The De La Hoya/Forbes ‘Infomercial’ Fight
The bout will take place almost a year to the day after Oscar’s bout with Floyd Mayweather last year, a mega-fight that in many eyes resuscitated the sweet science and inaugurated a glorious period of non-stop marquee action in the ring. ↵↵This year, no matter how much attention it garners in the media, De La Hoya’s Cinco De Mayo-oriented fight can’t claim to invigorate the sport, because boxing couldn’t be much more invigorated than it is right now, what with an almost weekly parade of great fights in 2008 including all-time FOY candidates like Vasquez/Marquez, Pacquiao/Marquez and Casamayor/Katsidis.↵
↵
↵
↵But De La Hoya/Forbes will kick off what is certain to be the sports’ headline story for the rest of the year – the retirement tour of the Golden Boy. In that way, the Forbes fight is understood to be little more than an appetizer – an “infomercial” is the current joke going around amongst boxing writers. And no matter how much Oscar claims that he learned his lesson about “tune-up fights,” he certainly seems to have at least one eye on the future going into Saturday. He’s told the press this week that he’s confident that he’ll beat Mayweather in their already made rematch in September, and he’s also been dropping hints left and right that his final fight in December will be against the winner of the July bout between Miguel Cotto and Antonio Margarito, preferably Cotto to hear Oscar tell it. ↵
↵↵Stevie Forbes, of course, is listening to all of this and thinking “Felix Sturm,” referring to the German middleweight who Oscar fought in 2004 as a tune-up for his shot at Bernard Hopkins. De La Hoya went into that fight soft and ill-prepared and though he won a UD on three 115-113’s from the judges, many at ringside thought Oscar lost the fight. Of course, Sturm had one considerable advantage over Forbes – he’s bigger than Oscar, rather than vice versa. Still, it’s fun to look back at that fight and imagine “what if?”, no matter how unlikely it may be.↵
↵
↵↵
↵
This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.
See More:
