American Son

by Oscar De La Hoya

  With just over a minute to go, he threw a right hand, which I dodged, leaving him open for a left hook, which I planted right on his chin.

  Boom, he went down.

  It was quite a sight for me. Marco Rudolph, my conqueror and tormentor, lying on the canvas before me.

  He got up, but that knockdown had shot me into a 7–2 lead and I would not be caught, that score holding up to the end.

  I remember that final bell ringing like it was yesterday. Looking into the crowd, I could see my family, led by my father, jumping up and down in joy. I, too, felt the happiness, but I couldn’t seem to express it. I couldn’t jump for joy. I couldn’t cry. It was like I was frozen. I was in shock. I had no expression on my face. I just couldn’t seem to let any emotion out. I didn’t know how to react. Should I be happy because I won the gold? Should I be sad because my mother was not there with me?

  On the victory stand, the gold medal around my neck, the national anthem playing, and the American flag waving, I looked over to where my family was sitting and I saw my mother right there with everybody else, cheering me on. I could see her clearly in my mind’s eye as if she was real. She was oversize, towering over everybody else, towering over the ceremony, towering over me.

  But still, I couldn’t get my feelings out.

  Finally, when I came down after the ceremony to do an interview with Fred Roggin for NBC, right there, it finally hit me. He asked me about my mother and I started bawling, my emotions spilling out in those tears like a dam overflowing.

  At last.

  I remember telling Fred I was so sorry I was crying.

  When I got back home to L.A., I found a reception beyond what I could possibly have imagined. I figured my whole family might be at the airport to see me bring home the gold.

  Well, sure enough, they were there, but they were joined by thousands of other people. I remember driving down the 405 freeway with what seemed like hundreds of cars following in a celebratory caravan.

  When we got back to East L.A., back to the neighborhood, the whole block where we lived was full of people. Cameras everywhere. It was crazy. Omigosh. We had radio stations broadcasting live from our living room half the night.

  I was overwhelmed. We celebrated for the longest time. I wore the gold medal everywhere I went.

  What I really wanted to do was visit my mother with that medal, but I didn’t want people to follow me to the cemetery. They might have. There were cameramen everywhere I went for days after I got home.

  I finally told them, “Look, can you please give me some time? I want to go to the cemetery and give the gold medal to my mother. And I want to do it alone. Can you respect my wishes?”

  They were very nice about it, going along with my request but not with me on my sentimental journey.

  When I got to the cemetery, I laid the gold medal down on Mom’s grave and stood there for hours, talking to her, reminiscing, crying. I thought about all the things I could have done for her, all the things I could have bought her if only she had still been alive. I thought about the house I would have bought her, the clothes, the shoes, anything she wanted.

  I envisioned her seated in the crowd at my fights, cheering me in happier times. And I thought about all the pain she had endured in her final days.

  I remember speaking out loud in the quiet of cemetery: “Why can’t she be here? Why did she have to leave?”

  All these years later, I still think about what it would be like if my mother was here.

  As good as my life has turned out, I think it would have been even better if she was here. I think I wouldn’t have had kids out of wedlock. I think my life would be more organized.

  I’ve learned from everything that has happened to me, good and bad. You make mistakes and you grow from those experiences. But with her around, I would have grown a little faster.

  She really stressed values. She was always on top of me, making sure I did the right thing.

  Yes, she and I thought of the gold medal as the ultimate goal, but she wasn’t a person who cared about money or material things. She really didn’t. To her, the medal represented a great accomplishment, achieved through hard work. That was what would have been important to her.

  I think if she had watched me excel as a professional fighter, she would have convinced me to retire at an early age, do it a long time ago. She would have stressed my future well-being over more belts and greater glory.

  That was my mother, always putting things in perspective.

  III

  THE CLEANEST WINDOW IN MEXICO

  Manuel Gonzalez never met Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, but they shared a common vision.

  Both saw Tecate as a Baja California haven, a picturesque town offering relief from the rough terrain of the Sierra Juárez mountains and the industrial, heavily populated centers in Tijuana and Mexicali on either side.

  It was Díaz, running in the 1964 Mexican presidential race, who called Tecate la ventana más lipia de México or “the cleanest window of Mexico.” Four years later, Gonzalez saw much the same, a place to give his mother and his siblings a better life.

  Life had not been easy for Candelaria Gonzalez, my grandmother, and her four children—Manuel, Amparo, Cecilia, and Evodio Jr.—to the south in Sonora. Born in Durango, Candelaria had met her husband, Evodio Sr., in Ixpalino, a town in the state of Sinaloa. When the couple split up in 1956, Candelaria took her kids to Sonora, while Evodio, a farmer, stayed behind.

  As a single mother, Candelaria survived by selling tamales, breads, and candies, by working as a maid and ironing clothes.

  In 1968, Manuel, then a farmworker of twenty-four and the head of the family, succumbed to the charms of Tecate.

  The oldest border town in Baja, and originally named Zacate by Yuma Indians, Tecate was a farming community by the early 1800s. It became best known for the Tecate Brewery, founded in 1943.

