de la Hoya, the Latino icon of east Los Angeles, will slick his hair back before he gloves up for what promises to be a war with the uncombed Ghanaian, Ike “Bazooka” Quartey, in Las Vegas, just a few hours after Cardiff’s Joe Calzaghe and Robin Reid of Runcorn have mussed up each other’s coiffure in an argument over Calzaghe’s world super- middleweight title in Newcastle, and turnstiles will click in a frenzy. All three have modelled, all three can box just fine.
De La Hoya should be the most popular fighter in the world. He is personable, intelligent and can fight like a cornered dog; the girls go whoozy in the bedroom; the guys go in the ring. But the more he smiles, the more he cuts down opponents, the better he gets, the greater the animus. Nobody likes a good- looking smart-arse, and they don’t come a lot smarter than De La Hoya.
De La Hoya has a website and plays golf off a nine-handicap. He has put his mother’s recipes in print and, unique in his business, he has endorsements with mainstream corporate America. He goes on Oprah and hangs out with rap singers and basketball stars, guesting on Shaq O’Neill’s single, The Way It’s Goin’ Down. The video is crammed with hundreds of beautiful women.
But Oscar also has a left hand that can cut like a scimitar, and he’s working on his right. His balance and footwork are a delight for purists, and you can almost hear his boxing brain cranking during a fight, although he is prone to intemperance, most noticeably in his last fight, a cuts-stoppage win over Julio Cesar Chavez.
In east Los Angeles, where he grew up, De La Hoya is hated and loved pretty much in equal measure and the divide is along gender lines. The first time he beat Chavez, also on cuts, he returned as the Grand Marshal of the Mexican Independence Day Parade, perched on a Mercedes, and was booed as people he had known all his life threw eggs and screamed “Sell-out!”
“They’re just ignorant,” he said at the time. But they knew he’d just moved to upmarket Whittier and they knew he was now a member of a whites-only country club. “They believe he turned his back on the barrio,” said Johnny Ortiz, a local boxing broadcaster.
Curiously, for a 26-year-old unbeaten fighter who has won world titles at four weights and is an Olympic gold medalist , De La Hoya is only this weekend making his first genuine move on greatness, when he defends his World Boxing Council welterweight title against the dangerous Quartey at the Thomas and Mack Center.
A lot of people would love to see the challenger put the Golden Boy in his place, preferably horizontal. He has made a habit of dodging tough fights and has astutely fought opponents smaller and less threatening, or older and faded.
When Oscar got by the tricky Pernell Whitaker in Las Vegas last year, the beaten New Yorker chided De La Hoya, “You got a lot to thank your girl fans for on your old dot.com.”
He was right. De La Hoya is boxing’s golden banker, the smiling, web-sited matine idol assassin who represents the sport’s main hope of immediate salvation. If he loses, boxing loses. The judges got it wrong in the Whitaker fight and De La Hoya went on to beat the sainted Chavez a second time to secure his position as the business’s marquee fighter.
But the pretty boy has boxing in his blood. His father, Joel, was a professional and even his mother, Dona Cecilia, from the no-nonsense Mexican town of Sonora, urges him on. He is ruthless. He has sacked managers and trainers without compunction and, behind the glib delivery, he can be cruel to beaten opponents, even accusing Chavez of quitting. Quartey will give him a good argument, though, and might even extend him the full 12 rounds – where the judges will be waiting again to deliver boxing’s golden boy the verdict he almost demands by right.
And Calzaghe and Reid? I have a suspicion that Reid is about to produce the sort of performance he has only fleetingly unveiled; if he does, Calzaghe’s features might be slightly disturbed, although his title should remain intact.