Boxing's pitiful battle between class and crass
Wallace Matthews
March 3, 2006
The disease that is killing boxing strutted into a midtown Manhattan restaurant yesterday. It came dressed as a pimp, threatening all manner of mayhem but in reality capable of little more than bluster.
Everything that is wrong with the fight game was on display, alongside one of the few things that is right about it.
And while Oscar de la Hoya, who represents what boxing ought to be, is quite likely to wipe out Ricardo Mayorga, who fights for the dark side, when they meet for Mayorga's junior middleweight title on May 6 in Las Vegas, not even de la Hoya can wipe out the ugly truth of what boxing has become.
That truth is there are far too many Mayorgas and not nearly enough de la Hoyas to save a one noble and important sport.
Even pro wrestling realizes that for every heel, it needs a hero. Boxing, on the other hand, eviscerates its heroes and celebrates its heels.
Mayorga, a Nicaraguan whose arrogance far exceeds his competence, turned what should have been a routine pre-fight news conference into an ugly display of everything that has turned corporate America - and by extension, network TV and the American sports public - away from the sport of Ali and Frazier, Louis and Schmeling, Evander Holyfield and the Sugar Rays, Robinson and Leonard.
Under the dubious guise of "fight hype," Mayorga insulted de la Hoya's Mexican heritage. He questioned his manhood no less than 17 times by unofficial count. He vilified de la Hoya's late mother and ridiculed de la Hoya's wife. In his blustering stupidity, he even ripped his own wife, and caught a blistering de la Hoya counterpunch in return.
"You're as pretty as my wife," he said to de la Hoya, who at 33 still looks like the kid who played Moondoggie in the old "Gidget" movies.
"Your wife's not that pretty," de la Hoya shot back, which shut Mayorga up, but only for the moment.
"My dad asked me to detach your left eye retina," Mayorga said. "And I've always kept all my promises to my father."
Well, at least he's a dutiful son.
What Mayorga is not, however, is a very good fighter, which made yesterday's display of clumsy trash talk all the more offensive. Certainly, Roberto Duran and Mike Tyson, to name just a couple, have engaged in similar pre-fight rhetoric, but at least theirs was backed up by a legitimate air of menace.
Compared to them, Mayorga - a powerful but crude brawler who fights as if he were trying to smash gnats with a sledgehammer - came off as just a street punk with a dirty mouth.
"He's just a dog who won't stop barking, but he never bites," de la Hoya said. "It's kind of funny, actually."
But de la Hoya never cracked a smile.
"It's really difficult to hold back," he admitted. "The guy's gotten under my skin. I've never hated a person the way I hate this guy."
Any true boxing fan should hate Mayorga and what he stands for, which is the ever-worsening degradation of a sport that is cruel enough inside the ropes. As he carried profanely on, his promoter, Don King, chortled encouragingly at his side, and his interpreter-slash-attorney seemed to take relish in translating every time Mayorga spat the word "maricon" at de la Hoya.
"It's a shame boxing has to be this way," de la Hoya said. "It's embarrassing."
And to think that not too long ago, it looked as if de la Hoya could inject some fresh enthusiasm into the sport.
Throughout the 1990s, de la Hoya was the crossover star of pay per-view boxing, a refreshing counterpoint to the freak show appeal of Tyson. His 1999 fight with Felix Trinidad drew nearly 1.5 million pay-per-view buys, the most ever for a non-heavyweight bout, and the atmosphere before his fights rivaled the hysteria of Beatlemania.
But then the backlash began. All the canards we had heard about Ali and Leonard came back again. Oscar was too pretty. Oscar didn't really want to be a fighter. Oscar was a phony. Instead of embracing Oscar, much of the boxing community rejected him.
And before long, another decent guy found that a sewer is no safe place to swim. De la Hoya was stopped by Bernard Hopkins in 2004 and disappeared. He hasn't fought since, content instead to concentrate on his promotional company, Golden Boy, in which Hopkins is a partner, and he won't fight much longer.
"Just two more fights and I'll retire," de la Hoya said yesterday. "I'll knock this guy out and fight one more big one, maybe against Floyd Mayweather, and that's it."
Just what boxing needs. One less good guy. Far too many creeps.
