Boxing’s Twister : De La Hoya Has Stormed the Sport, but He Plans to Cut a Wider Swath

See how fast he can go? With gloves on his hands and an opponent in his range, Oscar De La Hoya is cruelly quick, the demon who has forced champions to buckle in surrender, not merely hurt but humbled by the rapid fire.

Can you tell that he savors it when they quit on him, when they stagger to a stop and let him roar by?

“This guy is a little different, he’s a little cuckoo,” says veteran trainer Emanuel Steward, not without a large measure of admiration. “You look at him, he’s so sweet, so polite, so nice and classy.

“Then, once the bell rings, after about 45 seconds, you see him transform into a cold-blooded killer, one of the worst I’ve ever seen in my life.”

De La Hoya is traveling so fast now, streaking so quickly into history and outrageous fortune, sometimes everything and everybody around him look as if they’re spinning and wheeling, and still he goes faster and faster.

Can you see that Cecilia De La Hoya’s youngest son can’t slow down? Not when he’s speeding through a fabulously lucrative four-year fight career, or he’s driving his flamboyant car so hard down the freeway that his girlfriend winces at the thought?

“I hate that Lamborghini so bad,” says

Veronica Peralta, who has been with De La Hoya off and on through most of four

years. “I fear for him, when you have so much power . . . I tell him, ‘You know what? I don’t need you to be king of the ring so you can die on the road.’ ”

Four years after he was the only American boxer to win a gold medal in the Barcelona Olympics, six years after his mother died of cancer, De La Hoya is 23, undefeated in 21 fights, a millionaire 10 times over, a clean-cut pitchman for several national companies.

“He knew what he wanted from Day 1,” says Maria Elena Tostado, a former nun who was De La Hoya’s principal at Garfield High and grew close to him after his mother’s death in 1990. “He always had a goal and worked toward it. I mean, nonstop.

“His mother always believed in him. She must have seen he had special qualities. He really is a single-minded young man--there aren’t many like him. He’s never, ever once complained about what he was doing or how much it was taking of his life.”

So, as he winds down preparation for his milestone fight Friday night at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas with 33-year-old Julio Cesar Chavez, yes, De La Hoya is winning the race.

But, only he seems to know how swiftly he must go, and how far there is left to run.

*

In the stampede of his successes, his money and his fame, at this crucial moment in his life and career, is it easier to understand De La Hoya not for what he has won, but for what he has lost?

“In some ways, I think he will always be lonely--nobody will ever be able to replace the loss of his mother,” says Peralta, a striking former Miss Mexico-Los Angeles who has the public self-confidence and openness that De La Hoya only rarely displays.

“He says sometimes that he has so much now that he wishes his mom had just a tiny part of it. If his mom was around, she would be his counselor, helper, friend. Sometimes when we go to the cemetery, he’ll just sit there. I wonder, ‘God, what is he thinking? Is he talking to her?’ ”

In private, with his closest friends, he can be spontaneous and silly, screaming out goofy greetings and daring anybody to beat him at pool. But in public, De La Hoya is smart, sophisticated, and usually a bit distant.

“I think if his mother was still alive, she would’ve been a protector of him,” says Steve Nelson, who is not without his biases after having been fired, along with his partner, Robert Mittleman, in December 1993, after 13 months as De La Hoya’s co-managers.

“She was the other side to his development. His father [Joel, a former boxer and the son of a boxer] developed the fighter, the warrior. His mother was the person who he could go back to and talk about the personal things. Once she was gone, everyone looked at him like he was a money machine.”

Up in his carefully crafted, self-designed wood cabin about half a mile from Big Bear Lake, De La Hoya nods and says, yes, sometimes he does wish he could go slower, vanish to the golf links for a year or more, take time out, take a vacation with Veronica, relax, enjoy.

But how can he? De La Hoya wants a record-breaking six titles in six weight divisions before he quits, which he is sure will happen well before he is 30. If he wins Friday, he will already have won titles in three weight classes--130 pounds, 135, and Friday for the World Boxing Council’s 140-pound title--before his 23rd bout.

The plan is to go after a welterweight title by early next year, maybe move up to junior-middleweight by the next, finishing at the 160-pound middleweight limit somewhere near 2000. Then he says he will leave boxing, forever, to study architecture or just to golf the endless links.

