Two hours before his fight and he stands alone on a rainy night in the drab gray lobby of a Phoenix hotel, staring not so much at as through a door, looking into nothingness, unaware of watching admirers. Two women, summoning their courage for the past five minutes, finally approach, all sideways blushes and giggles. "Oh, uh, hey," he gasps. His big, liquid brown eyes blink, blink, blink. He nervously rocks on the balls of his feet, smiling shyly and offering an alto's boyishly high hello. He is 19. The women are 35 at least, looking like sexual predators alongside the boy-man, the blonde daring now to touch his arm, openly flirting, teasingly asking, "Where's your bodyguard, Oscar? You're big; you need a bodyguard."
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The Not-so-sweet Science Of Selling Oscar De La Hoya
He is a boxer with a million-dollar contract, an Olympic gold medalist accustomed to attention, but just the same, in this moment, he looks like any other wackily grinning teen-age kid, flattered to be ogled by a pair of mature, buxom women. The leering blonde persists: "Where's your entourage?"
The fighter shrugs, his way of saying, no entourage, not really. Something seen then from out of the corner of his eye makes his shoulders hunch. His mind has already left the women behind; his mouth unconsciously mumbles a swift goodby. He sees a block of dark suits and paunches shuffling toward him, an owlish man at the front gesturing at the others and murmuring, "We ready? Huh? Huh? We ready? Yeah, I'm ready. C'mon, let's go. Hi, Oscar."
And Oscar De La Hoya, the East L.A. Golden Boy, turns his back on the women to shake hands with the fellow in the darkest suit, 61-year-old boxing promoter Bob Arum, born and raised in working-class Brooklyn, the older and younger man whispering to each other as the rest of the fighter's gathering coterie call for a large van for the short ride to the America West Arena.
"OK, Oscar? Ready?" one of his managers asks. Head down, De La Hoya steps into the van, finding himself seated next to a woman he's never met, the wife of one of Arum's lieutenants. This is his life now. Strangers always at his elbows, usually adults twice his age, important people, in one way or another, with whom he must make conversation, say the right things, be the Oscar everyone expects him to be even if it's two hours before a fight.
It is part of the reason he has Joe around, Joe being Jose Pajar, his assistant trainer, aide-de-camp and, most importantly, another kid from the old neighborhood whom Oscar can count on for support and laughs when his adult life becomes tense and tiresome. Around fast-track white businessmen looking to make money off his fists, he occasionally lowers his head to speak softly to Joe in Spanish, knowing that the important older white men will not understand a word. This is the way he wants it--not because he has secrets or gibes to hide, but because any conversation in Spanish with Joe is a refuge for him, a chance to escape the suits and, if only for a few seconds, return to his adolescent world. But Joe is nowhere close right now, having been seated three rows back, with Oscar's father.
One of De La Hoya's co-managers, Robert Mittleman,takes the wheel of the van. "OK, that's it, everybody's in," says Arum, riding shotgun, and the vehicle rolls into darkness.
The wily promoter and innocent kid do not make eye contact, each alone with his thoughts, De La Hoya staring blankly at Mittleman's head, licking his lips, eyes darting now and then with the knowledge that he is being watched, studied, monitored by his handlers for signs of tension. Everyone in the van has some stake in his success and, as the days pass and the talk of his greatness builds, he can feel their expectations mounting. He takes slow, deep breaths, ruffling the hair on Mittleman's neck each time he exhales. "So much is there for my family and the people close to this if I \o7 do \f7 it," he said two weeks earlier. "But I guess a part of me likes the pressure. I'm used to it."
From the age of 15, when he won a national Golden Gloves championship as a 125-pounder, he had been coveted by shrewd boxing men who saw millions to be made on a kid whose teen-idol looks, fast hands and mule-kicking left hook would merely complement his most marketable feature: the ineffable mix of his American citizenship and Mexican ancestry, dual cultural loyalties that revealed themselves, benignly, in the way he proudly waved both his miniature American and Mexican flags when dancing around the Olympic ring. "You see the way Hispanics go wild for him?" Arum asked earlier that December day in Phoenix. "You can't buy that sort of thing for a kid. There's something more than boxing going on with that. It's like, he's theirs."
DE LA HOYA CLEARS HIS THROAT, CLOSES HIS EYES. AS THEY DRAW close to the arena, quiet fills the van. "Gonna be a good show," Arum says softly, to no one in particular. In Arum-speak, fights are usually "shows." Net revenue is seldom profit but "money to be whacked up."
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