Relative Humility : He’s Just Oscar Around Extended De La Hoya Clan

No one will see her in the ring, during the Olympics.

No one will know she’s there, watching her son box.

No one will know she’s in his corner, her spirit nourishing his will.

No one but Oscar the boxer.

When Cecilia De La Hoya of East Los Angeles went to Seattle to see her teen-age son box at the 1990 Goodwill Games, it meant missing a week of radiation therapy. Her son knew nothing of her breast cancer, only that she had been ill.

He won a Goodwill Games gold medal. And the next day, the day after the De La Hoyas returned home, his family told him.

“They didn’t tell me before how sick she was because they didn’t want it to affect my boxing,” he said.

“But she’d gotten so sick I began to worry. She showed me the burns on her back, from the radiation. I felt bad. She was more than my mother, she was my best friend.”

Cecilia De La Hoya was 39 when she died on Oct. 28, 1990. Her son, in his grief, vowed to win an Olympic gold medal at Barcelona for her.

THE GRANDFATHER

The focal point of this family’s inspiration and love is not the lean, handsome, 19-year-old boxer but a 5-foot-3, 145-pound man the De La Hoyas call Abuelito , Granddad in Spanish.

Vicente De La Hoya, 80, who ran a small restaurant and demolition business in Los Angeles in the 1950s and ‘60s, now lives in Mexicali, Mexico. There are 16 children from two marriages and they have produced offspring in sufficient numbers to perhaps increase the Olympic TV ratings a tick or two when their famous relative boxes in Barcelona.

“When you get all the aunts and uncles, the first cousins and the grandchildren together, it’s about 125 people,” said cousin Adrian Pasten, a 36-year-old executive with Bank of America in Los Angeles who is helping young De La Hoya with media obligations.

“Vicente has never seen Oscar box in person, just on TV,” he said. “We’ll bring him to L.A. during the Olympics and get him in front of a TV.”

Even by standards of tightly knit Latino families, the bonds connecting Vicente De La Hoya to his family are unusually strong.

“At family gatherings, all his sons line up to kiss the back of his hand,” Pasten said. “It’s an old tradition of respect for a father, but you don’t see it that much in today’s generations.”

Pasten says their Abuelito doesn’t know quite what to make of his famous grandson. To him, Oscar doesn’t look much like a fighter--at least, not like the bent-nosed fighters he remembers from his amateur days as a featherweight in Durango, Mexico.

“He knows what Oscar has achieved and he’s very proud of him, but he can’t figure him out,” Pasten said. “He thinks Oscar looks too much like a movie star, and acts too nonchalant.

“We showed him some videos of Oscar’s fights once and he said to us, with a smile: ‘That’s how I used to box.’ ”

Vicente De La Hoya came to Los Angeles with his growing family in 1956 and, among other jobs, worked as an auto mechanic in a garage at 7th and Central. A year later, he opened a small Mexican restaurant half a block away and called it, Virginia’s Place.

For more than a decade, it was the De La Hoya family’s Sunday afternoon gathering place. Also during his restaurant years, Vicente De La Hoya owned a demolition business. He would bid on home demolition jobs, knock the houses down, haul the scrap lumber to Mexicali and sell it.

Today, according to Pasten, lots of families live in Mexicali homes that were built of lumber hauled there by Oscar De La Hoya’s grandfather.

THE FATHER

Arriving in Los Angeles in 1956 with Vicente De La Hoya was one of his sons, 16-year-old Joel De La Hoya, now Oscar’s father. He went to Roosevelt High, learned to box in East L.A. gyms, turned pro, and fashioned a 9-3-1 record. He boxed several times at the Olympic Auditorium.

For the last 17 years, he has been a dispatcher for a City of Industry firm that makes industrial heating and air-conditioning systems.

Joel De La Hoya, 52, works an early shift and is with his son for most of his afternoon workouts at the Brooklyn Gym in Boyle Heights. He rarely has much to say--unless his son is in the ring. At the Olympic trials in Worcester, Mass., last month, Joel’s instructions, shouted in Spanish from his 10th-row seat, could be heard throughout the 15,000-seat Centrum.

