De La Hoya and Hopkins Try to Calm the Storm

He was a solitary figure in an empty and massive arena. Oscar De La Hoya, less than 48 hours from making his debut at 160 pounds, was feinting to the left, then the right, throwing countless punches at his trainer and ducking Floyd Mayweather’s ultra-quick roundhouse swings.

“C’mon, now. Work it faster, faster,” Mayweather implored De La Hoya during a Thursday night workout in the MGM Grand Garden. “You’re a Blaxican. Faster.”

Exhibiting a newfound speed with his snapping punches to Mayweather’s bare hands, De La Hoya, a Mexican-American whose style has morphed under the African American Mayweather, danced in the ring and hit with a rat-a-tat-tat rhythm that had even his hard-to-please trainer smiling.

“That’s it,” Mayweather said. “Like a Blaxican.”

A drenched De La Hoya, who fights Felix Sturm for his fringe World Boxing Organization middleweight title tonight, smiled, leaned on the top rope and let out a sigh that echoed off the empty seats.

“We’re ready,” he said as he looked to the ground. “Now we just need Bernard Hopkins to come through.”

The plans of the Golden Boy, arguably the most popular fighter in the world who will be going for his sixth title in a sixth weight class, contingent upon the latest mood swing of the Executioner?

Stranger things have happened in the alphabet-soup world of boxing, though perhaps none as bizarre as the days leading to tonight’s card, which features three world title fights.

Consider: Promoter Bob Arum took a spill and rolled around the media room carpet when he got caught in the middle of a scrap between two longtime boxing writers, Michael Katz of the New York Times and Ron Borges of the Boston Globe, and De La Hoya, the biggest draw in boxing, has been upstaged by Hopkins.

And they’re not even fighting each other ... yet.

Rather, Hopkins, who drips with gold as he holds the three major sanctioning bodies’ middleweight belts, will be making his 18th title defense of the International Boxing Federation title he won April 29, 1995, and will fight Robert Allen for the third time. Their first fight was declared no contest after referee Mills Lane had separated them in the fourth round and Hopkins slipped through the ropes and crashed to the floor, injuring his ankle. Hopkins then stopped Allen in the seventh round of their rematch.

Hopkins, though, seemingly put not only tonight’s card in peril by threatening to pull out, but also threatened the unification and mega-payday middleweight bout against De La Hoya in September, a $25-million showdown contingent on both winning their fights tonight.

Yet even if no one else was truly buying Hopkins’ threat -- he took exception to Joe Cortez as the referee and promised to “catch the next thing smoking,” meaning a flight home to Philadelphia -- De La Hoya, who weighed in at 160 pounds wearing what appeared to be a basketball uniform, seemed truly worried.

De La Hoya’s fears, though, were alleviated at noon Friday, when Hopkins relented and agreed to Cortez -- with a caveat.

All it took was a message from WBO President Francisco Valcarcel, a Puerto Rican who spoke with Cortez; a meeting with Arum in which the Top Rank chairman assured Hopkins that Cortez would be fair and that a camera, installed above the ring, would serve as an “eye in the sky” to keep Cortez honest, at least according to Hopkins.

Cortez, who refused to remove himself or switch with Tony Weeks, who will work the lightweight title fight between Juan Lazcano and Jose Luis Castillo, also went to Hopkins’ dressing room before the weigh-in to ease Hopkins’ mind.

“I have done what I believe is the right thing,” the self-managed Hopkins said after weighing in at 159 pounds. “The world is watching now. They say I’m paranoid, but is it justified?”

A day earlier, when Hopkins was holed up in his suite and left the hotel for the airport -- to pick up his arriving family, it turned out -- he rivaled Oliver Stone and Michael Moore as a conspiracy theorist.

“I hope they don’t try to assassinate me,” Hopkins said at the time. “I wrecked a $400-million deal between Roy Jones and Felix Trinidad [by beating Trinidad].”

Hopkins’ problems with Cortez, a Puerto Rican American, date to 2001. It was Hopkins who twice stomped on the Puerto Rican flag as a way to get into Trinidad’s head before their bout in 2001. Hopkins says he feared resentment by Cortez, who was twice dinged by Hopkins as a referee, for his fights against Trinidad and William Joppy.

It has all made for more fodder in the mill that has churned out the charge that De La Hoya and Hopkins will never meet in the ring, a claim that none other than rival promoter Don King loves to sing.

“I can take this guy,” De La Hoya said, looking ahead to Hopkins. “Why else would I take on this beast? He’s a beast in the ring.

“I know why people say [the fight won’t happen]. People say I’m crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m not scared. This is the biggest challenge of my life. Not of my career, of my life. But I’m not crazy.”

Need crazy? Try this: Mike Tyson is expected to attend the fight, in support of De La Hoya.

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Tonight’s Card

Who: Oscar De La Hoya (36-3, 29 knockouts) of East L.A. vs. Felix Sturm (29-0, 9) of Leverkusen, Germany; Bernard Hopkins (43-2-1, 31) of Philadelphia vs. Robert Allen (36-4, 27) of Stone Mountain, Ga.; Juan Lazcano (33-2-1, 25) of El Paso vs. Jose Luis Castillo (49-6-1, 45) of Sonora, Mexico.

What’s at stake: Sturm’s WBO middleweight title, Hopkins’ WBC, WBA and IBF middleweight titles and the vacant WBC lightweight title.

Where: MGM Grand Garden Arena, Las Vegas.

When: 6 p.m., televised undercard begins.

TV: HBO pay per view.