by graham houston
www.fightnews.com
Oscar De La Hoya is back, seeking to end his glittering career by going out on top, in his 12-round junior middleweight title challenge against Ricardo Mayorga.
The plan is for De La Hoya, assuming he wins, to have one more fight after this, almost certainly against Floyd Mayweather Jr., before retiring to concentrate full-time on his Golden Boy Promotions company and other interests.
De La Hoya should win, of course, but it is not an easy fight. Mayorga’s durability, awkward aggression and heavy hands make him a potentially rough handful for the classier, more cultured De La Hoya.
Mayorga’s barrage of insults, even reaching out to cuff De La Hoya’s head at one of the press conferences, might work against him by increasing the Golden Boy’s motivation and sense of mission.
In the last couple of days, though, Mayorga’s tone seemed to change when, after demanding more money from his promoter Don King, he apparently approached De La Hoya in a conciliatory way.
The psychological battleground clearly seemed to shift to De La Hoya.
Mayorga might have hoped that his press-conference taunts would lure De La Hoya into a toe-to-toe fight, but this was never likely. I have no doubt that De La Hoya wants to punish Mayorga, but his method has always been to do things in a calculated, controlled manner, which would especially apply in a fight such as this when he is dealing with a slugger who can be dangerous but is not on his level in terms of pure boxing ability.
De La Hoya’s trainer, Floyd Mayweather Sr., tells we can expect to see a loose, relaxed De La Hoya give one of his best performances. Part of the plan seems to be go to Mayorga’s body, which makes sense as the Nicaraguan’s chin is one of the best in boxing.
There are intangibles here, though, as with most fights. This will be De La Hoya’s first fight since he was counted out after Bernard Hopkins hit him in the body 18 months ago and we do not know how hungry Oscar is these days. Mayorga, on the surface, is the fighter who will have the greater desire.
I do feel, though, that it is extremely important to De La Hoya that he wins this fight, especially because of his opponent’s sometimes distasteful utterances.
De La Hoya, 33, does not want the fans’ last memory of him to be the image of him on his knees on the canvas, pounding the floor in apparent frustration.
It would be highly satisfying for De La Hoya to put Mayorga in his place and have another championship belt strapped around his waist, but the most important thing of all for Oscar, I believe, is that he leaves the ring as the winner that he has always considered himself to be.
There is another factor here: De La Hoya, at this late stage of his career, with his boxing legacy to consider, not to mention his pride, would not have made the match unless he was very sure that he was going to win it. This does not mean to say that he thinks it will be easy but that he sees Mayorga as distinctly beatable.
I think Oscar has got it right but there could be stormy moments. Mayorga is easy to hit, yes, but his unorthodox attack, with punches thrown from weird angles, can be successful against a more ordered type of boxer, as we saw in his two fights with Vernon Forrest.
I can visualise De Hoya getting caught and rocked, maybe knocked sideways and even staggered. Mayorga scored a flash knockdown against Felix Trinidad and also seemed to hurt him in another round in a fight where Tito was, like Oscar, returning the ring after a long spell of inactivity. I am not sure, though, that Mayorga will be able to do much more than have the occasional and perhaps merely fleeting success — not once De La Hoya settles into the fight and starts to get his timing and distance locked down.
Because Mayorga's way of fighting tends to be wild and crazy he might be able to unsettle De La Hoya initially, but Oscar’s left jab and well-placed counter punches could begin to slow down the World Boxing Council champ by the midway mark.
Always an intelligent boxer, De La Hoya should, surely, be able to figure out Mayorga’s madness — the sudden, pell-mell rushes and the crude, clubbing deliveries.
I expect De La Hoya, as the fight goes on, to be able to hit the target with increasing frequency, but Mayorga will not be easy to stop. He took some tremendous punches from Trinidad before the fight was halted in the eighth, and Tito was a full middleweight fighting a blown-up junior middle: Mayorga says he was not in good shape for that fight.
If De La Hoya manages to stop Mayorga it will probably not be till late in the fight and not until he has worn him down with an accumulation of punches. Mayorga, we are told, has trained intensely for the fight and will be in tremendous condition, and De La Hoya has not scored a knockdown in his last four fights: when he stopped Yory Boy Campas it was with a constant peppering against a slow-moving target.
De La Hoya’s hand speed should serve him very well against Mayorga, whose tactics seem to be based on a series of rushes in which he tries to overwhelm the other man with a succession of wide or chopping punches. As Oscar’s trainer Floyd Mayweather Sr. said to me: “If the guy throws a straight punch it’s by accident.”
I would expect De La Hoya to have impressive scoring sequences in between his rival’s full-frontal charges. As the fight goes into the later rounds, if Mayorga’s assaults become less frequent it seems likely that De La Hoya will be able to increase the flow of his own punches. This, I think, is when the possibility of a stoppage win by De La Hoya might present itself.
It has long been said in boxing circles that class tells — and, layoff and luxury life notwithstanding, De La Hoya simply looks an altogether higher class of fighter than Mayorga.
Last Updated: May 5, 2006 5:06am
