An Old Wrist Injury Stops De La Hoya Fight

Suffering from torn cartilage in his left wrist, World Boxing Council super-welterweight champion Oscar De La Hoya has been forced to cancel his Dec. 8 title defense against No. 1 contender Roman Karmazin of Russia at the Olympic Auditorium.

“It’s a devastating blow to me,” De La Hoya said, “but I think we are catching it in time.”

He is scheduled to undergo arthroscopic surgery on the wrist today. If all goes well, De La Hoya will be in a cast for five or six weeks and undergo 90 days of rehabilitation.

He is hoping to fight again on May 4, a date he had already reserved before the injury.

It’s an old injury, one that De La Hoya incurred in the first round of his 1999 fight against Oba Carr.

“It was from a left hook I threw in that fight,” De La Hoya said, “and the pain has been there ever since.

“On a scale of one to 10, I would say it was a five or six.”

Ten days ago, on his first day of sparring for the Karmazin match, De La Hoya threw a punch that severely aggravated the wrist.

“The pain went to a nine or 10,” he said. “I thought I had broken it.”

De La Hoya tried medication.

“That only seemed to make it worse,” said Howard Rose, De La Hoya’s promoter.

De La Hoya had planned on facing a major opponent in May--Felix Trinidad, Shane Mosley, Bernard Hopkins or Fernando Vargas--and says he still hopes to do so if he can get WBC approval to put off his mandatory match against Karmazin.

“I will finally be pain free,” De La Hoya said, “which is what I will need to face the big names. When I have this hand surgery and I am finally 100%, I have to have a big-name opponent.”

De La Hoya said the hand bothered him in his losses against Trinidad and Mosley.

“It was always bothering me,” he said, “but we are fighters and we have to tough it out.”

Along with Karmazin, the Olympic may have lost its golden opportunity. This fight had offered the old arena a chance to sweep out the cobwebs and emerge as a credible fight site. But If De La Hoya does indeed return to the ring against a marquee opponent, the 7,000-seat Olympic would be too small to host such an event.

“I regret that very much,” De La Hoya said of the Olympic’s lost opportunity. “I kind of feel bad because this would have been a great event. We would have had a sellout crowd. Now, who knows if it can happen there.”

This fight seemed to have been cursed from the start.

When Karmazin’s two trainers, his manager and his doctor were all denied visas, the Russian fighter had threatened to go home to train.

Karmazin’s promoter, Frank Maloney, went further, questioning whether the fight would happen.

There had also been skepticism about how many tickets could be sold with the house scaled from $900 to $150.

But Rose bristled at the suggestion he was looking for a way out.

“We are not going to have arthroscopic surgery for him unless it was real,” Rose said. “If Karmazin couldn’t get his trainers here, he would gone back to Russia to train and come back. And the fight would have sold out.”