Fighters who dare to reach for greatness deserve our admiration, and Oscar De La Hoya is one such fighter. But De La Hoya’s ambition exceeded his grasp when he attempted to win the undisputed middleweight title from the formidable Bernard Hopkins.
De La Hoya, who turned professional as a junior lightweight, said he was attempting to do the impossible by challenging a champion who had been a middleweight all his career. And for the first half of the scheduled 12-rounder he seemed, at the very least, in with a chance of upsetting the odds.
But while it is a good thing to have aspirations, sometimes reality intrudes cruelly on our dreams. And just as most of the boxing fraternity had predicted, Hopkins, in the end, was just too big, too tough and had too many advantages. At least two rounds before Hopkins’s left hook to the body ended the fight in the ninth one sensed that the Golden Boy’s gallant quest to secure an epochal victory was slipping from his reach.
De La Hoya boxed well — so well, in fact, that one judge had him in front after eight rounds — but Hopkins was not only bigger but also better.
But while the resolution of the superfight at the MGM Grand casino resort in Las Vegas on 18 September might have been expected, the bout did not follow the expected pattern.
Those who expected Hopkins to win — that is to say, the majority — had by and large expected him to do so by bullying De La Hoya, putting pressure on him and pounding him on the inside.
De La Hoya, we thought, would be using speed and movement, hitting and getting out.
Instead, we saw De La Hoya standing his ground and looking to land hard shots — and Hopkins also went against the script by staying on the outside and engaging De La Hoya in a set-piece boxing match.
So, instead of hunter against hunted we had two technicians matching wits in a tactical fight with lots of thinking interspersed by moments of action.
This made for a tense if not exciting encounter and at the end of the day De La Hoya suffered no loss of prestige while Hopkins reinforced the fact that he is truly an exceptional fighter — in fact almost a phenomenal one, because at the age of 39 he showed the speed, reflexes and stamina of a boxer many years younger. As he gained momentum, Hopkins actually appeared to be faster than De La Hoya, and coming out for the ninth, the Executioner from Philadelphia looked as if he could keep going strong for many more rounds than the mere four that remained.
The last third of the fight, in fact, looked like being as difficult for De La Hoya as had been widely predicted, and Hopkins’s left hook to the body might have spared the Golden Boy a gruelling ordeal down the home stretch.
Whereas De La Hoya seemed to be holding his own after six rounds (my ringside impression was that the fight was level, three rounds each, at this stage) there was a notable shift in the tide of battle in the seventh and eighth as Hopkins stepped up the intensity level. He was outboxing, outspeeding and even outjabbing De La Hoya in these rounds and for the first time the 31-year-old underdog started to look anxious and a little out of synch, his boxing becoming a bit frayed around the edges.
It was as if De La Hoya didn’t quite know how to counter the quickened tempo that Hopkins had introduced to the proceedings. And although De La Hoya landed a couple of lovely shots right at the end of the eighth — a left hook followed by a right hand — all they produced was a shake of the head from Hopkins as the older man stepped jauntily back to his corner.
Usually, when a fighter shakes his head “No” it means he has been rattled. In Hopkins’s case, though, one got the impression that the punches really hadn’t bothered him.
It was possible that De La Hoya might have rallied had he not been caught by the body blow, but I really don’t think so. He had been caught in the undertow and was starting to get swept out to sea.
Even though De La Hoya landed an excellent left hook in the ninth, Hopkins soon came back with an even harder right hand. De La Hoya took the blow well but there was a very real sense that these two solid, single hits, one from each man and each delivered well, summed up the tenor of the fight: The exchange had favoured Hopkins.
I had the strong feeling that the life force of Hopkins was starting to flow stronger while De La Hoya’s was starting to ebb.
In essence, in that ninth round, Hopkins had the look of a winner. And then, as quick and startling as a gunshot in the night, came that thudding left hook to the body, around the side of the right elbow, that took all the fight out of De La Hoya and sent him sagging to the canvas on all fours, a follow-up left hook to the head merely serving as window dressing: The body punch had done the damage.
