COOKING THE GOLDEN GOOSE

Oscar De La Hoya was once so happy with fight promoter Bob Arum that the young boxer presented him with his prized Olympic gold medal during Arum’s 65th birthday celebration at a Reno hotel ballroom. The gesture wowed the crowd.

“It was a stunner, it made the night, and Bob was very emotional,” said Bill Caplan, the longtime publicist for Arum’s company, Top Rank, recalling the 1996 party.

But that was then. Today the onetime father-son relationship between fighter and mentor is in tatters. De La Hoya and Arum no longer speak.

And a week before De La Hoya’s World Boxing Council super-welterweight championship defense against unbeaten Floyd Mayweather Jr. in Las Vegas, there is fear behind the scenes that this bitter estrangement could cause lasting harm to boxing -- depriving the slumping sport of other marquee bouts.

De La Hoya, in his dual role as a fighter and head of Golden Boy Promotions, has emerged as a major rival of promoter Arum’s firm, Top Rank. The two camps control some of the top talent in boxing, potentially lucrative matchups -- if only the warring managers were talking and negotiating.

Mayweather, De La Hoya’s challenger this Saturday at the MGM Grand Garden Arena, left Top Rank last year, at least in part to escape the feud and improve his chances to fight De La Hoya.

How long will this silent treatment continue? “Permanently,” De La Hoya says.

Arum’s counterpunch? “This is total idiocy.”

And what about the gold medal? Now, the fighter wants it back.

On the surface, their feud rages around a fierce court battle for the promotional rights to super-featherweight Manny Pacquiao of the Philippines, a battle that Arum thus far is winning.

But hard feelings have been building for at least eight years, interviews reveal. And money differences seem to mark each mile along De La Hoya’s road from deep admiration for Arum to utter disdain.

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The De La Hoya-Arum union originated in the afterglow of the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games at which the fighter from East Los Angeles won his gold medal.

Arum already was a leading figure in boxing, having promoted 26 Muhammad Ali fights and played a key role in the careers of Sugar Ray Leonard and Roberto Duran. He had spent the previous decade promoting middleweight Marvin Hagler’s super bouts and was in the midst of the successful George Foreman comeback.

But he saw something special in De La Hoya. NBC’s Olympics coverage had focused on the boxer’s promise to his dying mother that he would win the gold medal for her. The good son also was a good-looking, power-punching American hero who spoke fluent Spanish and held great appeal in the emerging Latino market.

Arum saw gold in the Golden Boy.

In the years that followed, Arum managed De La Hoya’s career to great riches, an earnings total that Caplan estimates at $225 million.

After Barcelona, the Golden Boy easily dispatched a succession of obscure professional opponents and over-the-hill foes like Julio Cesar Chavez. Arum picked the competition with an eye on the surging Latino population.

Women loved De La Hoya’s movie idol good-looks. To exploit that, Arum salted news conference crowds around the boxer with attractive women holding up “Marry me, Oscar” signs. By the late 1990s, De La Hoya’s fights were drawing both genders and all races to the rings and to house parties for TV viewing.

The first small rift in the boxer-promoter relationship was seen in early 1999, when De La Hoya told a Spanish-language television station at a Dodger Stadium news conference that he had threatened to leave Arum if the promoter agreed to a rematch clause with world-class opponent Ike Quartey. The storm passed when Arum designated De La Hoya a co-promoter of the victory over Quartey.

“It was a big misinterpretation,” De La Hoya told The Times afterward. “I will be happy with Bob Arum for the rest of my career. He’s the reason I’m here.”

Arum showed his worth with record-setting paydays. He set up the richest non-heavyweight fight in history when De La Hoya stepped through the ropes to take on Felix Trinidad later in 1999.

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De La Hoya dominated Trinidad in the early rounds, but became more defensive as the fight went on. A close score and split decision among the judges went against the Golden Boy. But De La Hoya’s disappointment went deeper than his tarnished perfect record.

He later learned that Arum had earned $12 million from the fight. The promoter’s share was a staggering sum and De La Hoya harbored deep resentment, despite the fact that his own take totaled $23 million.

