Manny talk of any kind sickens me. In this country they treat him like he found the cure for cancer. And it's not like we are talking a real role model here. I admit I am not the biggest boxing fan but might as well quote an expert. The proposed fight in December made front page news here in this attention starved country. I knew in my gut something was wrong with this picture. I mean the fight not the title picture of Oscar. Might as well hear it from a boxing expert. Somebody who is objectively covering this event with the emotion and the false patriotism removed. Somebody actually viewing it from a boxing angle.
Ed
Oscar takes low road in fighting Pacquiao
By Kevin Iole, Yahoo! Sports
Aug 26, 2008
Apparently, Oscar De La Hoya didn’t feel like waiting for the outcome of WBO junior flyweight champion Ivan Calderon’s bout on Saturday before choosing his next opponent.
Seven months after fighting a super lightweight, De La Hoya decided on Thursday to drop a class and take on a lightweight when he announced he’d be facing Manny Pacquiao on Dec. 6 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
No word on whether he gave serious consideration to either Sky Low Low or Little Beaver.
De La Hoya is embarrassing himself and the sport he professes to love by refusing to fight the real challengers in his division and picking on a guy who has only once fought above 130 pounds. But for this fight, De La Hoya will make Pacquiao fight at welterweight.
It’s a farce.
Yes, it’s going to be a big event. Yes, it’s going to generate tens of million, perhaps hundreds of million, dollars.
But De La Hoya is hardly covering himself in glory fighting a man so much smaller. This is a fight pitting a one-time middleweight champion against a one-time flyweight champion.
Thank about that: De La Hoya won a world title belt in the 160-pound weight class. Pacquiao won one in the 112-pound class.
The bout will be fought at welterweight, which has a weight limit of 147 pounds. De La Hoya hasn't’t made 147 since he knocked out Arturo Gatti on March 24, 2001.
By fight night, it will be seven years, eight months and 13 days since De La Hoya stepped onto a scale and weighed 147 pounds
And so as not to be confused with how great the disparity in size between these two men is, realize that a month before De La Hoya manhandled Gatti, Pacquiao weighed 122 for a Feb. 24, 2001, victory over Tetsutora Senrima.
De La Hoya said he decided to purse the fight because he felt challenged. His ex-trainer, Freddie Roach, who trains Pacquiao, suggested Pacquiao could win because De La Hoya no longer can pull the trigger.
And it’s true that De La Hoya hardly looked sharp in his last outing, a win over Steve Forbes. De La Hoya won nearly every round, but was sloppy and failed to assert his size.
Pacquiao’s best chance to win this fight is if De La Hoya is, indeed, over the hill. That’s where the intrigue in this fight lies.
Pacquiao is, as De La Hoya repeatedly noted during a conference call to announce the bout on Thursday, the faster man. And at this stage of his career, he’s clearly the more skilled and talented man.
But he won’t be able to stay outside and use his quickness to outbox De La Hoya, because he is giving up five or six inches in reach, an extraordinary figure for a guy who can’t afford to get into a shootout.
And while Pacquiao is one of the hardest hitters at both super featherweight and lightweight, it’s difficult to imagine he’ll be able to hurt De La Hoya. This is a guy who went 24 rounds with Shane Mosley and 12 rounds with Felix Trinidad, both of whom were among the hardest punchers at either 147 or 154. He was never seriously hurt, or even rocked, in either of those fights.
Pacquiao’s power won’t be the same at 147 as it was at 135 and it’s clear he won’t hit as hard as either Mosley or Trinidad did.
There’s no way to get around the fact that De La Hoya is flat-out ducking WBA welterweight champion Antonio Margarito.
That’s the fight that he should have taken and the match that would have made sense. Margarito, though, would have mauled De La Hoya and the Golden Boy wants no part of that.
Pacquiao deserves credit for taking on the challenge that De La Hoya would not. He has so many physical disadvantages, but he took the fight regardless.
He even had the pluck to say that he expects to be stronger than De La Hoya.
“He’s taller than me, but I believe I’m going to be stronger,” Pacquiao said.
That’s unlikely, but good for Pacquiao for believing it. It’s too bad De La Hoya no longer has that kind of competitive spirit. Oh, he tried to act as if he took the bout when he heard Roach suggest Pacquiao would win the fight because De La Hoya can no longer pull the trigger.
He said that got his competitive juices flowing and made him decide to try to make the bout.
“When people started saying, ‘Manny can beat you,’ and ‘Manny can knock you out,’ and especially when Freddie Roach started saying ‘Oscar can’t pull the trigger,’ or ‘Manny Pacquiao, the fighter I train, can beat you,’ it started to become a challenge to me,” De La Hoya said. “Now, it’s very personal, especially when Manny Pacquiao beat all the legendary Mexican fighters from Mexico. To me, it’s a challenge. People are talking.
People are talking that Manny Pacquiao can beat me. Well, we’ll see Dec. 6.”
Nice try, Oscar.
This fight has nothing to do with De La Hoya’s competitive spirit or belief he has to defend the honor of beaten Mexican fighters.
He took the fight for the money.
He’ll get paid more – far more – to face Pacquiao than he would to fight anyone else who was in consideration.
At least speak the truth, Oscar.
But De La Hoya is so much into image and saying the right thing, that, as Jack Nicholson said to Tom Cruise in “A Few Good Men,” he can’t handle the truth.
Or at least admit it.
Admit you’re fighting for the money and no one complains. It’s a hard business and a dangerous game and every fighter, even ones who have made more than a quarter of a billion dollars in the ring, deserves as much as possible every time out.
But it’s ridiculous when De La Hoya attempts to frame it as a competitive challenge.
If he wanted a challenge, he’d be fighting Margarito. He wants a payday, so he’s fighting Pacquiao.
De La Hoya, who also backed off his earlier vow to retire after this fight, will only lose this fight if he’s totally shot.
And though he’s just 3-3 in his last six and looked less than intimidating against Forbes, another much smaller man, he figures to be greatly motivated for this one and should assert his physical superiority.
Given that he’s now not committed to retiring, at least there’s hope.
Sky Low Low may yet get his shot at the Golden Boy.
Kevin Iole covers boxing and mixed martial arts for Yahoo! Sports. Send Kevin a question or comment for potential use in a future column or webcast.
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