De La Hoya tried to get up but couldn’t make it, with referee Kenny Bayless completing the count after one minute, 38 seconds of the ninth round.
It was, De La Hoya said afterwards, as if he had been paralysed. The punch had caught him “right on the button” as he described it.
“It’s hard for someone to knock me out,” he told the post-fight press conference. “I knew it wasn’t going to happen [from a punch to the chin] — but never in my wildest dreams did I think that I’d get stopped by a body shot.”
It took me by surprise, too. I had not envisaged De La Hoya getting stopped. If it happened, I thought it would most likely come from Hopkins wearing him down and then overwhelming him with a series of punches late in the fight, with the Golden Boy at least finishing on his feet.
A one-shot, clean-KO finish — especially from a body shot — was something I must confess I didn’t see coming.
Nor, of course, did not Oscar.
De La Hoya was a gracious loser. He had no excuses. Even though his left hand had been cut four days before the fight (more on this in Frontline Diary) he said that the hand had been no problem at all. He had, he said, lost to a great champion and he had no regrets about taking the fight.
“I feel proud of myself,” he said.
I think he had the right to be.
For six rounds, I didn’t know who was going to win. I was surprised that Hopkins did not go out to put pressure on De La Hoya from the start (Oscar said afterwards that this surprised him, too). Hopkins seemed to be letting De La Hoya get into the fight, to get comfortable. It was a cautious opening by the naturally bigger man (although at the weigh-in Hopkins was just 1lb heavier than De La Hoya at 156lbs).
De La Hoya, about two inches shorter than the 6ft 1in Hopkins but thicker in the body, looked the stronger man initially, and early on, gave me the feeling that, strangely, he might actually be the puncher in the fight.
This was a sculpted De La Hoya, not the soft-looking version of the Felix Sturm fight three months earlier, and you could see from the moment the fighters entered the ring that the Golden Boy, serious and stubble-chinned, was far more focused than he had been in his 12-round struggle with the under-regarded German boxer.
So, being the wise old professional that he is, Hopkins decided to have a look at the situation and not commit himself to anything too aggressive, too soon.
With each trying to outguess and outthink the other the fight became a little too much of a chess match for some tastes and there were a few boos from the crowd of 16,112 although most of the spectators seemed to find this an absorbing boxing match — as indeed I did myself.
The first six rounds all seemed to fall into the hard-to-score category.
De La Hoya brought a roar from his supporters with a flurry late in the second, appearing to steal the round the way Sugar Ray Leonard had stolen rounds from Marvelous Marvin Hagler 17 years earlier in a fight that had been compared to this one. Hopkins, though, made sure that De La Hoya didn’t get the chance to do it again.
The judges, we discovered later were divided in five of the first six rounds. The only round in the first half of the fight to have been won unanimously was the third, which went to Hopkins on all the scorecards after he landed the best punch of the fight to that point, a strong right to the jaw.
Still, Hopkins was not able to land the right in a consistent manner due to De La Hoya’s defensive alertness.
Six rounds down, six to go, and, for me, a dead-even fight, but Hopkins came out of his corner for the seventh with an almost perceptible switch to a higher emotional gear, as if he had decided: “OK, now it’s time really to get the fight started,” and from here on, for the first time, I felt that one man started to look dominant — and that man was Hopkins.
Afterwards, Hopkins, who made his 19th title defence, spoke of how important it is for him to make 20 successful defences. Once that target is accomplished, he said, he will be prepared to “seek out major fights outside the middleweight division” — such as a match with light-heavyweight champion Antonio Tarver. But he stressed: “I’ve got to get my [20] defences, man.”
He pointed out that, as his weight for the De La Hoya fight showed, he is not really a light-heavyweight. “I’m not looking to go up [in weight] any time soon unless it’s absolutely the right thing to do,” he said.
In other words, a Tarver fight isn’t in his immediate future unless he is made an offer he can’t refuse.
As for coming in at the low weight of 156lbs, he said: “Three years ago, two years ago, correct me if I’m wrong, but I was willing to make ’54 for certain fights. I coulda came in ’58 [the match weight was 158lbs, 2lbs under the middleweight limit] but I wanted to make a statement to scare the junior middleweights that I might come down there.”