  My grandmother still lives in Tecate today, in a house I bought for her. Along with her three surviving kids, she has fourteen grandchildren and thirty great-grandchildren.

  Among the Gonzalez offspring, the one who spent the shortest time in the family’s new home was Cecilia, my mother. While she was still living in Sonora, her aunt Maria Candelaria came to visit from her home in L.A. and asked my mother to come join her. My mother, about to turn eighteen, was thrilled by the prospect. She hadn’t seen her father since she was five, and her mother and siblings were departing for a new life of their own in Tecate.

  After obtaining a visa, she headed across the border to live with her aunt in Los Angeles, where she found work in a zipper factory.

  Along with her two cousins, my mother would take a bus every morning from East L.A. to her job downtown. She didn’t notice the man getting gas across the street from the bus stop until he drove up and asked the young ladies if they needed a ride.

  My father, Joel De La Hoya, introduced himself and the young ladies piled into the car. Like my mother, my father had also been born below the border and come north to live with family.

  The De La Hoyas were farmers in Durango. Vicente and Guadalupe had ten children, my father being the oldest. When he wasn’t in the fields, Vicente pursued his passion, boxing.

  He was the first of the De La Hoyas to come to America, leaving behind Guadalupe, who had no desire to give up her simple life in Mexico. Settling in East L.A., Vicente worked as a mechanic while briefly continuing his boxing career. The highlight was a match at the legendary Olympic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles.

  When my father was sixteen, his father sent for him. My father arrived in the United States in 1955 and was enrolled in Roosevelt High School. Upon graduation, he started at the bottom of the job market, literally, digging graves at a San Gabriel cemetery. After three years, he became a sheet-metal worker for the next five years.

  My father was late to work the day he took the Gonzalez girls downtown, but he had no regrets. Soon my mother was a regular passenger in his car as they began dating.

  Aft
er eighteen months, my father asked my mother to marry him. By then, she was working as a singer, traveling as far north as San Jose to perform. My father was concerned that marriage could deny her a career.

  “I don’t care about that,” she said. “I want to marry you.”

  My father had a dream career of his own that he wanted to pursue. Like his father before him, he loved to box. He had a 22–2 record as an amateur.

  His transition to the pros, however, began disastrously. All he had to show for his first three fights were two losses and a draw. But then he regained his lost style and reeled off nine straight victories. He even followed his father’s footsteps into the Olympic Auditorium, fighting there as well.

  My father took a job at an air-conditioning-and-heating plant in Azusa, where he did everything from working on the machinery to serving as a shipping clerk. Being the sole support of a growing family left no time for continuing his fanciful pursuit of a career in the ring. He would remain at the job in Azusa for a quarter century, his boxing days becoming a dim memory.

  Whatever hopes my father had of glory in the ring would have to be passed down to his two young sons.

  IV

  MY LAST FIGHT, AT AGE FOUR

  Memories of Mexico will always be special to me because they are my first memories. Even though I was born in East L.A., I was nurtured by family trips across the border to visit relatives.

  The first words I heard were Spanish ones. My father spoke more often in English, but my mother wasn’t fluent in the language. She understood it, but couldn’t really communicate without the comfort of her native tongue.

  There was never any danger of that being a problem for me because, in my neighborhood, if I tried to speak with my friends on the block or in school in Spanish, they would laugh at me, point their fingers, and say in a mocking manner, “Look, he speaks Spanish.”

  You quickly learned to stick to English if you wanted to be cool and fit in.

  Boxing is also lodged in my mind as one of my early experiences, but it isn’t a pleasant memory.

  Every weekend, we would go to my uncle Lalo’s house a few blocks away for family gatherings. The women would hang out in the kitchen, doing the cooking, the men outside around the garage, having a beer. That was the “man” area. That garage, minus a door, served as a sort of playhouse for the men. My uncle had a pool table in there, so guys would be playing, laughing, swigging their beer, bragging after sinking that last ball, or demanding a rematch after losing. It was all good fun.

  When they tired of that, the men turned to more serious competition: boxing. There was certainly no gym in that backyard, but they had gloves and that’s all they needed.

  My brother, Joel, two years older than me, would get laced up and mess around with some of my cousins.

  I never did. Not at that point. I was just over four years old.

  One Sunday, two of my uncles really went at it. It was a vicious fight, at least to my tiny eyes. I saw blood and I got scared.

  When it ended, they looked around for fresh blood.

  “Let’s put George in there,” someone said, referring to my cousin, who was then six.

  Who could they put him in with?

  All eyes turned to me.

  I was terrified. I had nowhere to hide. My uncles, and even my father, were all pushing me out there, assuring me I could do it.

  Do what? I had never put on a pair of gloves before. Didn’t matter. I had no choice, so I reluctantly, sheepishly, stuck my hands out and watched in horror as those bright red leather weapons were strapped onto my tiny hands.

  Now what? I didn’t know what to do.

  In contrast, George was a son of Uncle Lalo, meaning he had had access to the gloves, had put them on before, and at least understood the concept of throwing a punch. That made me a heavy underdog, considering I was making my ring debut against a veteran. Not a crafty veteran, but certainly craftier than little Oscar.

