American Son

by Oscar De La Hoya

I was nothing more than a flailing six-year-old, dressed like it was Halloween.

  Looking back, though, my first fight proved to be much more, proved to be the moment I took my first tentative steps on a trail blazed long ago by my grandfather, and later followed by my father. That Saturday afternoon at the Pico Rivera Sports Arena, I added a link to our family chain and forged a lifelong bond with my father, a bond subsequently tempered by the heat of battle; though strained by the demands of a warrior existence.

  Of all the battles I have fought in my career, none has been as tough as my struggle to gain my father’s approval. He was raised in a culture where the difference between winning and losing in the ring could mean the difference between adulation and despair in life. For him, praise generated overconfidence and lack of discipline. He was always more worried about my next fight than elated over the last one.

  In a way, he was right. Victory can be fleeting in boxing, defeat permanent.

  None of that went through my mind after that first match, of course. I was just a youngster who had learned how much sweeter winning was than losing.

  I was given a trophy I brought home to my mother. I also showed her the additional spoils of my victory. Some of my uncles had been ringside, and when I came down the steps, they rewarded me with money. One gave me a quarter, another fifty cents.

  Boy, that opened my eyes. You could make money doing this?

  I loved that and I loved all the attention I received, but I think the biggest bonus I got out of that fight was the first hint of approval from my father. It was not verbalized. That wouldn’t be the case for a long, long time. All he said to me was, “Good job, but you can do better.”

  But I could tell he was very proud. Our family and some of his friends were there and I saw a look on his face that let me know he was thinking, Yeah, that’s my kid.

  After that, the fights came fast and furious. I would sometimes have matches on both Saturday and Sunday, but always at least once a week. Occasionally, we would be transported to other gyms as far away as Santa Fe Springs.

  No matter how well I had done in a fight, though, I knew that when I got home, I would receive a big lecture from my father. He would get in a boxing stance and show me how I should have done this or shouldn’t have done that.

  I got my first pair of gloves when I was ten. An uncle, Jose Luis Camarena, took me to buy them. He was one of the uncles who fought in Uncle Lalo’s garage. Jose Luis wasn’t very good with the gloves on, always getting beaten up, but he was great at shopping for them.

  My stockpile of equipment continued to grow. As the champion of my neighborhood, undefeated for several years, I needed the right look, so my parents began to dress me in red satin trunks. My mother wanted red because she said it was good luck and would make me angrier and stronger, like the bull seeing the red of the matador’s cape.

  I also got my own shoes and socks and a tank top. No more 7-Up T-shirts. I even got my name on my shorts, with iron-on letters.

  I was always trying to take my brother’s clothes because I had so few of my own. I would wait until he left for school, grab something of his, put it on, and then avoid the route he had taken.

  One day, when I was about nine, he caught me and started beating on me in the kitchen of our apartment on McBride. I gave him a left hook to his body and he went down like a sack of potatoes.

  He never bothered me again.

  My brother had received all the attention from my father in the beginning because he was supposed to be the Golden Boy. People used to say he was better than me, but in the end, he just didn’t like boxing. So he quit at the age of fourteen or fifteen after just four fights. He lost them all. To this day, if you ask him, he’ll tell you he got robbed in all four, but I think it was just that his heart wasn’t really in it.

  My uncle Jose Luis begged my brother to stay in the sport. He even tried to bribe him with a motorcycle. Didn’t matter. My brother wanted out.

  He preferred baseball, a sport he was great at before he blew his arm out pitching.

  I would follow my brother to the diamond, wanting to be with him and, perhaps, even be his teammate. As much as I had learned to love boxing, I was still intrigued by what big brother was up to.

  One Saturday, when I was eight, I was playing in a game with him at Salazar Park. He was pitching and I was at shortstop.

  That lasted about five minutes. Suddenly, out of the parking lot, came my father, an angry look on his face. He marched right onto the field, oblivious to the fact that a game was going on, grabbed me by the arm, and escorted me off the diamond.

  “Come on,” he said firmly, “this is not for you.”

  I started crying. I didn’t understand. I just wanted to play.

  I was wasting my tears. Emotional displays did not work on my father. Nor did you ever argue with him.

  That was the premature end of my baseball career. There was only one glove my father wanted to see me wear, and it didn’t have webbing.

  With my brother out of the picture, my father turned his full attention to me. I was the chosen one.

  It wasn’t just my father. I was the focus of my extended family. They would support me and buy me equipment, all of them anxious to have a part in the making of Oscar.

  I could sense that my brother was hurt by all the attention I was getting. As he faded into the background, I think he regretted for the first time that he hadn’t stayed in boxing.

  It was kind of like the movie La Bamba. I was Ritchie Valens and he was the older brother, Bob Morales.

  I’ve always included my brother in all of my training camps, but I’ve felt his resentment toward me. That’s certainly understandable.

  It’s funny how it is reversed now. My brother and my father are very close. They hang out together, drink together, do a lot of things with each other. I have a good relationship with my father, but I can sense he’s closer to my brother.

  Back in my youth, however, my father was focused on me as I continued to have success in the ring, filling up the house with my trophies. Eventually, I would win more than two hundred.