THE BOXER

At the trials, where he won the lightweight championship, Oscar De La Hoya said he was under wraps. He relied primarily on his long, accurate left jab, boxing carefully yet smartly in winning three relatively easy decisions.

At the Olympic team boxoffs in Phoenix last weekend, De La Hoya easily defeated his challenger, Patrice Brooks of St. Louis, to make the Olympic team.

At Worcester, many wondered where the vaunted De La Hoya power had gone. Where were the body shots that had stopped some opponents in their tracks?

“No one here saw the real Oscar,” he said. “That will happen in Barcelona. U.S. judges favor basic boxing technique, but foreign judges score more for power shots. And in Barcelona, that’s what I’ll do.”

He is unusually tall for a lightweight (132 pounds), 5 feet 10, and generates considerable leverage with his punches, particularly when working an opponent’s body.

He has looked brilliant in competition when he uses all his skills.

Said Roosevelt Sanders, U.S. Marine Corps coach and former Olympic team assistant coach: “I compare him to Meldrick Taylor (1984 featherweight gold medalist) because of how quickly he’s developed in a short time.

“The best word to describe him is, he’s a natural. He’s so fluid, he makes it look easy. And he’s very cool under fire. And with everything else he’s got going for him, he’s a tremendous body puncher.”

For much of Oscar De La Hoya’s amateur career, now in its 13th year--he began at 6 in Boys Club tournaments--the De La Hoya women have been unable to see him box because he usually fights out of town.

De La Hoya has been in only one significant amateur boxing tournament in Los Angeles, the 1991 Olympic Sports Festival. USA Boxing’s national championships are held most years in Colorado Springs, and De La Hoya’s other major matches have been there, in other U.S. cities or overseas.

So De La Hoya, before he began intense training for the Olympic trials, staged a workout at the Brooklyn Gym in Boyle Heights for family members only, the women getting the prime seats in the tiny bleachers.

His sisters, cousins and aunts seemed startled at the pistol shot-like noise De La Hoya’s gloved fists made in the closed gym when he hit trainer Robert Alcazar’s sparring mitts. They responded with polite applause.

Then he made the speed bag sound like a machine gun for about 10 minutes. Polite applause. Next was a demonstration of high-speed rope-jumping. More polite applause.

Then he lay on his back, on a towel, while Alcazar hammered his stomach with judo chops. More polite applause. Finally, De La Hoya stood on his head in the corner. Good for the circulation, he says. More polite applause.

Then, at the finish, he addressed the several dozen relatives, thanking them in English and Spanish for their love and support.

Unrestrained applause.

He is intensely loyal to his family.

Pasten said: “One night about a year ago, Oscar said to several of us: ‘I don’t want anyone in the family to change if I get to be famous. I don’t want anyone in the family to ever treat me like a star. I just want to be Oscar to you.’ ”

Last October in Sydney, Australia, De La Hoya lost his first international match--he had been 36-0--to German Marco Rudolph in the preliminary rounds of amateur boxing’s World Championships.

It’s his only loss since he was 14.

He lost a 17-13 decision and within an hour was on the phone with Pasten in East L.A.

Pasten said the conversation lasted about 10 minutes, with De La Hoya distraught over the loss, and somewhat confused. Then, 12 hours later, De La Hoya called again.

“Adrian, I think this is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” De La Hoya told Pasten. “I was actually getting bored with boxing, I was in a rut. This really woke me up. I’m coming home and work harder than I ever did, and I hope I get this guy in the Olympics, because I’m going to beat him.”

The young boxer’s trademark, in his cousin’s view, is his ability to focus on the project at hand.

“In addition to his talent, there is one thing he’s very, very good at and that’s concentrating on the next competition and nothing beyond that,” Pasten said.

“A year ago, it was only the Sports Festival in L.A. He never talked about the Olympics then. Now, it’s only the trials, then the boxoffs, then it’ll be the Olympics. And we hardly ever talk about turning pro, although I know he’s anxious to do that.

