No one will see her in the ring, during the Olympics.

No one will know she's there, watching her son box.

No one will know she's in his corner, her spirit nourishing his will.

No one but Oscar the boxer.

When Cecilia De La Hoya of East Los Angeles went to Seattle to see her teen-age son box at the 1990 Goodwill Games, it meant missing a week of radiation therapy. Her son knew nothing of her breast cancer, only that she had been ill.

He won a Goodwill Games gold medal. And the next day, the day after the De La Hoyas returned home, his family told him.

"They didn't tell me before how sick she was because they didn't want it to affect my boxing," he said.

"But she'd gotten so sick I began to worry. She showed me the burns on her back, from the radiation. I felt bad. She was more than my mother, she was my best friend."

Cecilia De La Hoya was 39 when she died on Oct. 28, 1990. Her son, in his grief, vowed to win an Olympic gold medal at Barcelona for her.

THE GRANDFATHER

The focal point of this family's inspiration and love is not the lean, handsome, 19-year-old boxer but a 5-foot-3, 145-pound man the De La Hoyas call \o7 Abuelito\f7 , Granddad in Spanish.

Vicente De La Hoya, 80, who ran a small restaurant and demolition business in Los Angeles in the 1950s and '60s, now lives in Mexicali, Mexico. There are 16 children from two marriages and they have produced offspring in sufficient numbers to perhaps increase the Olympic TV ratings a tick or two when their famous relative boxes in Barcelona.

"When you get all the aunts and uncles, the first cousins and the grandchildren together, it's about 125 people," said cousin Adrian Pasten, a 36-year-old executive with Bank of America in Los Angeles who is helping young De La Hoya with media obligations.

"Vicente has never seen Oscar box in person, just on TV," he said. "We'll bring him to L.A. during the Olympics and get him in front of a TV."

Even by standards of tightly knit Latino families, the bonds connecting Vicente De La Hoya to his family are unusually strong.

"At family gatherings, all his sons line up to kiss the back of his hand," Pasten said. "It's an old tradition of respect for a father, but you don't see it that much in today's generations."

Pasten says their \o7 Abuelito \f7 doesn't know quite what to make of his famous grandson. To him, Oscar doesn't look much like a fighter--at least, not like the bent-nosed fighters he remembers from his amateur days as a featherweight in Durango, Mexico.