  Sure enough, the predictable happened. Boom, he popped me in the nose and that was it.

  I went down, tears flowing.

  When I got up, I ran to my father. Everybody else was laughing, but I think he was just embarrassed.

  And on that low note, my boxing career began. And ended, as far as I was concerned.

  V

  COMEBACK AT SIX

  I had no idea where my life would take me. That’s not something you think about at four. But I could have told you this much. I was not going to be a fighter. I would never, ever put boxing gloves on again, I vowed, after that afternoon in the backyard of Uncle Lalo’s house.

  I was crying so much after that punch in the nose that the laughter around me quickly stopped. My uncles were sympathetic.

  My father was not.

  “Don’t cry,” he said sternly.

  No hug.

  To my uncles, he said resolutely, “You watch. I am going to take him to the gym and he’ll be back.”

  Not right away. Oscar–George II never happened.

  I didn’t want to be a fighter. I was petrified. I hated it, but I had no choice.

  Ultimately, my father was right. I did come to love something that had seemed so abhorrent to me. And that love did start in the gym. That’s because I didn’t connect the two at the time. The gym was just a fun place for me as a young child, a place to run around with all the other little kids there, a place to climb in and out of the ropes, to awkwardly jump rope or reach up with my small fists and attempt to move a heavy bag that seemed like a skyscraper from my tiny perspective. To me, the gym was a big playground.

  My father wisely let six months go by before even broaching the subject of boxing. He said we were just going to go down to the gym to watch what was going on.

  We lived on McBride and the gym was at Atlantic and Olympic. It wasn’t very far, just a few blocks, but back then, it seemed like it took an eternity to get there.

  My brother, Joel, was already hitting the heavy bag and sparring. I just soaked in the atmosphere.

  Then one day, my father had me put the gloves back on. It wasn’t, he assured me, to fight anyone, but just to hit the heavy bag. Or sometimes, he would pick me up in his arms, get me level with the smaller speed bag suspended from an overhead beam, and have me play around with hitting it.

  Nothing threatening

  Perhaps because of that kid-glove treatment, I was starting to like it, little by little. It wasn’t serious business to me. It wasn’t as if I was being told to put on the gloves and train so I could get revenge on my cousin George. I didn’t see it that way.

  I didn’t even know boxing was a sport at that point. We didn’t watch the Friday-night fights on TV. The only thing I remember being shown in our living room was baseball. We watched the Dodgers every weekend.

  The trainers at the gym encouraged all the kids by building a little platform we could stand on to reach the speed bag. Actually, in that gym, they had what we call peanut bags, little speed bags that would go super fast when you hit them. All the kids loved them.

  Everybody went out of their way to create a friendly environment for the youngsters, make it a place we would look forward to visiting.

  My mother didn’t question my father’s decision to make the gym a focal point of my youth. She never said, “What are you doing? He’s not going to be a fighter.” And for his part, my father never said, “I’m going to make Oscar a champion.” It just wasn’t like that.

  My father didn’t take me to the gym all the time. As a matter of fact, it got to the point where I thought he didn’t take me enough.

  By the time I turned five, I wanted to be in the gym so much that I would secretly follow my brother over there. He would go after school and my father would meet him after he got off work around 4 P.M.

  I liked being with my big brother, but let’s face it. To a seven-year-old, I was just an annoying little punk, someone he didn’t like buzzing around him, so there was no way he was going to willingly take me with him.

  Un
derstood, but I wasn’t going to be denied. The name of the gym, a converted fire station, was Ayúdate, which means “Help Yourself.” And that’s just what I was going to do. I would wait until my brother left, and then I would slink out of the house behind him, staying ten to fifteen yards back, hiding behind a tree or darting into a driveway, doing whatever was necessary to stay out of sight.

  Once I got there, my brother saw me, but he was so involved in what he was doing that he didn’t really think much about how I had gotten there. When you’re seven, those things don’t really concern you.

  My dad didn’t know that I was sneaking out to the gym, but he soon found out. When he walked in one day and saw me there, he nodded, smiled, and said, to no one in particular, “Okay, guess it’s time to take Oscar to the gym on a regular basis.”

  Initially, I was a southpaw fighter, but Joe Minjarez, the trainer at the gym, switched me over to the right side because it was difficult for him to work with me the other way. Not being a southpaw himself, he would have had to reverse everything he knew.

  Being just a kid, I didn’t know the difference. He told me how to stand and that’s how I stood. Looking back, it was the best thing that ever happened to me because it helped me unleash my left hook and perfect my jab, my two best weapons over the years.

  Playing around in the gym was one thing, but one day, I took the next big step: hand wraps.

  Those are the protective gauze strips a fighter wraps tightly around his hands for protection before putting on gloves. My brother and I and four or five other kids were taken over to Prieto Reyes, a local sporting-goods store, by the trainers to get the wraps.

  You could buy them for fifty cents each. That was big money for me, but it was worth it because I felt, once I had hand wraps, “Wow, I’ve made it as a fighter.”

  Of course I had no idea how to even put them on, but at least I had them.