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By Doug Fischer (May 3, 2006) Photo HBO
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The night before his rematch with Vernon Forrest, Ricardo Mayorga, then the welterweight champion, was spotted by this fight scribe and a small group of young boxing writers smoking a cigarette with his mother and some friends at a blues bar inside The Orleans Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas where the HBO-televised rematch took place.

The laidback-looking champ casually took slow drags from his ciggy as his mom and friends drank an assortment of alcoholic beverages. It didn’t appear to be a calculated move on Mayorga’s part. He couldn’t have known any media members would be at the bar at that exact time and he didn’t seem to notice us until Joe Santoliquito of The Ring walked over to his table and struck up a conversation.

Mayorga, who defends his WBC 154-pound title vs. Oscar De La Hoya this Saturday, was just being himself, and that was OK with the media covering the fight as well as the fans who watched the former gang lord from Nicaragua retain his welterweight crown via hard-fought decision the next day.

From Jack Johnson to Mickey Walker to “Two-Ton” Tony Galento to Roberto Duran, boxing has always had a place for hard hitting, hard drinking and hard smoking tough guys. Fans and the press have always romanticized fighters who were badasses in and OUT of the ring, especially the authentic characters who knew how to play to the both the public and the media. While Mayorga, 28-5-1 (23), is more Galento than Duran in terms of his skill and technique, his personality and antics rank with the best of them.

At the weigh-ins before his WBA title winning effort versus Andrew Lewis and his title unifying first bout with Forrest (when he added the WBC crown to his collection by knocking Viper out in the third round of a wild shootout), Mayorga ate fried chicken and pizza before stepping on the scale.

Minutes before the start of the Lewis fight, which took place in March of 2002, Mayorga stalked back and forth in the ring waiting for the WBA title holder to walk out of his dressing room. Once Mayorga spotted Lewis outside of the ring he ran to the area of the ropes where the champion and his team tried to enter and prevented them from climbing through – causing a scene as though he wanted to start a fight before the actual boxing match took place.

At the post-fight press conference for the Lewis fight he lit up a cigarette and downed a bottle of beer to the surprise of promoter Don King and the delight of the assembled media.

After knocking out Forrest, a 7-1 favorite, Mayorga didn’t hesitate to take a deep drag off the cigarette HBO’s boxing analyst Larry Merchant presented him before their post fight interview.

In the rematch with Forrest, he allowed the former champ to land three unanswered one-two combinations to his head in the middle of the fight, an ultra macho move that didn’t do his brain any good or earn him any extra points with the judges (or did it?), but it certainly got a rise out of the ringside commentators and press, as well as the arena crowd (which rose to its feet when he rushed Forrest after taking the shots) and the audience watching on TV.

Mayorga’s often hyper-masculine theatrics vs. Lewis and Forrest served two purposes: they entertained the fans and gave him a psychological edge over his somewhat bewildered opponents.

The boxing media ran with Mayorga’s hardcore showmanship/mind games until it took a nasty turn before his fight with Cory Spinks in December of 2003, when he told the IBF title holder that he would “deliver him” to his recently deceased mother.

Mayorga lost his 147-pound crown in an upset unanimous decision to Spinks but his marketability remained strong enough for Felix Trinidad to select him as a “come-back” opponent when the Puerto Rican icon decided to return to boxing in late 2004.

Mayorga spun out of control in the weeks before the pay-per-view showdown at Madison Square Garden. He was accused of sexually assaulting a woman while “training” in Nicaragua (an allegation he eventually settled out of court) and when he finally got in the ring with Trinidad he had the audacity to allow the murderous punching three-division champ to get off with two or three flush left hooks in the first round of the fight (a round he appeared to be winning with hard pressure before he got stupid with his own machismo).

Those hooks were the beginning of the end for Mayorga, who absorbed an unmerciful eight-round beating from Trinidad and retired after the stoppage loss, seemingly hobbled and humbled.

However, those who thought Trinidad literally beat the “hell” out of Mayorga were wrong. He returned to the ring last year (10 months after the Trinidad beating) to win the vacant WBC 154-pound title from light-punching Italian Michel Piccirillo via decision, and he appears to be more macho, more vulgar and even nastier than before as he prepares for the biggest fight of his 13-year career.

All Mayorga needed was someone to hate, and De La Hoya, he says, is someone he’s hated for a long time. The hate goes back 10 years – when, as an unknown 7-1 novice prize fighter, Mayorga watched De La Hoya chop up Julio Cesar Chavez on TV in Nicaragua – if you believe the story he told to the boxing press on an international conference call held last week.

“Chavez was one of my great idols,” Mayorga said during the conference call. “[That fight] is a perfect example of why I don't like [De La Hoya]. Oscar was pretty much in his prime and Chavez was well past his prime and at that point when I remember seeing him beat Chavez up I remember saying to myself that I was going to avenge [Chavez’s] loss and make [De La Hoya] pay for what he did to one the great idols, his own Mexican idol, and I will.”

