KO the Stereotypes; They’re Not OK

Oscar de la Hoya, the latest boxing champ from the East L.A. barrio, finally has Latino fans united in his corner--although not for a reason he would have wanted.

The 24-year-old phenom won the world welterweight boxing championship last week by defeating the titleholder, another widely heralded boxer, Pernell Whitaker. But among Latino boxing fans, the hype that preceded the bout, and even controversy over De la Hoya’s narrowly scored decision, has been overshadowed by the tactless remarks of a television commentator.

Larry Merchant, a boxing expert on Home Box Office telecasts, angered many Latinos even before the fight began when he seemed to denigrate a group of mariachi musicians as they serenaded De la Hoya. I say “seemed” because it is hard to figure just what Merchant was trying to get across in an oddly disjointed monologue whose main point seemed to be that it was highly inappropriate for mariachis to be playing because:

* De la Hoya is not Mexican, but “born and bred American.”

* It slighted Whitaker, an African American, “unless they follow it with some soul music.”

* It was “a marketing ploy” by the match promoter to get “Mexican fans to support De la Hoya.”

All the words quoted above are from a transcript, as is the following: “In other words, in my view, as wonderful as the music is, and it is, in this setting, it sucks.”

That final tasteless word is what seems to have stuck in the craw of the many Latinos who complained to HBO, which was charging viewers a hefty $40 for its broadcast of the match--a lot of money to hear your culture insulted.

Merchant has apologized for those remarks on subsequent HBO boxing telecasts, including a rebroadcast of the Whitaker-De la Hoya bout late Saturday. He also told Times’ sportswriter Steve Springer that he was “talking about the unfairness of playing one fighter’s music and not the other.”

I’m not sure that explanation helps much. It still trades one stereotype for another.

Still, at least Merchant and HBO now understand how even offhanded remarks can generate a firestorm of criticism. I was not surprised, given the extent to which anti-Mexican bigotry has resurfaced in this country as a sad side effect of our national debates over immigration and the North American Free Trade Agreement. These days, Mexican Americans are hypersensitive about perceived slights or insults, especially in the media.

Which brings me back to poor Oscar de la Hoya, who surely deserves better than this after his great moment of athletic triumph.

Ironically, before the match, what most mainstream boxing journalists were reporting about De la Hoya was the fact that hard-core Mexican and Mexican American fight fans do not revere him the way they have past Latino boxing champs. That’s because De la Hoya has never fit the stereotype that too many Latino boxing fans have of champions. He is not some beat-up but still proud fighter like Julio Cesar Chavez. He is a handsome and smart young man who dreams of using the money he’s earning now to study architecture in college. Such presumption is unheard of among Latino boxers, and some rather dense Latinos have expressed their disapproval by booing De la Hoya in public appearances.

I don’t think that will happen anymore, thanks to Dave Merchant.

But the larger, and sadder, lesson of this episode is how all of us must try to move beyond simplistic stereotyping that has all Mexicans liking mariachis, all African Americans liking soul music and all boxers being beat-up pugs.

It’s worth noting here two other athletic milestones last week that fall into the same category. It was certainly poetic that a young black golfer, Tiger Woods, won the Masters Tournament, notorious for having excluded African Americans, 50 years--almost to the day--after Jackie Robinson broke major league baseball’s color barrier. Poetic, but not quite accurate.

For Woods is only part African American. He is the son of a black American father and a mother from Thailand. And while I have no doubt that Woods is proud of his African American background, I suspect that a 21-year-old who last year was playing intercollegiate golf at Stanford is smart enough to know that his identity is too complex to easily fit into anybody’s stereotype.

And I suspect that De la Hoya, somewhere deep inside, feels much the same way. The son of immigrants from Mexico, he too knows his identity is too complex to be put into a box labeled “American” or “Mexican.”

And it is no coincidence that both of these fine young men were raised in the polyglot megalopolis that sprawls across the Los Angeles basin.

Who knows? If we older folks just step back and let these skilled young heroes be themselves, along with the rest of their multiracial, multiethnic generation, they just may lead us out of the box that ethnic, racial and cultural rivalries fed by stereotypes have led us into.