Delayed Payoff: De La Hoya Collects for Barcelona Saturday in Las Vegas

In the summer of 1992, on an Olympic boxing team of complainers and whiners, he was America’s sunshine boy.

No matter how bad the decisions were perceived as going, no matter how poorly the referees officiated, no matter how heated the controversy over computer scoring became, Oscar De La Hoya’s billboard smile was somehow the beacon that made everything seem OK.

As it turned out, it was OK--for Oscar, who won the only boxing gold medal for the United States.

On Saturday, De La Hoya will face by far his most difficult challenge since Barcelona. He fights Rafael Ruelas in a lightweight title match that figures to be not only the biggest event in decades involving L.A. fighters, but also the richest lightweight bout in history.

And in the 1992 Olympics, all this was on the line.

But De La Hoya made it happen, and he did so at a smelly little concrete basketball arena called Joventut Pavilion in the Barcelona suburb of Badalona.

From out of East L.A.’s tiny Resurrection Church gym and the Brooklyn Gym in Boyle Heights he came--lean, strong, bearing a cannon-shot left jab and the kind of talent that drew pro boxing people to Barcelona like moths to a Klieg light.

De La Hoya had been 36-0 in international competition before he lost in the preliminaries of the 1991 World Championships at Sydney to Germany’s Marco Rudolph. At Barcelona, he was matched with Rudolph in the gold-medal bout, and this time De La Hoya won emphatically.

The fight was close until the third and final round, when De La Hoya suddenly overwhelmed Rudolph, decking him with a left hook to the jaw.

Anyone searching De La Hoya’s 5-0 run through the 1992 Olympic tournament for clues as to how he might fare against Ruelas might do well to examine his semifinal bout with South Korean Hong Sung-Sik.

Against an unorthodox opponent who wrestled Greco-Roman style as much as he boxed, De La Hoya was never in command and fought a confused, almost passive fight. As a pro, De La Hoya has also, on occasion, gone into a shell against unorthodox fighters.

Ruelas is no wrestler but he will bring a busy inside game to De La Hoya, as well as a slightly awkward, upright style.

Against the Korean, De La Hoya barely survived. Confused, he rarely threw his crackling jab, and his right-hand leads had nothing on them. He won an 11-10 decision. By contrast, he was totally in command against Rudolph in the final.

When De La Hoya stepped to the victory platform and accepted his gold medal, tears flowed in the balcony, where De La Hoya’s father, Joel, and other relatives had been Oscar’s cheering section.

Also in the balcony that day was Shelly Finkel, manager of then-heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield.

Today, Finkel says he subsidized De La Hoya and his father, to the tune of $100,000, for more than a year before the Olympics, and thought he’d had an agreement with the De La Hoyas that he would become De La Hoya’s pro manager. That didn’t happen.

De La Hoya’s pro career has gone pretty much as expected. He has fought 17 carefully selected opponents and still hasn’t lost a fight since that defeat in Australia in 1991.

In Ruelas, he meets another Southland headliner. And win or lose, De La Hoya has a post-fight appointment--in a New York courtroom.

He has been summoned to submit a deposition, preliminary action in Finkel’s $10-million lawsuit against the De La Hoyas.

Finkel asserts that he was stiffed by the De La Hoyas.

“Early on, I would have settled this thing for $100,000, but not now,” Finkel said recently. “I’m suing for an amount keyed to what Oscar’s earnings potential is now, not then.”

Finkel, who says he has receipts for everything, alleges that he:

--Helped the De La Hoyas pay hospital and funeral expenses for Oscar’s mother, Cecilia, who died of cancer in 1990.

--Paid for vehicles, transportation of relatives to De La Hoya’s boxing events, clothing and other expenses.

And Finkel isn’t the only dissatisfied handler. Los Angeles boxing figure Marty Denkin, who put together a group to manage De La Hoya and paid for numerous training expenses, claimed later that the De La Hoyas walked and never reimbursed them.

The New York management team of Steve Nelson and Bob Mittleman also wound up embittered.

The De La Hoyas deny having stiffed anyone. Joel De La Hoya, in fact, has said of the Finkel dealings: “I am a poor Mexican man, and Finkel tried to take advantage of us.”