He said that in the next two weeks he and promoter Bob Arum would have a lot to talk about. Although Hopkins is a free agent promotionally he indicated that Arum will have right of first refusal. Or, as Hopkins put it: “This man [Arum] has my first ear.”
It meant a lot to him, Hopkins said, to become the first to stop De La Hoya. “Oscar’s track record shows he don’t get knocked out, so that was very important to me,” he said. “One reason is, when you look at my record later on down the line, 10, 15 years from now, two of the best fighters of my era, Felix Trinidad and Oscar De La Hoya, are not only under my defence record but I have KOs over both of them — that’s a real big accomplishment for Bernard Hopkins. You couldn’t ask for a better script.
“I’m not saying I’m a big puncher — I’m a beat-’em-up guy. They get stopped as time goes on. But De La Hoya’s crafty. He kept his distance and he countered me a couple of times and threw my rhythm off a little bit. The struggle was trying to get him to do what I wanted him to do. It was kinda difficult early. I had to adjust to what Oscar was doing. He was trying to lure me in and counter me. I was trying to play a cat-and-mouse game, trying to grab the cheese without getting countered in what I considered a trap. So I was just trying to do what I wanted to do anyway; come in, run my punches off, catch him with a jab, catch him with a lead right hand. He kept taking a half-step back so I kept falling short, I had a couple of wild swings, but then I got a little bit more relaxed.”
His trainer, Bouie Fisher, he said, told him to use the jab, to take his time — “Everything off the jab. And once I started settling down and started working on the jab, I started seeing a lot more openings for the lead right hand and then, as you all witnessed, the combination of the jab and the left hook to the liver.”
De La Hoya arrived at the press conference, wearing a track suit and baseball cap, about a half-hour after Hopkins. He was understandably subdued after what, in his own mind, was the first time he had been beaten genuinely, without dispute, but he carried himself with great dignity.
“Bernard hit me with a good left hook to the body and I couldn’t recover — believe me, I wanted to,” he said. “I give him [Hopkins] all the credit in the world. He caught me with a great, great body shot and stopped me. There’s no excuses whatsoever.”
De La Hoya said he was surprised that Hopkins didn’t pressure him more. “It was more of a tactical fight, a chess match, and I had no problem with that,” he said.
He wasn’t prepared to commit himself, in the fight’s immediate aftermath, as to whether he will box on, but the indications were that he will. “You know us fighters,” he said. “It’s like a love-hate relationship with boxing. I know I’m better [than this performance]. There’s always little things that you can improve on, there’s always improvement — always. I know I can be better. I know I can stretch myself a few more notches.”
He seemed to be saying, without wanting it to sound like an excuse, that on this night he didn’t box up to the fullest level of his ability.
“Sometimes when you’re in the ring,” he said, “depending on the night of the fight — how you feel, how your body feels — sometimes it’s not going to be up to par or sometimes you might not be 100 %. Not because you didn’t train right or you’re not prepared. It just happens. Fighters are always better than what their performances are — always. Fighters always say: ‘I can do better, I can do better.’ That’s what makes a fighter.
“I’m not ashamed whatsoever. I feel proud, [but] obviously disappointed. I know I’m better — better than that.
“It’s killing me inside, but you have to give all the credit to Bernard Hopkins — he’s the champion of the world.”
Those words seemed a clear indication that De La Hoya will not be able to walk away from boxing on this note. But then, why should he? He has never been beaten up. In this fight, the most daunting of his career, he was leading on the scorecard of judge Keith MacDonald, 77-75, although the other two judges in the all-Nevada panel, Dave Moretti and Paul Smith, had Hopkins in front by scores of 79-73 and 78-74 respectively.
Oscar can hold his head high.
The fight was not, of course, one of the great middleweight title bouts but there was a sense that we were witness to something historic. The finish was swift and stunning. And there was no controversy, no one screaming they were robbed. All in all, not a bad night for the fight game.
For additional coverage of this show, including Frontline Diary, see October issue
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