“We made a lot of money together,” De La Hoya recently acknowledged, but he can’t get over his feeling that Arum also deprived him of “millions and millions of dollars.”

De La Hoya came to believe that Arum, a Harvard graduate, was not sharing all the fine points of their business arrangements. The fighter’s more limited education as a high school graduate also left him feeling vulnerable to manipulation in his own partnership.

“Arum never put all of those cards on the table for me,” De La Hoya says now. He was kept in the dark, he said, on fight income generated by such alternative “revenue streams” as cable television, pay-per-view and sponsorship percentages, closed-circuit broadcast money and others.

It was part of his motivation for starting Los Angeles-based Golden Boy Promotions.

In 2000, De La Hoya lamented that he was turning into another sad boxer-blows-his-earnings story, wasting cash on cars, jewelry and other investments that weren’t appreciating in value.

“That’s why I got rid of everybody,” he said. “I just woke up one day and decided this was not the life I wanted.”

He ended his dealings with a longtime financial advisor, car dealer Mike Hernandez, and contacted a Swiss banker named Richard Schaefer.

“Before Schaefer entered the picture, there wasn’t a blip [of trouble] on the radar,” Arum said recently. “From that point, it started going downhill.”

De La Hoya lost a June 2000 decision at Staples Center to Pomona’s Shane Mosley, and he railed in the post-fight news conference that perhaps Arum had something to do with the scoring that also triggered a rematch clause. And Arum chided De La Hoya about retiring in favor of a new career as a singer.

One insult led to another -- and finally to federal court. In August 2000, De La Hoya filed suit to terminate his partnership with Arum. After winning in court, De La Hoya tried one more jab at Arum, but ended up hitting a hornets’ nest of controversy when he said he had just “defeated one of the biggest Jews to come out of Harvard.”

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Their separation lasted barely two years. De La Hoya’s two-fight relationship with television executive Jerry Perenchio as a promoter ended without a major card. With Schaefer as chief executive, De La Hoya formed Golden Boy Promotions in 2001 and reunited with Arum the next year.

Arum promptly delivered major fights for De La Hoya -- one against Fernando Vargas, a Mosley rematch and a 2004 bout against Bernard Hopkins. But financial success did not end internal friction.

“All [the] while Schaefer was looking to ease me out,” Arum said. “They were asking, ‘Why did they need me?’ ” He said he rejected a De La Hoya bid for an ownership share in Top Rank.

The friction got worse after De La Hoya suffered a ninth-round knockout loss to Hopkins, then successfully negotiated to promote the winning fighter’s future bouts. Arum, too, had hoped to land the Hopkins contract. By November 2004, Golden Boy announced it would promote both Hopkins’ and De La Hoya’s fights.

Arum, well known for angry outbursts, responded by “going ballistic,” telling reporters that it looked like De La Hoya “quit” in the Hopkins bout. To De La Hoya, that implied he had taken a dive during the fight in order to land the Hopkins promotion contract.

That was the damning blow, all sides seem to agree.

As Golden Boy’s stable has grown to include Mosley, Marco Antonio Barrera, Winky Wright and super-featherweight champion Juan Manuel Marquez, so has De La Hoya’s icy strain with Arum lingered -- until competition over Pacquiao’s free agency erupted into open warfare last year.

De La Hoya struck first in dramatic fashion, delivering a signing-bonus suitcase of $250,000 cash to Pacquiao at a Beverly Hills steakhouse meeting in September. Pacquiao signed a seven-fight contract with Golden Boy.

In November, after Pacquiao clobbered Erik Morales in a third-round knockout that affirmed his stature as one of the world’s top pound-for-pound fighters, Arum counterattacked. He gave Pacquiao a $1-million bonus and claimed the Golden Boy contract was invalid. Amid dueling lawsuits that are still pending, Pacquiao moved to Arum’s stable.

“This relationship has been torn apart, and there’s no way we can make peace together,” De La Hoya said in an interview. “I’ve always been willing to patch things up. It has gotten to a point, with Bob Arum always trashing me ... I won’t put up with those things. We won’t be able to sit down any longer and discuss any issues.”

