LOS ANGELES – Oscar De La Hoya says he “can’t remember” any details about the 60-something rounds he sparred with Shane Mosley during their formative years, and yesterday I think I learned the reason.
Judging by a home videotape of a couple of rounds of sparring between the two taken eight years ago, there wasn’t much to remember.
That should change when De La Hoya and Mosley, a pair of local tough guys who have been circling each other for 18 years, finally do it for real – and for real money – tonight at the Staples Center.
De La Hoya was 19 at the time and headed for the Barcelona Olympics. Mosley was 20, an Olympic team washout, headed for the pros.
In the sparring session screened yesterday for the media as if it were a sneak preview of the next installment of “Star Wars,” the two moved, feinted, jabbed – mostly short – and occasionally tried a real punch, without much success.
It was a classic example of two guys in a gym “moving around,” boxing parlance for taking it easy. Real easy.
There probably won’t be anything easy for either fighter tonight, which is why De La Hoya-Mosley is one of the most anticipated welterweight matchups since, well, De La Hoya-Trinidad.
That one turned out to be about as exciting as the De La Hoya-Mosley sparring seesion, but this one does not.
By virtue of their personalities, their fighting styles and their physical attributes, De La Hoya-Mosley almost has to be a scorcher.
“I’m gonna use my old school style,” De La Hoya said. “I’m not just gonna go in there and throw punches like crazy, but I’m gonna go in there and fight.”
“I’m gonna go in there and fight like I always fight,” Mosley said. “Very aggressive, very intense, throughout the fight.”
You go, boys.
If De La Hoya and Mosley walk the walk like they’ve been talking the talk, this will be the one you’ve been waiting for.
And there are other reasons to believe they will, not the least of which is the site of the fight, downtown L.A., close enough to where each of them grew up to practically insure both men will come out fighting or risk the scorn of their neighborhoods.
“To get this fight here, against Oscar, in Los Angeles, is like a dream,” said Mosley (34-0, 32 KO’s), who grew up in Pomona, a suburb 35 miles east of the city.
“Even up at my training camp in Big Bear, people have been telling me about the excitement this fight has brought to L.A.,” De La Hoya (32-1, 26 KO’s) said. “It’s great.”
They may not be Shaq and Kobe, but tonight, Shane and Oscar will be the biggest names in a town of name-droppers and the most recognizable faces in a town that worships appearance above all else.
And speaking of appearances, it looks as if De La Hoya should be able to win this battle for so-called SoCal bragging rights.
First of all, he is bigger, 5-11 to Mosley’s official 5-9 (he’s closer to 5-7), and what Mosley is trying to do – leap-frog from a 135-pound title to a 147-pound title without an interim stop at 140 – is a leap only the truly great could hope to pull off.
And De La Hoya is more experienced at events of this magnitude, having faced the pressure of fights against Julio Cesar Chavez, Pernell Whitaker, Ike Quartey and Trinidad.
Most importantly, De La Hoya’s style seems more suited to win a fight against a fighter like Mosley, who needs to be close to be effective and needs to be busy to win.
Both of those requirements could expose Mosley to De La Hoya’s wicked, half-underhanded sweep of a left hook, a punch that is particularly devastating when walked into.
Mosley, because of his size, or lack thereof, has to come to De La Hoya to score. If he can slip De La Hoya’s jab, he can do some damage, especially to the body.
But if he can’t, he can’t hope to win a jabbing contest against De La Hoya.
“My head movement, my shoulder movement, opens up a lot of things for me,” Mosley said. “I’m going to be the aggressor throughout the fight, and it seems to me that when the other guy gets aggressive, Oscar gets passive.”
Certainly, that was De La Hoya’s habit against Quartey, whom he beat with a last-round fusillade of punches, and Trinidad, whom he lost to because he tried to run out the clock.
And certainly, De La Hoya is a fighter who likes to put some distance between himself and his opponent. He may have to work hard to accomplish that against Mosley, who at times fights like a welterweight Joe Frazier.
But this time, De La Hoya says he is climbing into the ring with no excuses, no injuries, nothing that should detract from his ability to do with Mosley whatever he wants.
“I had the perfect training camp for this one,” he said.
Assuming he is being honest, it is De La Hoya’s fight to win or lose.
He is a little too successful now to be the reckless punching machine he had been as a novice pro, and although his weight has climbed from 130 to 147, his punch has not travelled quite so well.
And he has always been a little too handsome to be truly fearless in the ring. Too often, he fights the way the late Billy Graham did, with one eye always on protecting his Roman nose, a nose of which it had been said should have been broken with a baseball bat early in his career to rid Graham of that worry.
If De La Hoya is to ever recapture the luster his career had before the Trinidad fight – the sin is not that he lost, but the way he lost – he must put those things aside and get back to what brought him to the attention of fight fans in the first place.
It was not his face or his singing voice or his personality. It was his punch, and his willingness to use it.
Tonight is as good a time as any for De La Hoya to start recapturing that part of his past, and the feeling is that he will, in nine rounds or less.
That would be a fight to remember, something to replace an eight-year-old tape of a sparring session to forget.