De La Hoya and his dad
Oscar De La Hoya retired this week, his dad on stage with him in Los Angeles as he made the announcement. He took months making the decision. It is tough, as he said, for the great ones to know when to quit. I suspect it is the same in other professions as it is for athletes. Architects. Supreme court judges. Columnists. A lot of us hold on a little too long*. The skills slip with age, at least for everyone who isn’t Clint Eastwood. We notice it most in sports, though, probably because we care so much and the end comes so quickly.
*Remind me sometime to do an entire blog about my hometown dentist, an aging man who died while still practicing. My family had to switch dentists, obviously, and on the first visit, the new guy said I had 10 cavities that needed to be filled. It might have been 12. I can’t remember. It was not a fun two weeks. Point being, Willie Mays wasn’t the only one who hung on to long. It’s hard for all of us to move on from what we love and what we know.
De La Hoya’s career is an interesting one, and not just because he is a future hall of famer who had 10 world titles and was one of the most popular boxers of his era. It’s also that his greatness is so questionable, or at least questioned. It’s that you can’t talk about him without someone mentioning that boxing was weak during his era. It’s that you can’t help wondering how a Mexican-American boxer from Los Angeles could remain so unpopular and disconnected from the Mexican-American community.
There was a constant struggle in De La Hoya’s career. He just wasn’t the warrior some people wanted him to be, that so many Mexican fighters had been. It wasn’t in him. He danced. He dodged fists. He threw a punch, then moved, then threw another, then moved again. He was the ”Golden Boy.” He posed for magazine covers and milk moustache ads. He released a CD. He was mainstream. There was that famous fight in 1999 against Felix Trinidad where De La Hoya had the fight all but won, and then didn’t finish him. Not that he couldn’t finish it. He chose not to. He played prevent defense. He stopped attacking. In the final rounds, he dodged and ran and avoided and just generally stayed away from Trinidad. That’s not the way men are supposed to win fistfights. And as it turned out, he didn’t win it, and not too many people felt sorry for him.
De La Hoya was a great boxer, but ultimately bound to the image of a pretty boy. He didn’t seem to mind. Hard to blame a man for being born attractive. But you never saw him out-slug anyone. You never saw him in the 12th round, eye swollen shut, lip split open, throwing punches with nothing but guts. To some extent, you suppose a man is who a man is, and we should just be grateful to have seen such a talented boxer. But there was this unavoidable feeling that after De La Hoya won that gold medal in the Olympics and became a household name that the sport wasn’t the most important thing. It was the fame and money and business that seemed to drive De La Hoya. Maybe it always was. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that.
At the press conference, though, it wasn’t his retirement that brought De La Hoya to tears – not that a boxing retirement is ever binding – and it wasn’t the memories of his 45 professional fights or his wins against 17 world champions or that gold medal from the 1992 Games. It was his dad.
Joel De La Hoya Sr. was a boxer. So was his father. Oscar’s brother, Joel Jr., was a boxer, too. Boxing was woven into the family tree, like old Christmas lights, but Oscar just wasn’t drawn to it at first. He played baseball and skateboarded. He never got in street fights. He hated violence. Part of the sadness at De La Hoya’s press conference had to be for his mom, a woman who wanted her son to be a champion and died all those years ago, before he won the gold medal, but I imagine a lot of it was for that relationship with his father. He must have experienced a lot of the same emotions most sons do with tough dads. There must have been times when he felt pressured. There must have been times when he felt trapped in the gym, hitting the speedbag again and again, hour after hour, when his friends were playing catch and eating ice cream.
I’m not sure when you stop wanting to please your father. Probably never. Is there any song more true than that country tune by Rodney Atkins, “Watching You?” As kids, we want to be our dads. We talk like our fathers, act like them, say the same things they say. As we get older, we are drawn to our dad’s profession. We want to take over the family business, work side by side, sweat and triumph and ache together. My dad is a farmer, and if I hadn’t accidentally found writing in my early 20s, I’m 99% sure I’d be raising corn with him in southwest Kansas. Not that he needs my help, but I picture it a lot, coming in together after a 12-hour day, covered in dust and sweat, father and son, like some sort of Ford truck commercial. There would be exchanged looks of contentment, pride. We would be working the land together, tilling the soil, growing crops, feeding families the way fathers and sons did in the ’50s. Heck, the way they did in the 1830s and the 1530s, the way they’ve done forever. OK, we’d have GPS and XM radio in our tractors, but still, there would be nobility in it.
Of course it wouldn’t really be like that. Not all the time anyway. Father-son relationships are complicated. In the beginning, there are rules and discipline and in the end there is friendship, and you spend your lives trying to make the transition. The struggle is what makes the moments, and you never forget those, the hugs and the times your dad looked at you with his eyes filled to the corners.
In boxing, there’s a pretty sharp line between the victories and defeats. No one else takes blame. It is absolute joy or crushing defeat, and you can imagine what a 36-year-old boxer and his father have been through in a long career. I’m just guessing here, but those were probably the things that went through Oscar De La Hoya’s mind when he thanked his dad. When his voice cracked. When he seemed a lot less like a celebrity, and a lot more like a common man.
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