“And we’ve never once talked about how much money he might make as a pro. That’s one of those things that takes care of itself, so he just doesn’t think much about it.”

De La Hoya’s adviser is Shelly Finkel, the onetime New York rock promoter who today manages heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield, former lightweight champion Pernell Whitaker and junior-welterweight champion Meldrick Taylor.

“Oscar and his father talked to me a couple of years ago about turning pro then, and I told them that if he did turn pro then, he’d make maybe a few thousand dollars in his first fight,” Finkel said.

“But I told them that with an Olympic gold medal, I could get him $200,000 for his first pro fight.”

Had De La Hoya never ventured into a gym, he might today be a university architecture or art student.

At Garfield High, his strengths were drafting and art classes. On international boxing trips, he has passed time in airports and hotel lobbies by sketching teammates.

And just maybe, he might be a comedian masquerading as a boxer.

A year ago at the Sports Festival, he described in horrifying detail to several dozen reporters the night armed gang members robbed him.

His delivery:

“I was walking to my girlfriend’s house one evening, about five blocks from my house. A truck pulled up and about five guys jumped out and three of them put guns to my head. They told me to give them my wallet, which I did. It had $150 in it. They took my camera, too.

“They didn’t know who I was. I had some gold rings on and a nice leather jacket, but they didn’t even ask for them. They were amateurs, I guess. That was around 7 p.m. By 9, the wallet was on my front porch, the money still in it. I guess they opened it, saw my I.D. They kept the camera, though.”

And what, a reporter asked, had the incident taught him about American urban crime?

“Don’t walk at night,” he said.

THE TRAINER

When De La Hoya first achieved prominence on the U.S. amateur boxing scene, his trainer was Al Stankie, the former L.A. policeman who guided another East L.A. boxer, Paul Gonzales, to an Olympic gold medal in 1984. But Stankie’s problems with alcohol, which resulted in a one-year suspension by USA Boxing a year ago, forced De La Hoya and his father to find another trainer.

Enter Robert Alcazar, 34, who works at a Fullerton firm that manufactures airline seats.

“I’ve known Oscar since he was 10,” he said.

Under Alcazar, who lives in El Monte, De La Hoya’s fast-paced workouts are models of discipline and efficiency. There is no idle time, no conversation with anyone--and none of the horseplay so common to some pro boxers’ workouts.

The trainer says something amazing happens almost daily.

Recently, he showed a reporter a crack in a stainless steel swivel joint used to suspend a speed bag from its platform.

“This was a brand new speed bag, and Oscar broke the swivel on the second day,” he said.

Next, he showed off another trophy, a split sparring mitt. Sparring mitts are similar to baseball catchers’ mitts, worn by a trainer who uses them to provide moving targets for a fighter in mock sparring sessions.

“This was a brand-new mitt when Oscar split it on the first day,” he said.

Alcazar and all the other Olympic team boxers’ personal trainers were kept away from their fighters at the trials and boxoffs, and will be banned from the athletes’ village at Barcelona. Once boxers make the Olympic team, USA Boxing takes over.

“Oscar’s not happy about it, I’m not happy about it, but that’s the system, I guess,” Alcazar said.

Said Jim Fox, executive director of USA Boxing: “We either have an Olympic team coaching staff that’s in charge, or we have 12 personal coaches going to the Olympics, one for each boxer. One’s a workable way of doing it, the other isn’t.”

And so Alcazar will wait and worry, about a Cuban named Julio Gonzales.

In his most significant international victory yet, De La Hoya scored a close decision over the Cuban, also a Barcelona medal pick, in the USA-Cuba matches at Ft. Bragg earlier this year.

“Oscar needs to work every day on bringing his left jab back quickly,” Alcazar said.

“He could be hurt by a good right-handed counterpuncher, and that’s what Gonzales is.”

And so it goes, in East Los Angeles . . . a lot of worrying and waiting.