Last year, De La Hoya flung himself to the front of the boxing world--and was named the consensus fighter of the year--by defeating John John Molina, Rafael Ruelas, Genaro Hernandez and Jesse James Leija in succession, with each new bout showing how well he was adapting to new trainer Jesus Rivero’s athletic, clever fighting style.

“I think that was the learning year,” De La Hoya says. “I kind of matured a bit. I still have probably two more years to reach my peak, but that year there kind of showed a lot of people that I’ve grown up and learned a lot.”

It’s hard to skip a month or two if you’re planning four more megafights by the time you’re 25, if the current calendar year is already loaded with future opponents, if you are poised to fulfill every prophecy.

“People think everything’s come easy to me,” De La Hoya says late one evening after dinner. “Now I’m glad that all the hard work I’ve been doing is paying off and people are seeing it. People think I train for maybe a week or something and just go and fight. It’s not like that. People think it just came overnight. But I have to work very hard for what I have, just like everybody else.”

At first, everything happened too fast, even for him. His mother died before he could get to the Olympics, or earn the money that everyone knew he would. Once he had won the gold medal, the shy, single-minded teenager was a superstar, on the fast track to anywhere he wanted to go.

“I remember when I first met him, he was only 19 and he was a wild one,” says Peralta. “Because he used to love to go out, hit the party scene and meet the girls. I think since he got famous quick and he got rich quick, it was something he wasn’t exposed to before. He had to learn how to deal with it.

“Those girls who go after him, even when we’re out together, God, give me a break, have some self-respect. And I guess some of that is alluring to him, like, ‘Wow!’

“But, he finally realized all that is superficial. These girls don’t realize what he really is, don’t know him when he’s lonely, when he’s sad, when he’s mad.

“Sometimes, I think it’s not fair, because I’ll be there for him all the time, and he’s up in Big Bear, and his life goes on like normal because he’s doing what he’s always done. But for me, when I’m down here, life doesn’t go on. I want my life to be with him.

“God, most of the time we’ve been together, we’ve been apart.”

*

He knows how fast he’s going, how far he’s gone. And since ejecting Nelson and Mittleman, De La Hoya has leaned on a small corps of friends and advisors--from Peralta to Rivero to marketer Bjorn Rebney to businessman Mike Hernandez, who will head up De La Hoya’s new charitable foundation--who have steadied his finances and kept him on pace to be the highest-paid non-heavyweight since Sugar Ray Leonard.

Only at the end of a long career is Chavez receiving a guaranteed $9 million for this fight, by far the biggest purse he has earned. De La Hoya, in his 22nd fight, is guaranteed $8.85 million--more than Roy Jones Jr., Terry Norris, Pernell Whitaker or countless other more experienced, talented fighters have ever made.

“I’m just very glad that it happened to me at an early age,” De La Hoya says. “And I still have many, many fights ahead of me, bigger fights out there for even bigger money. I’m in a position where a lot of fighters, if they want to make money, they have to fight me. I don’t have to go to them. Even if they have all the experience in the world and they’ve been boxing a long time, still, they have to come after me.”

Hernandez, who has until now been an unpaid advisor, is nudging De La Hoya toward settling his business affairs and establishing the foundation, which is in the process of buying Resurrection Gym, in order to rename it the Oscar De La Hoya Youth Center.

But the only way De La Hoya will ever truly settle down, his girlfriend is sure, is when he becomes a father. And he can invest his mother’s dreams into his own child.

“Once we have a family together, I think that’s going to be a totally different Oscar,” Peralta says. “It’s going to be a happy Oscar, an Oscar who’s going to give his children what, unfortunately, his mother couldn’t have, all that happiness, all the love, hopefully the stability economically and emotionally.

“His mom isn’t around, and he knows he wasn’t able to provide for her what she would’ve wanted--superficial things to make her happy that now he has that probably don’t make him happy because he’s always locked up up there [in Big Bear]. He loves his nephew so much, his eyes sparkle when he sees his nephew. I think, God, it will be so beautiful.

“I think once you have a child, all your hopes, all your dreams, all your cares, they all make sense.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

DE LA HOYA vs. CHAVEZ

“I know Oscar is the favorite, but if you recall what happened to older underdogs in Ali-Foreman, Moorer-Foreman, Douglas-Tyson, Hagler-Leonard, you know that us geezerz will surprise you every now and then.”

George Foreman