For De La Hoya, Loss Isn’t All Bad

The best thing that could have happened to Oscar De La Hoya’s boxing career happened Saturday night at the Mandalay Bay Events Center. He lost.

It wasn’t a clear decision. It could have gone either way. One judge had it even. One had Felix Trinidad winning by one point, the other by two points. I agreed with the last one.

De La Hoya, of course, disagreed with all of us.

“I know I won,” he said.

But even though the result of this “Fight of the Millennium” is sure to be debated into the early part of the next one, the more intriguing topic today concerns where De La Hoya goes from here.

“I hurt inside emotionally,” he said. “Hopefully, we can do it again.”

He can rest assured that there will be a rematch. Trinidad virtually guaranteed that Saturday night. The question is whether De La Hoya will be ready for it.

That will be the true test of his greatness.

De La Hoya believed that this fight against Trinidad might be that.

“I think it will settle questions within the boxing world,” De La Hoya said last week. “For me, this is an opportunity for everyone in the world to watch me, people who are not even boxing fans.

“Every champion has a moment. I think this fight here is going to have a huge impact on my boxing career and going to put me right up there with the greats.”

His promoter, Bob Arum, didn’t necessarily agree. He believed that De La Hoya had already proved himself as one of the great welterweights in a 12-round decision at the Mandalay Bay in February against Ike Quartey, a fight in which De La Hoya pulled out with a barrage of scoring punches in the waning minutes.

“Is this the defining moment, getting into the ring with Felx Trinidad?” Arum asked last week. “No, the defining moment was last February, when he fought Ike Quartey. Trust me, Ike Quartey was a much more difficult opponent for Oscar De La Hoya than Felix Trinidad.”

Arum still promoted it like it was the ultimate fight, “The Fight of the Millennium,” because that’s what promoters do, promote.

The people bought it. The final figures probably will show that more than 800,000 people bought the pay-per-view package, a record for non-heavyweights. The 12,200-seat Mandalay Bay Events Center sold out even before tickets went on sell to the public.

Among the crowd were many celebrities who all brought dates. There were David Kelley and Michelle Pfeiffer, Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, Jack Nicholson and Lara Flynn Boyle and Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf. If Judi Dench had been there, you could have mistaken it for the Oscars.

It would have to be a great fight not only to live up to the hype but to keep awake the East Coast viewers, who had to wait until 12:05 a.m. EDT to see the start of the first round.

If the undefeated De La Hoya, 31-0, figured to have a big edge against the undefeated Trinidad, 35-0, it would have been because of his experience in fights of this magnitude.

The inexperience of the Trinidad corner, the trainer father, Felix Sr., and Trinidad Jr., showed early, even before the start, when they left the fighter’s mouthpiece in the dressing room, delaying the start.

But if Trinidad started slowly, and he did by losing four of the first five rounds, he finished with a flurry, dominating the late rounds. When it ended, De La Hoya was on the run.

Arum was wrong about Trinidad.

We now know how much heart he has. Now let’s see about De La Hoya.

Sugar Ray Leonard was the “Golden Boy” of his time, also undefeated until he finally met a better fighter, at least on that night, in Roberto Duran, who handed Leonard his first loss.

“It wasn’t until after the loss that I knew Sugar Ray was a great fighter,” his trainer, Angelo Dundee, said last week. “Twenty minutes after the fight, even though he had been beaten and beaten badly, he was dying for a rematch.

“Let’s see if Oscar reacts like that if he loses. That’s when we’ll know whether he’s a great fighter.”

There has been reason in the past to wonder whether De La Hoya has the kind of fortitude necessary to go down with the other greats such as Leonard and Sugar Ray Robinson.

He now says that as recently as the months before the Quartey fight, he wondered about whether he really loved the sport enough to make it a long career.

“I didn’t really know whether I wanted to be in boxing,” he said. “Should I retire, should I quit? I wasn’t really focused. That’s the reason I was listening to all those voices. They got to me. It was wearing me down. I wasn’t really comfortable with myself.

“I’m always well trained. I’m always in good shape. I would never ever cheat my fans. I’m always in good shape. It’s the mind that sometimes is not there. It’s the dedication, the focus.

“When you’ve been through so many big events and the money comes easy, it’s tough to motivate yourself and be focused and dedicated. It’s difficult.

“I’m only 26 and haven’t reached the peak of my career. Maybe it’s a stage I’m going through, maybe that’s all it is.

“Do I want to go full out in boxing for the next four or five years or do I want to play around and fight here and there once in a while and that’s it? I really have to decide after this fight.”

We will find out the answer now.

He repeated after the loss that everything had come too easy for him in the past. It won’t be easy now.

*

Randy Harvey can be reached at his e-mail address: randy.harvey@latimes.com.