Of course, Mayorga can’t stop there. He had to add this distasteful tidbit:

“I'm going to detach his retina or stop his heart.”

Nasty stuff, but he says De La Hoya deserves the rancor for supposedly disrespecting him at the initial HBO commercial shoot for the promotion.

“When we were doing the HBO shoot, I remember him saying that he was going to take the belt away from me,” Mayorga said. “I go, ‘The only way you're going to take this belt away from me is [if you] let me have your wife for a night and I'll let you have the belt for a night. At the same time, he goes, ‘No that's not what's going to happen, I'm going to take your mom for a night’ and then that's when I went off on him.”

Never talk bad about a street thug’s momma, folks, ‘cause that’s when they start trippin’.

Now Mayorga pretty much blames the Golden Boy for all the sacrifice he says he’s gone through to prepare himself for the fight.

“Being away from my family for so long,” he said when asked why he was so damned surly, “away from them for my birthday, I wasn't able to celebrate. I was [in camp] for my birthday by myself. I wasn't able to have my Easter dinner with them like I usually do and I attribute it all to [De La Hoya]. So I have a lot more fury now than I did before.”

At least he’s been in camp, which was a big question mark attached to him prior to the Trinidad fight. Mayorga says he’s taking his training seriously for the first time in his career.

He claims that he’s cut down his cigarette intake to three or four a day (down from three or four PACKS a day) and he’s completely cut beer out of his diet for the duration of his training camp (which took place in Miami but has now moved to Las Vegas). He also said he’s abstained from having sex, something unheard of for his previous camps (good news for the women of Miami and Las Vegas).

For De La Hoya, Mayorga, who claims to have only trained 28 days for Trinidad, says he has been in camp for between 10 to 12 weeks.

“I’m running five to six miles every day since camp started,” he said. “I do two and half hours of gym work every day; in the past I would skip out early if I didn’t feel like it.”

Why the newfound dedication to his sport?

“Maturity,” Mayorga said, “but also because I hate De La Hoya so much.”

Ah hate, the great motivator for sick people.

And it seems real, not just part of the pre-fight hype from the promoters (Golden Boy Promotions and Don King) and the network (HBO Pay Per View) of the bout.

Where in the past, Mayorga showed mere disdain for his opponents, referring to fine boxers like Forrest and Spinks as “clowns”, for this fight he has repeatedly called De La Hoya a “punk”, “sissy” and “faggot”.

But at the end of the day those are just words, and it’s going to take more than a potty mouth to bring down De La Hoya. On Saturday, Mayorga is going to have to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

He will have to press De La Hoya from the opening bell and try to take advantage of any rust the Golden One may have accumulated during his 20-month hiatus from the sport. Mayorga must close the distance immediately, throw a high volume of punches, back De La Hoya up and try his best to force his challenger to swap leather at an uncomfortable pace. He can’t fight in spurts like he normally does – leaping in with two or three haymakers and then back off to strut around the ring with his gloves on his hips. The macho theatrics will not work with De La Hoya, who knows his key to victory is his far superior jab and footwork.

But Mayorga says he’s ready for the boxing skills of the ’92 Olympic gold medalist.

“It doesn't matter to me if he wants to come out boxing [and] use distance,” he said. “I've been working on cutting the distance short, keeping close and basically I'm going to prove my general ringmanship that night. I'm going to be the one dictating the pace of the fight. I'm going to be the one dictating how many blows he's going to throw, how many blows I'm going to throw. So, it doesn't bother me at all [if he tries to box]. It's going to be the same result.”

And don’t expect Mayorga to offer up his chin to De La Hoya as he did in his bouts with Forrest and Trinidad.

“Oscar doesn’t deserve my sticking my chin out like I did with Trinidad,” he said. “Trinidad was a real man and a great warrior. That’s why I did that.”

As for De La Hoya?

“He reminds me of my grandma,” Mayorga said, “a little chubby, sitting on a rocking chair on my front porch. That’s what I see in Oscar. He wants to come back and be what he once was, but he can’t.”

De La Hoya’s magic, which has faded in recent years (as evidenced by his TKO loss to Hopkins and disappointing performance vs. Felix Sturm), can not be rekindled, Mayorga added, not even with an ample dose of hate that his hate made.

During the multi-city press tour, De La Hoya stated that Mayorga is only the second fighter he’s disliked (the first being Fernando Vargas, of course) and he’s recently added that he plans to beat the Nicaraguan up worse than Trinidad did and send him to the hospital.

Mayorga likes this kind of talk. When his opponents begin to trade insults with him, and more importantly, trade punches inside of the ring, it lets him know that’s he’s in their heads and helps him do what he does best.

“It’s nice to hear he has so much hate for me,” Mayorga said last week. “Let’s see if he shows it in the ring and stands and fights me.

“The result will be the same whether he does or not. I’m gonna stop him.

“Despite the insults and things I’ve said, I still don’t think he’s man enough to stand and fight me.”

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