Arum says he remains fond of De La Hoya, dismissing lawsuit claims as “Oscar’s law firm talking.” But the promoter still has a stinging jab.

“I don’t feel the acrimony Oscar feels, but I’m also more mature,” Arum said. “I never had the best relationship with Don King, but I never hesitated to talk business with him. That’s what grown-up people do.”

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The personal cold war may be taking a toll on boxing.

If the rival promoters were working together, some seemingly natural, high-profile fights might include Top Rank’s Pacquiao vs. Golden Boy’s Marquez, or Golden Boy’s Mosley against Top Rank’s unbeaten Miguel Cotto.

“This is boxing -- every man for himself, in and out of the ring -- but there’s too much emotion in this [dispute],” veteran HBO boxing commentator Larry Merchant said. “They had this emotional connection. There’s elements of a marriage and a father-son relationship here.

“But now there’s this bitterness from Arum that Oscar is trying to mine the same talent. It’s a fight to the death apparently, but you would hope [for] an agreement to make fights the public wants to see.”

King, Arum’s longtime rival promoter, compared the Arum-De La Hoya friction to the tale of Frankenstein.

“The great genius made a great man, but when the lightning starts striking and Frankenstein comes to life and gets up on his own, he wants to kill the doctor,” King said.

In King’s view, a multimillion-dollar dual promotion is usually worth forgiving a rival’s bitter words or sins. But, he shrugged, “if Oscar ... really doesn’t like Arum, then maybe some money ain’t worth having. Maybe he will stay true to his word.”

Amid all the litigation and posturing swirling around their legal and business conflicts, one thing underscores how personal the battle remains: De La Hoya’s Olympic gold medal. Arum still has it. The fighter wants it back.

“How can he keep that medal?” says Golden Boy executive Schaefer. Despite the bitter feud, Arum “keeps that medal ... and looks at it every day. To me, that says it all. He didn’t earn that gold medal, but he’s keeping it.”

And De La Hoya is taking a bitter satisfaction in the fact that Arum has no stake in his fight with Mayweather next weekend.

“Bob Arum has been promoting all these fights for 40 years, and now he can’t promote the biggest fight in boxing history. That must eat him alive,” De La Hoya said.

Although his office is in Las Vegas, Arum said he’ll probably be vacationing in the Bahamas when the bell rings to start the bout.

The live gate money is expected to exceed $19 million, and the pay-per-view and other dollars generated are expected to make the bout the richest non-heavyweight fight in history -- and move De La Hoya past Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield as the top-grossing pay-per-view boxer in history.

“Notice the descriptions of these two fighters as stars,” Arum said. “Who made these guys stars? I claim credit for that, and that’s something to be proud of.”

He added a few parting jabs:

“I have no intention of going to it, or watching it. It’ll be a boring fight. It’ll be a technical fight. Floyd is a lot smarter, he’ll out-speed Oscar.

“I don’t think it’ll be exciting. If I’m wrong, I’ll wait a week and watch it on HBO.”

And the gold medal? Arum said he will return it -- the day De La Hoya retires from boxing.

lance.pugmire@latimes.com

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The card

Oscar De La Hoya-Floyd Mayweather fight facts:

What: World Boxing Council super-welterweight championship.

* When: Saturday, 6 p.m.

* Where: MGM Grand, Las Vegas.

* Records: Oscar De La Hoya (38-4, 30 knockouts), East Los Angeles, vs. Floyd Mayweather (37-0, 24 KOs), Grand Rapids, Mich., for De La Hoya’s belt.

* Undercard: Rocky Juarez (26-3, 19 KOs) vs. Jose Hernandez (22-3, 14 KOs), featherweights; Rey “Boom Boom” Bautista (22-0, 17 KOs) vs. Sergio Medina (28-0, 16 KOs), junior-featherweights; Alex Banal (12-0-1, 10 KOs) vs. Juan Rosas (25-2, 22 KOs), bantamweights; Billy Dib (15-0, nine KOs) vs. Jose Gonzalez (14-3, six KOs).

* Television: HBO pay-per-view, $54.95.