  Through all of those years, my father pushed me to run. No matter where I was in my career, he believed in focusing on conditioning from my first waking moment. Open eyes, hit the road.

  When he woke up at 4:30 A.M. to leave for his job in Azusa, he would bang on my door and yell out, “I’m going to work and you have to go run.”

  That scenario lasted a few months and then it became automatic for me. A kid waking up at four-thirty in the morning to go running? That was unheard of. But I did it.

  I can remember the sights and smells of dawn as I raced through the neighborhood, my headphones under my hood, my music coursing through my soul. I would run by a food stand and see the people huddled around in the breaking dawn, eating their tacos. I would make my way around the cemetery and back home, about two miles in all, on a run that took me about half an hour.

  From age six to nine, I was fighting in the peewee division among the local kids. When I turned ten, I gained amateur status.

  Throughout that period, Joe Minjarez was my trainer, as he was for all the kids in that gym. He worked us, but he made it fun. After we finished training for the day, he would give us each a quarter or thirty-five cents to use in the little ice-cream shop across the street. When the other fathers and trainers hung out in the back of the gym, drinking beer, Joe stayed with us.

  At fourteen, I thought I was about to take the biggest step of my young career. Our boxing team was going to Hawaii to face a team of kids. It was beyond anything I had ever imagined, getting on a plane and flying thousands of miles to a distant shore for a boxing match. This was something the pros did.

  Six kids were to be selected by Joe. When the list was announced, however, I wasn’t on it. I was stunned. Stunned wouldn’t begin to describe my father’s furious reaction. He just lost it.

  I don’t know what my father said behind closed doors with Joe, but I just shrugged a
nd thought, Oh well, it would have been cool.

  To be fair to Joe, there was another kid in my weight category—85 or 90 pounds—who was also very good and was older and had more experience than I did.

  My father didn’t want to hear it. We walked out of that gym and never returned.

  We moved to Resurrection Gym, where my new trainer was George Payan. I knew all about George because he had also been at Ayudate. George was tough and ran his operation military style. It was like being in boot camp. He had us running several miles a day. There weren’t going to be any side trips to get ice cream under this guy.

  But he was good and he knew boxing. Though I was sorry to lose Joe, the move was the best thing for me. I was turning thirteen and needed the added discipline. The new environment was also good for me. Resurrection was a bigger gym, with more fighters, tougher competition. Some pros even worked out there, guys like Paul Gonzales, who would go on to win Olympic gold, and Joey Olivo, a former WBA light-flyweight champion. It felt like I had left the friendly neighborhood gym for the big time.

  In Ayudate, I drew a crowd whenever I sparred. I was one of the stars and could justify that status by my ability to dominate just about anybody they put in there with me.

  In less than a year at Resurrection, I was sparring with professional fighters. My days of domination were temporarily over.

  Olivo was the first pro I faced. He was twenty-nine and had been a world champion. I was fourteen and my world was the neighborhood. But I wasn’t intimidated. Close to 100 pounds by then, I loved to bang and felt confidence in my punches. That confidence soared when I found I could actually hold my own with Olivo. I would go five, six, even eight rounds with him.

  I became the boy wonder in that gym, receiving all the praise my father had tried to keep from my ears.

  Back at Ayudate, we would spar three rounds and then scatter. Joe would have one of us on the heavy bag, another on the speed bag, yet another jumping rope. He told us to stay at it until we got tired.

  Under George, there was no such thing as getting tired. He didn’t want to hear about it. And nobody went off to do their own thing. We worked out as team in a regimented routine. We would run five miles together, George included. When we jumped rope, it was for ten seconds and we were expected to increase our speed over that brief span of time. We were there to work.

  After George’s relentless workouts and my challenging sparring sessions, facing opposition my own age in various tournaments sometimes seemed like a break. After feeling Olivo’s punches for five rounds, nothing I faced from another fourteen-year-old was going to faze me.

  That began to change, however, as I moved up to tournaments like the Golden Gloves and encountered other talented fighters my age who were also being groomed for stardom. There were four of us considered the elite fighters on that circuit, myself: Shane Mosley, Pepe Reilly, and Ruben Espinoza.

  Three of my five amateur losses were to those guys, and each time, it was like the end of the world.

  My father didn’t take it well, either, always blaming me. He said I didn’t train hard enough or I was messing around too much away from the ring. It was never a case of maybe the other guy being good. It was always my fault. I think it was just that he knew how good I was, and he felt I should beat anybody I faced.

  I think my father wanted to live his dreams through me. He was a fighter and my grandfather was a fighter, but they never really made it.

  My father didn’t do it because he saw dollar signs above my head. Neither of us imagined I’d become the Golden Boy and make millions. It was just for the love of the game, for him to see his son excel at a level he never attained.

  When I was fourteen, I would go to the gym, go running four or five miles afterward, and then, when I got home, there was my father in the living room with the boxing mitts on, waiting to work with me and show me a few moves.

  Father-son relationships in boxing—the father usually serving as trainer and perhaps manager as well—almost never work. The normal clash of egos in the corner along with the natural clash of egos between a father, who has wisdom to impart, and a son, who thinks he already knows it all, has too often proved disastrous.

