The Time Warp: De La Hoya vs. Chavez?

If you’re a fight fan, and certainly if you’re a Mexican fight fan, Oscar De La Hoya’s annihilation of Julio Cesar Chavez in 1996 was a landmark turning point for boxing in the 90’s, a changing-of-the-guard moment none too welcome to the Mexican diehards who worshipped Chavez like a god amongst men and never embraced the pretty face of the Golden Boy as one of their own. ↵↵Of course, that pretty face recently suffered some severe punishment in boxing’s latest changing-of-the-guard moment, when on December 6th Manny Pacquiao forced De La Hoya to quit on his stool after dominating him mercilessly for eight rounds.↵

↵↵Now it seems that the Chavez family wants to add insult to injury, as Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., son of the great Mexican champion and a fighting star in his own right, is calling out De La Hoya in a quest to avenge his father’s honor. It’s going beyond a mere fantasy call-out, too. Rumors are currently swirling in the fight community that this bout might actually happen, with the dream location being the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, the venerable stadium that last hosted a fight in 1993, a junior welterweight title bout between Chavez Sr. and Greg Haugen that drew over 130,000 spectators.↵

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↵↵Oscar has long dreamed of fighting at the Estadio Azteca -- he even explored the possibility of staging his May ’08 fight with Stevie Forbes there. But he has NOT dreamed of fighting in front of 100,000 Mexicans as the consensus villain of the crowd. If there’s anything in the world more important to Oscar than money (a dubious proposition, I realize), it’s his precarious standing with Mexican fight fans. This, I believe, was one of the primary reasons that he refused to even consider fighting Tony Margarito, an ironic situation in retrospect, because whereas all of us boxing experts thought Oscar was taking the easy way out in facing Pacquiao rather than Margarito, doesn’t it now seem probable that he might have fared infinitely better fighting Margs at 154 than he did Pac Man at 147? ↵

↵↵Ah, hindsight. Either way, Margarito simply wasn’t an option for Oscar because he wasn’t going to put himself in another situation where he was the enemy of Mexico, which he would certainly have been against Margarito. Beating Chavez twice in the 90’s earned Oscar another level of stardom in the fight community at large, but it also brought him a measure of scorn from Mexicans that he has never shaken off to this day. After getting the beating of his life from Pacquiao, there’s zero chance that he will leap back into the fray to fight Chavez Jr. in Mexico City in front of a rabid throng all hoping to see him get knocked out. He stands to gain absolutely nothing from winning such a fight, while a loss would be the most humiliating of his career. Many commentators are pointing out that Chavez Jr. is the only mega-event left for De La Hoya. If that proves to be the case, I’m betting he’ll retire on his stool. ↵

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