Boxing can absorb body blow if De La Hoya retires

Manny Pacquiao, the new name on top of boxing’s marquee, will take a little vacation now. So will his sport.

Pacquiao has a birthday, his 30th, on Dec. 17. He also will enjoy the Christmas and New Year’s holidays with family and friends, and, in January, the birth of another child.

Boxing has a few smaller shows rounding out the year, but it will be mostly quiet.

Do not, however, expect Pacquiao’s one-sided dispatching of longtime superstar Oscar De La Hoya into almost certain retirement to cripple the sport, as some fear.

Jim Lampley, who makes a considerable portion of his livelihood as the lead boxing broadcaster on HBO shows, expressed that concern late Saturday night.

“Am I going to read Monday that boxing is dead?” he asked.

Not in this space, Jim.

Boxing is its own wonderful traveling circus. Always will be. Only the names and faces of the clowns change. Its dysfunctional nature is its delight.

The Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning sports columnist, the late, great Jim Murray, used to say that only two things could drive him out of sportswriting: the month of February and the demise of boxing.

February’s sports doldrums have been taken care of. Among other things, the NFL, seeing a chance to stretch its season and its profits, often pushes the Super Bowl into February.

Boxing is getting a challenge now from a generation of fans who inexplicably like to watch shoeless people batter each other in cages. But if there is no accounting for taste, there is also no way to pry the sport of boxing from the hearts and minds of those who follow it, especially its flaws and its fun.

If horse racing is the sport of kings, boxing is the sport of kooks.

This is a sport that once saw a man propelled by a giant fan land in the ring during an outdoor heavyweight fight at Caesars Palace. While his corner crew beat on the Fanman with flashlights, a bleeding Riddick Bowe sat on his stool, waiting for somebody to repair the cuts that had been inflicted by Evander Holyfield.

Holyfield was the victim of Mike Tyson’s ear-biting several years later, and as Norm Frauenheim of 15rounds.com tells it, a security guard at ringside found a piece of Holyfield’s ear, put it in a napkin, hailed a taxi to rush it to the hospital. And lost the piece in the taxi.

The bigger events in boxing bring out the best (worst?) in the sport. Last week, the lead-up to Pacquiao-De La Hoya was the usual wacky world.

Wednesday, a news conference featured De La Hoya, a multimillionaire who owns his own downtown high-rise in Los Angeles and is a more successful businessman than half of the buttoned-down Wilshire district, standing in a sweatsuit and hawking beer and tequila rebates.

At the same function, the man who promoted De La Hoya for much of his Golden Boy career and now promotes Pacquiao attempted to introduce those on the dais with Pacquiao. Bob Arum got to someone he didn’t know, a man who was once a high-ranking government official and who had blown the whistle on governmental malfeasance and done much to keep the Philippines on the straight and narrow.

Arum stumbled with a name, then flicked his hand in the direction of the man and introduced him as “Governor Whatever.”

The next day, at another press event, Arum called competing promoter Shelly Finkel, with whom he is in a legal dispute, “the worst person in boxing.” That, of course, covers a lot of territory. Finkel, sitting nearby, replied that everybody has a right to his opinion.

The next day, some boxing officials were angry because the media, especially photographers, were pressing close for access to heated discussions taking place during an official meeting over how De La Hoya’s hands would be taped for the fight. One photographer was even threatened with the loss of his credential. The thing was, they were holding the meeting in the media work room.

Friday’s weigh-in attracted a crowd of about 6,000 people, who clearly have no life, to watch two men stand on a scale in their underwear and then pose face to face, pretending to be angry. ESPN, the daily outlet for those who have no life, televised it live.

Comedian George Lopez, wonderful as always, filled time while ESPN dithered. Lopez eventually introduced De La Hoya as a man who had won 10 world titles in six weight classes, “which is two more than Oprah.”

In the end, the lasting image is of a huge crowd, late Saturday, circling around a man the way it would a huge celebrity as he walked through the MGM Grand. Some sought autographs. Most just wanted to be close to greatness.

Manny Pacquiao? Nope. It was a 48-year-old ex-boxer with Parkinson’s, who shakes noticeably, dresses like a guy who runs a boxing gym and may have never run a comb through his hair in his life.

It was Freddie Roach, Pacquiao’s trainer and mastermind of Saturday night’s victorious moment. It is Freddie Rock Star now.

It was also ironic because, in this sport of fast talkers, con men, pocket-pickers and carnival barkers -- all lovable, to be sure -- boxing had found its hero of the moment in its only honest man. Roach is incapable of lying, incapable of ducking a question, incapable of BSing for a buck.

Boxing is incapable of knowing what to do with such a person.

Not to worry. In a few years, Arum will be introducing him at some function as “Freddie Whatever.”

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Times staff writers Kevin Baxter and Lance Pugmire contributed to this report.

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bill.dwyre@latimes.com