HE’S NO ANGEL

The image is pure gold.

He won a gold medal in the 1992 Olympics and now is known as the Golden Boy of professional boxing, unbeaten in 28 fights and the World Boxing Council welterweight champion. Publicly, he says all the right things, does all the right things, and is courteous to all his fans. He is handsome, wealthy, charitable and polite. Women dream of being with him and kids dream of being him.

Who wouldn’t want to be Oscar De La Hoya, the man with the golden touch?

Well, once in a while, Oscar De La Hoya doesn’t want to be Oscar De La Hoya. And sometimes, the man is a long way from the image.

Once in a while, he wants to be allowed to have the same flaws as any other 25-year-old, wants to drink too much, gamble and womanize too much, to allow a little tarnish on the gold.

Last spring, De La Hoya was spotted making nightly treks into a bar in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where he became publicly drunk, dancing on tables with half-clad females.

He has been spotted at several casinos on the Las Vegas strip, gambling hundreds of thousands of dollars, a fact that has so concerned his promoter, Bob Arum, and De La Hoya’s chief advisor, Mike Hernandez, that they have asked some casinos to put a limit on what De La Hoya can wager.

De La Hoya does not deny any of the reports.

“I was a naughty boy one time,” he said of the Mexican trip. “I knew that I exceeded my limits. I don’t do anything bad. I drink, but I don’t have a high tolerance [for alcohol], I guess. I don’t crave it. Sometimes I want to be human. Once, twice a year, I just want to let loose. I go on vacation and have a good time the way I want to have a good time. It keeps me balanced. It’s frustrating to know I can’t be normal.

“I’ve been this straight person for many years. This is me, yeah. But it’s sometimes difficult to just be that person that everyone wants to see.”

So he becomes a wild and crazy person, but, De La Hoya said, never for long.

“I tell myself, ‘I have to stop this. This is not me. This is not my life. If I keep doing this, then I will not get to where I want to get.’ Once I say that, then I stop,” De La Hoya said.

“I have total control of that. I’m a grown man. I don’t need anybody else to tell me what to do. If I’m doing something wrong, then I’ll know. If I’m exceeding my limits, then I’ll know.

“If I don’t do the right things, I can go down, just like anybody else. I think that people sometimes want to see me go down, and that’s another thing that helps keep me focused. I don’t want to give the people the satisfaction of seeing what they want. A lot of critics, [Julio Cesar] Chavez people or whoever, they want to see me drink, they want to see me not train, but it’s not going to happen.”

And while De La Hoya sometimes breaks out of his mold, he said he has no desire to emulate Chavez, the hard-drinking, violence-prone boxing legend of Mexico whom De La Hoya will meet in a rematch at Las Vegas’ Thomas & Mack Center on Sept. 18.

“He’ll eventually break down,” De La Hoya said of Chavez. “It will all come back to him one day, and it’s starting. I don’t envy the fact that he is a hero.”

De La Hoya acknowledges that he occasionally drinks when he is not in training but picks his spots.

“I make sure it’s not around little kids who can’t drink,” De La Hoya said. “I always have to think about setting an example. I know my limits. I know what I have to do to keep my positive image. It’s limits I choose to have, that I chose a long time ago. I want to be a role model for little kids. That’s something that I strongly believe in.”

De La Hoya concedes that he gambles, but maintains it’s usually with the house’s money. He said he took $20,000 one night to play baccarat in a Las Vegas casino, went on a winning streak that got his total up to half a million dollars, then lost $200,000, ending the evening ahead by $300,000.

“Losing $200,000 of their money isn’t bad at all,” De La Hoya said.

“Oscar is one of best behaved athletes I’ve ever seen,” Arum said, “but he is still very young.

“We are concerned about the casino gambling and we are working on him to cut it down, cut it down. The problem is, the first time he gambled a lot, he won half a million dollars. That’s like getting a fix on drugs. It hooks you. Oscar thought he was as invincible at the tables as he is in the ring.”

Arum said that at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and several other places, including a casino in Connecticut, De La Hoya now has a $25,000 limit on the amount he can bet.

Arum said he is not concerned about an image problem if De La Hoya is spotted gambling, or about the possibility that a casino operator might find De La Hoya deeply in debt to him someday and try to use that to influence the outcome of one of his fights.

“It’s an economic issue for Oscar’s future,” Arum said. “I think he’s listening. What’s important is that he’s not in denial. He realizes what’s going on.”

No argument from De La Hoya.

“I have now rededicated myself to just focusing on boxing,” De La Hoya said. “I want to try to create history in boxing. And to do that, I have to quit those other things. It’s not right. I understand that it’s not right.”

And if he sometimes forgets, De La Hoya depends on his brother, Joel Jr., two years older, to remind him.

“He’s the one that will keep me grounded,” Oscar said of his brother. “He’s the bad guy.”

And for good reason.

“He’s got his buddies,” Joel said, “but they are only going to keep him in a straight line for so long. Everyone else is afraid of him. What’s he going to do to me, fire me? He knows I will take care of him. I tell him, ‘Look at Julio Cesar Chavez. I don’t want you ending up like this guy. So don’t push it.’ Unfortunately, I can’t be with Oscar all the time.

“He likes having a good time, but after one or two drinks, he already has a little buzz. That’s a good thing that he can’t drink too much.”

Joel says he isn’t concerned about De La Hoya’s gambling.

“I think he does that mostly to impress the high rollers,” he said.

And then there are the women. They mob Oscar, jump on his car, hold up signs telling him that they want to have his baby. They slip him their panties. One female fan threw De La Hoya her bra over an airport fence.

But De La Hoya, who has had a son out of wedlock, insists he’s not with as many women as everybody seems to think. And someday, he said, he would like to be with only one, in marriage.

“I know that when I get married, that will settle me down,” he said. “I have a beautiful, wonderful girlfriend now [actress Shana Mokler]. She is the kind of woman that I would always dream about. I would love to get married. It would settle me down completely.”

In the meantime, De La Hoya leaves the country in search of peace and quiet, puts on sunglasses and a wig and pulls his hat down to walk through a mall or simply stays occupied with a heavy fight schedule that keeps him at his Big Bear training headquarters.

“I would rather stay busy and stay up here,” he said of Big Bear. “It’s much safer. I admit there are times when I have too much time on my hands.”

So being the Golden Boy isn’t all that it’s supposed to be?

“It’s tough,” De La Hoya said. “I wouldn’t recommend it. There’s a lot of pressure involved. Somebody else might not have made it. They would have gone crazy having to deal with everything. The toughest part is making decisions all the time, giving answers and having to deal with people who just want you for your money. It’s all combined and it’s all too much.”

De La Hoya said there is only one place he can truly get away from it all: the golf course.

“I don’t think about anything,” he said. “I just play golf.”

De La Hoya certainly isn’t looking for sympathy, simply a little understanding.

“Everybody thinks it’s easy,” he said. “A lot of people tell me how I have money and fame and how they would love to be in my shoes. I tell them, ‘No, you wouldn’t.’ ”

Nobody said perfection was easy.