De La Hoya vs. TBD Puerto Rican
The identity of Oscar De La Hoya’s opponent for his scheduled fight in December still remains a mystery, and in that Oscar has promised that this will be his last trip to the ring, the speculation is being followed with keen interest in the boxing world. ↵↵The big buzz of the last few weeks was that a Felix Trinidad rematch was a serious consideration for the Golden Boy, but now Tito’s father, Felix Trinidad Sr., is saying that this buzz was all a hoax perpetrated by the Golden Team to gain leverage for a fight with Miguel Cotto.↵
↵↵If this is true, it’s a bizarre and possibly short-sighted strategy by Oscar and Co. First of all, it operates on the presumption that Cotto is going to beat Tony Margarito in their July 26th bout, which to me is like presuming that Holmes would beat Norton, or Leonard would beat Hearns, or, hell, that Tracy Patterson would beat Daniel Zaragoza. Cotto and Margo are very evenly matched, and despite the current Vegas line (Cotto -260), I’d say putting your eggs in any one basket in that fight would be a very risky move indeed.↵
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↵But even if Cotto does beat Margarito, does he seem like the kind of guy who is going to be terrible swayed in negotiations by the fact that if he doesn’t sign on the dotted line Oscar might fight an older (washed-up) Puerto Rican icon? Not to me, he doesn’t. The idea that Cotto falls far short Tito Trinidad as a Puerto Rican boxing star is a media thing, an inescapable but largely uninteresting truth that Cotto doesn’t seem to give much of a crap about. Tito was Puerto Rico’s Ali, and Cotto is, by default, their Larry Holmes. But unlike Larry, Cotto seems unconcerned with his inability to fill Tito’s shoes as a national hero. All he seems to care about is taking the best fights out there and winning them, which makes him one of the most likable fighters on the scene right now.↵
↵↵On that score, one has to wonder if Cotto will even be interested in an Oscar fight. Oscar is irrelevant to the real boxing world right now, a very expensive sideshow, another Rolling Stones tour ready to rake in its feckless billions. Granted, the money will be bigger than anything Cotto has ever dreamed of previously, and generally when money talks, everybody walks. But look, so far every fighter that Oscar has courted for his big farewell fight seems to have walked in the other direction, Floyd Mayweather most notably, but also Manny Pacquiao and Ricky Hatton. Which starts to raise the question – what happens if no marquee names want to fight Oscar? In other words, what happens if you throw a big retirement party and no one shows up?↵
↵↵(P.S. And what happened to Oscar’s pledge to his wife that he would never fight another Puerto Rican? Why do these guys make these stupid promises public when they know that as soon as the money’s right they’ll break them without blinking an eye?)↵
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This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.
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