GOLDEN JOY

It was the kind of phone call that could make a woman think she was hallucinating, on the end of a wrong number or the object of a cruel prank.

On the other end of the line was someone claiming to be Oscar De La Hoya, young, single, available, good-looking, an athlete, a singer, an international celebrity and a multimillionaire. And he was pleading for a date.

As far as Millie Corretjer was concerned, the joke was on him. She wasn’t interested.

Corretjer wasn’t much of a sports fan, certainly not a boxing fan. As a Puerto Rican, all she knew about De La Hoya was that he had been beaten by Felix Trinidad, a fellow Puerto Rican, and that was fine with her. As a singer who has been seen and/or heard on television, videos, CDs, albums and the Internet, she is accustomed to being pursued by men.

But this was not just any man, those around her told her as she cradled the phone in her San Antonio hotel room on that day in February 2000, this is Oscar De La Hoya.

“What’s the big deal?” she said. “I don’t care. He’s just a pretty boy. I’m not an easy girl. I don’t go for pretty boys. I go for people with good heads and good hearts. Who does he think he is? I don’t have to be anything for this guy. He’s not going to get anything from me.”

It was an unusual position for De La Hoya to be in. He was not accustomed to being the pursuer. Women had been throwing themselves at him since he won an Olympic gold medal in Barcelona in 1992. Squealing as if he were a rock star, they would toss their underwear at him or hold up signs saying they wanted to have his baby. In El Paso in 1996, while on a media tour to promote his first fight against Julio Cesar Chavez, De La Hoya found his limo under an attack by a mob of mostly female fans who jumped on the hood and clawed at the windows as he arrived at a hotel for a news conference.

So why all this effort to land a date with Corretjer, a woman he had never seen in person?

It began in a recording studio weeks earlier, where De La Hoya was making his first CD. Things were not going well in the mind of his producer, Rudy Perez. De La Hoya was supposed to be singing about heartbreak, yet he wasn’t showing enough emotion.

“I’ve never had my heart broken,” De La Hoya told Perez. So how could he express that feeling?

Perez’s eyes lit up.

“I’m going to give you someone who will do it for you,” he said.

Perez flipped on one of Corretjer’s videos.

That did it.

“It wasn’t just that she looked beautiful,” recalled De La Hoya last week at his Big Bear training headquarters where he was wrapping up his preparation for Saturday’s 154-pound championship fight against Fernando Vargas at Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay Events Center. “I’ve seen many beautiful women before. It was something beyond that. I don’t know what an angel looks like, but I felt like I was seeing one. I couldn’t even record after that. I just wanted to see that video. I was watching it 20 to 30 times a day.”

When De La Hoya found out Corretjer was performing in San Antonio, he took a detour on his way home from New York where he had beaten Derrell Coley.

Finally, Corretjer agreed to see De La Hoya, but there were strings attached. Nearly a whole orchestra, as a matter of fact.

“We can take a walk as long as I can bring along some chaperones,” she said. She wanted to include her dancers, musicians and chaperone, eight people in all.

“Fine,” De La Hoya said.

And so they strolled down the famed Riverwalk, De La Hoya, his dream date and eight chaperones.

“It was very weird,” Corretjer said.

De La Hoya, undeterred, waited a few months and then invited Corretjer to fly to L.A. to be his date for the Latin Grammy Awards. She accepted, as long as she could bring along chaperone Marisela Diaz. De La Hoya agreed. He was making progress. The chaperone list was down to one.

“He put me up in a nice hotel,” she said, “but that didn’t make any points with me.”

Corretjer stuck around for four days, allowing De La Hoya to show her Southern California, including a trip to Disneyland.

“He was very respectful,” Corretjer said. “He was very sweet. Because he was a boxer, I would expect him to be a monster. I couldn’t imagine this guy being a boxer. He didn’t try to kiss me or even grab my hand.”

Of course with Diaz, the chaperone, still acting as Corretjer’s shadow, De La Hoya didn’t have many options.

When they parted at the airport, however, De La Hoya and Corretjer exchanged their first kiss.

“On the way home,” Corretjer said, “I cried. Then I knew I missed him. I didn’t like that feeling because I had heard the stories about Oscar [He has had two children--Jacob, age 4, and Atiana, 3--out of wedlock and was twice accused of rape though no criminal charges were filed].

“I thought I was all wrong for him. I am in show business, but I’m not into the celebrity scene. My friends are my high school friends. I have a very strong family feeling.

“I knew that when I got married, I wanted it to be forever and I wanted it to be to the father of my children.”

When Corretjer arrived home in Puerto Rico, she found something else worth crying about. There, plastered on the pages of the tabloids, was a picture of her kissing De La Hoya. It was a national scandal. Here was the nation’s sweetheart, a highly popular singer, in an embrace with public enemy No. 1, De La Hoya, the man who had dared to take on Trinidad, a national hero.

Corretjer still remembers sitting in a restaurant in Puerto Rico in 1999 on the night of the De La Hoya-Trinidad match with her cousin, Jaime Durand, who had a radio stuck to his ear. The first thing Durand thought he heard was that Trinidad had lost. Depression spread through the restaurant. Then came the correct information. Their beloved Tito had won. Total elation.

“Some people called me a traitor for being with Oscar,” Corretjer said. “Then I understood what a big deal it was. It caused the first controversy of my career.”

But it didn’t stop her from seeing De La Hoya. Again he sent for her and again she came.

And again Diaz came along. But this time, it wasn’t to protect Corretjer from De La Hoya. It was to protect Corretjer from herself.

“I didn’t need this at that time in my life,” she said. “I had to be careful not to fall in love. I wanted Marisela to hold me and save me from falling for Oscar.”

But soon Diaz was gone and so was Corretjer’s resistance. On Oct. 5, 2001, De La Hoya and Corretjer were married.

She had agreed to share his life, but she still didn’t understand it.

“I don’t like boxing,” she said. “I didn’t know why two guys would beat each other up. They should talk first.”

The first match Corretjer saw in person was De La Hoya’s fight against Arturo Gatti in March of last year.

“I just wanted it to be over,” she said of a fight De La Hoya won easily. “I thought, ‘What is wrong with these people fighting like this?’ I was scared. When I saw Oscar could hit so hard, I started crying. I wanted to go home.

“When it was over, his hands were swollen and there were scratches on his body. It’s painful for me. It’s hard to see it happening. And it’s hard to understand how Oscar can do this. This is a person who is afraid to go on a roller coaster. It makes him sick. But he can do this.”

While Corretjer finds it hard to connect her loving husband to the vicious fighter she sees in the ring, it also is hard for her to see a connection between De La Hoya’s reputation and the De La Hoya she has come to know.

“This perfect guy,” she said, “loyal, fun loving, a man and a kid. I haven’t met that other person and I’m grateful for that. But if he had to do all the things he did to be the man he is today, thank God for that.”

De La Hoya gives Corretjer the credit for changing him.

“Ever since I met her,” he said, “my life has been different. I had gotten caught up in a lifestyle that isn’t me anymore. I had a lot of money and went out with my buddies a lot and it was wild, but all that is over now. It never crosses my mind. I have what I want. I have my jewel here in Millie.”

The fact Corretjer was sitting beside De La Hoya as he spoke last week in Big Bear showed how important she has become to him.

Historically, women have been about as welcome in a boxer’s training camp as a flu bug. Wives, girlfriends, one-night stands, it didn’t matter. They were all forbidden.

But when De La Hoya found himself pining for his wife while isolated in the San Bernardino Mountains, Joel De La Hoya, Oscar’s father and a stern disciplinarian, asked Corretjer to come to camp. And Floyd Mayweather Sr., Oscar’s whip-cracking trainer, approved.

“I was hesitant,” Corretjer said. “I assured them I would be a good girl and not mess with his training.”

Corretjer also will be at Saturday’s fight, although she still won’t feel comfortable.

“I’m kind of jealous when women throw themselves at him,” she said. “But in my business, men throw themselves at me too, so I can understand.

“And as far as the boxing, I can deal with that too because, even though I don’t understand his career, I know how happy it makes him.”

De La Hoya says he won’t go on much longer. “I want to be a husband to her,” he said. “I want to think about her before I think about anything else.”

But what if the lure of the ring keeps him fighting much longer, perhaps for another decade?

“Then I would put my foot down,” Corretjer said. “It’s dangerous. I love him and I want to grow old with him. I would tell him, ‘This is ridiculous.’ ”

And if that doesn’t work, she can always threaten to bring back the chaperone.