Fighting for Respect

I was at Gulfstream Park in Florida a couple of weeks ago for a horse race. When heavily favored Silver Charm lost, a colleague, grumbling that he’d just had his wallet shot off, turned to me and said derisively, “West Coast horse.”

I could have responded that Silver Charm isn’t really a West Coast horse, that he’s a Florida-bred who moved to California for business reasons. Or I could have pointed out that the winner that day, Puerto Madero, also has a West Coast address.

But I learned long ago that this East-West argument is not one you can win if you live west of the Grand Canyon.

Eastern players, my friends from the right coast say, go to work with hard hats and lunch pails. Western players go to work with Jack Nicholson and Dyan Cannon. Eastern teams have nicknames like Broad Street Bullies and Bronx Bombers. Western teams have nicknames like Showtime.

Even after the Lakers had won five titles in the ‘80s, they got only grudging respect. They had it easy, East Coast critics would say, because they merely had to go through Phoenix or Seattle to reach the NBA finals. The Eastern finalist had to go through Boston or Philly.

Rudyard Kipling was right. Never the twain shall meet.

I bring this up now because Oscar De La Hoya defends his World Boxing Council welterweight title Saturday night at the Thomas & Mack Center against Ike Quartey.

De La Hoya has won an Olympic gold medal, 29 fights--24 by knockout--against no losses as a professional and championship belts at four weights. One thing he hasn’t won is respect from East Coast media.

His promoter, Bob Arum, said De La Hoya asked him recently how he could change that.

“Move to New York or Philadelphia,” Arum told him. “As long as you live in California, you don’t have a prayer.”

But De La Hoya has deep roots in Los Angeles. He was reared in East L.A., owns homes in Big Bear and Beverly Hills, has one child who lives with him part time and another on the way with his television-star fiancee. He’s not moving.

So he’s trying to do the next best thing, which is to beat fighters who are respected by East Coast media.

Enter Quartey.

If Quartey is an East Coast fighter, then a giraffe is a New York taxicab. He’s not even from the East Coast of Africa. He’s from Ghana, which is in the Western part of the continent. Most of his fights have been either there or in Europe.

But even if they can’t claim him as their own, the East Coast media have championed him. One reason is, they believe he can expose De La Hoya as just another West Coast Golden Boy.

Arum doesn’t think so. He won’t say it now because he’s trying to persuade you to pay $39.95 for the pay-per-view telecast Saturday night, but a couple of months ago the promoter said he didn’t think Quartey was much of a challenger, despite a 34-0-1 record with 29 knockouts.

“Overrated,” was the word he used.

Because it was the East Coast media doing the rating, though, Arum saw Quartey as an opponent who could validate De La Hoya without having more than a puncher’s chance to beat him. So Arum made the fight, called it “The Challenge” and started hyping it as the greatest war the welterweight division has seen since Leonard and Hearns.

It appears to be working.

“Chicken lays it on the line,” read the headline Thursday in the New York Daily News.

Chicken is short for Chicken De La Hoya, the nickname given to the fighter by the Daily News’ respected--by almost everyone--boxing writer, Michael Katz.

Katz once told De La Hoya, “If you go over to Don King, I can call you ‘Chicken A La King.’ ”

Because De La Hoya laughed, Katz scores him higher for his sense of humor than for his boxing skills.

When I spoke to Katz on Thursday in the press room at the Las Vegas Hilton, he said he likes Quartey a lot and will finally concede that De La Hoya is a special fighter if he wins Saturday night.

Until then, Katz said, he will consider De La Hoya a one-armed fighter who has never fought a legitimate contender other than Pernell Whitaker, who, according to Katz’s card, should have won the decision.

“Oscar might be the best thing since chopped liver, but he hasn’t proved it to me yet,” Katz said.

“Arum blames the East Coast attitude. The truth is that we’re more sophisticated in the East in the press. Most of the press on the West Coast haven’t seen that many fights. They just don’t know. Promoters like Arum can sell them anything.”

When I repeated that to Sports Illustrated’s Richard Hoffer, a West Coast writer, he said, “I never should have saved his life.”

He explained that he once administered the Heimlich maneuver to Katz, who was choking in a restaurant.

A colleague of Hoffer’s heard about the incident, called him and said, “Next time, mind your own . . . business.”

Hoffer reminded me about Shane Mosley, who has been going through East Coast fighters lately “like gasoline through hell.”

Mosley is a West Coast fighter from Pomona.

So it works both ways.

Before the first fight between De La Hoya and Julio Cesar Chavez a couple of years ago in Las Vegas, Arum was talking about the promotion with Rich Rose, then of Caesars World, and The Times’ Steve Springer.

“This is going to be the biggest battle since the Alamo,” Arum said.

“What about Gettysburg?” Springer asked.

“Nah,” Rose said. “East Coast fight.”

Randy Harvey can be reached at randy.harvey@latimes.com.