De la Hoya Creates a Name for Himself

Rene de la Hoya stands 6-foot-2. And he weighs 140 pounds. Which makes you wonder if he has eaten anything resembling a meal in the past month.

How does one describe de la Hoya’s physique?

“He looks like a pencil,” Reseda Coach Jeff Halpern said.

De la Hoya is that guy you play against on the blacktop who is so rail thin that it feels as if his elbows have been chiseled to an annoyingly sharp tip.

Meet Rene de la Hoya, most valuable player of the North Hollywood tournament and a senior starting forward for Grant (8-1), the No.1-ranked team in the Times Valley poll. Grant, behind the fine play of de la Hoya, dumped previously top-ranked North Hollywood on Saturday night in the title game, 54-43. That’s the same Husky team that features all-everything Dana Jones, a player who is so talented that it’s likely the tournament folks had his name engraved on the MVP trophy sometime last summer.

De la Hoya paid careful attention to Jones, making sure that all of his team-high 13 points avoided a Jones handprint.

“When I drove in against him, I just dished it off,” the quiet de la Hoya said respectfully.

But Jones and the rest of the capacity crowd at North Hollywood’s gym were forced to pay attention to de la Hoya when the thin man was making an emphatic statement with two breakaway dunks.

The first came with 3:52 left in the second quarter and gave Grant an 18-14 lead. The second came with 3:05 left in the third quarter and gave his team a 29-23 lead, making it seem plausible that Grant could beat the Huskies.

“I was at the game,” Halpern said. “And those dunks just about made my assistant’s jaw fall open.”

De la Hoya’s reaction?

“Well, I was waiting for that,” he said. “I’d never dunked in a game before but I knew I could get over the rim, so I did it.”

In addition, de la Hoya scored 11 points in the opening tournament game against Bell-Jeff and a game-high 23 points in a semifinal win over Reseda. Not bad for a guy who played his first game of organized basketball just last year.

De la Hoya shied away from the sport even though he competed against his brother Javier, a former Grant baseball star now in the Dodger organization, on the playground. It took the encouragement of Bill McKee, a former Grant varsity coach and current physical education teacher to induce him to try out for the team as a junior.

De la Hoya--who insists that the correct spelling of his surname is as such and not the single-word spelling his brother uses--played on the ‘B’ team his junior season and was chosen league player of the year.

He has come a long way.

Two years ago, he didn’t even attend Grant games. Now he is chosen tournament MVP over a player such as Jones, who already has signed with Pepperdine. “It surprised me,” he said of the selection. “I thought Dana was gonna get it for sure. But then my whole team was mobbing me, and my brother, Javier, was in the stands jumping for me, he was so happy.”

As Halpern said: “Coming out of the shadow of his brother.”

For a lean sort, Rene is casting a rather big shadow himself.