  I have to give my father credit. He never got caught up in all that. He never tried to work the corner or train me or have any type of hands-on involvement in my career. He was always content to remain behind the scenes. He let his feelings be known, but he did so from the background and I respected that.

  While my peers between the ropes treated me with respect, I was sometimes treated with disdain out on the streets. As my reputation grew, teenagers sometimes challenged me to a fight. Not gang members. As I said, they stayed away. It was just fellow students or guys in the neighborhood looking to make a name for themselves.

  It wasn’t going to work with me. I never used my fighting skills to confront anybody. As a matter of fact, I never had a street fight. Never.

  To be honest, I was scared. I didn’t know how to fight in the street. I didn’t like the uncertainty of it all, the fact you could find yourself on the ground forced to wrestle rather than box, the frightening possibilities of a no-holds-barred confrontation, the realization that one opponent could quickly turn into two or three as friends piled on, and, the ultimate nightmare for me, getting hurt seriously enough to endanger my career.

  Once, when I was fifteen, a couple of guys tried to throw punches at me, see what I had. I just ducked and dodged and walked away. They yelled, “Ah, you’re nothing. You’re not a fighter.”

  They could say anything they wanted, but there was no way I was going to play their game. If they wanted to put on gloves, yeah, let’s go. I liked the comfort of the ring, where the rules were set and a referee was there to enforce them.

  The closest I came to a street fight was a scuffle involving some friends that I tried to break up. When I got in the middle, somebody threw an elbow that left me with a black eye. When my father saw that, he gave me a big lecture on protecting the fighting machine I had worked so hard to perfect.

  While I wasn’t fighting on the streets, I was boxing at an ever-higher level in the ring as I reached the age of fifteen. I was traveling to Arizona, competing in regional Golden Gloves tournaments.

  While that afforded me high visibility in the amateur boxing world, I was certainly no Golden Boy at Garfield High.

  If I had been a leading receiver on the football team or a hot-shooting guard in basketball, I could have been a star on campus, my letterman’s jacket serving as a babe magnet.

  Instead, until my senior year, I was barely seen and rarely heard, even when I wasn’t away at tournaments—the quiet, shy type. I had few friends and no girlfriends. While everyone else was running around, having a good time, I was off in the corner by myself in my own world.

  I always got the brush-off from the in crowd. With my Olympic dream swirling around in my head, I would look at them and mutter to myself, “Okay, fine, we’ll see how it all turns out.” At that point, however, there was no guarantee I had anything but pipe dreams. Maybe I was fooling myself.

  By my final year, however, my cover was blown. I had become a prominent amateur boxer, well known in the neighborhood, with an occasional mention in the newspaper.

  That increased my popularity, but what ultimately brought me out of my shell was Veronica Ramirez, the most beautiful girl in school.

  I met her through a new friend I had made, Javier, another outsider who had transferred from another school and spoke only Spanish, pushing him even further to the fringe. Our mutual isolation gave us a bond.

  We both had our eye on this girl with long, flowing hair, a pretty face, a nice personality, and a gorgeous figure.

  It was Javier who first talked to Veronica. When he introduced her to me, we clicked instantly.

  Of the girls I dated long enough to introduce to my mom—I think it was a total of three—Veronica was her favorite. My mom would tell me, “This is the one for you.”

  After
Veronica and I had been dating for a while, I went to Colorado Springs to train for a national tournament. In the past, when I had a major match coming up, I had tuned out the world.

  Not this time. I was so in love, I would call her several times a day—every half hour, if you can believe that, during one stretch.

  My teammates got so sick of hearing about her that they would look for an escape route when I started talking about my Veronica. When I pulled out my picture of her, as I inevitably did, I would empty the room.

  When I returned home, the first thing I wanted to do, of course, was see her. She lived only a few blocks away.

  When I got to her parents’ house, I could see something was wrong. She was obviously upset, had been crying, and was unusually quiet.

  Then she dropped the bomb on me. “It’s over,” she said. “I can’t see you anymore. I can’t take this. Why did you do this to me?”

  At first I couldn’t even speak. Finally, the words tumbled out, my voice getting higher as anxiety gripped my body.

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “I didn’t do anything.”

  There was nothing I could say to change her mind. As far as she was concerned, we were finished.

  I stumbled down the street like a zombie. I couldn’t figure out how this had happened, how my dream relationship had turned into a nightmare without warning, without any discernible cause.

  I was heartbroken, crushed. I had lost my first love.

  A few months later, I learned the truth. One of my teammates in Colorado Springs, perhaps jealous, perhaps just mischievous, had gotten Veronica’s phone number and had his own girlfriend make a crank call to her.

  “What are you doing?” the girlfriend told Veronica. “This is my man. Oscar is with me. We’re sleeping together. You can’t see him anymore.”

  It may have been a joke to my teammate, but it was a big blow to me.

  I didn’t talk to anybody else about what had happened, not even my parents. I didn’t know how to approach them with something like that.

  And just who was the prankster who had such a good time at my expense? Raúl Márquez, who would go on to win the International Boxing Federation 154-pound championship.