American Son

by Oscar De La Hoya

  Raul was nervous and scared.

  “What are you doing?” he said. “You can’t do this.”

  I wasn’t budging.

  “No,” I said, “I am going to do it. This is what’s meant to be.”

  Before I told Mike I was cutting the umbilical cord, I wanted to inform those closest to me. So a meeting was set up that night at a restaurant owned at that time by my trainer Robert Alcazar. Robert, of course, was there, as was my father, my brother, and Raul.

  When we arrived, we had a few drinks to soften up my father.

  Then I told him, “I’m getting rid of Mike Hernández.”

  “What?” my father said, his eyes getting wide. “You can’t do that. Your life is going to be ruined. Look at what this guy is doing for you. Look at what he is doing for us. He’s a good man. He’s the smartest man ever.”

  The mellow feeling induced by the beer had definitely dissipated.

  I looked over at my brother, who had worry written all over his face.

  “Who are you going to get?” my brother asked. “What’s going to go on?”

  “I’ll figure that out,” I said, bolstered by a rush of newly discovered confidence. “I’m just going to get rid of him. I’m not happy with him. I can do a lot better.”

  My brother and Robert started crying.

  After a while, everybody realized, yeah, Oscar really is going to do this. They were petrified. Especially my father

  “Look,” I told them, “I’m going to shoot for the moon. You are all going to hang on or you are going to let go and watch me fly away.”

  Nobody spoke.

  We broke up the meeting agreeing that we were all going together to see Hernández the next day.

  As Raul and I drove over to the dealership in the morning, Raul called my father, my brother, and Robert. Nobody picked up their phone. We were on our own.

  When we got to the dealership, we went up to Hernández’s office on the second floor.

  Hernández looked at Raul and said, “Get out. I don’t want you in my office. I need to talk to Oscar alone.”

  I nodded and told Raul, “Go downstairs, I’ll be okay.”

  I did away with the niceties and told Hernández, “I’m going to go my own way.”

  I don’t think he really got it at first.

  He just said, “Okay, that’s fine. We’ll talk.”

  “No,” I said, “I’m serious. This is it. It’s over.”

  Then it sank in. He tried for an hour to talk me out of it.

  “We have big plans,” he told me. “You are making a huge mistake. You have your whole career ahead of you. Bob Arum is going to try to screw you over. I’m the one who is taking care of you.”

  He couldn’t get to me. I just wanted him out of my life.

  Don’t get me wrong. When I left Hernández in 1999, I had money, but it was a lot less than I’d thought it would be.

  Mike wound up suing me and I countersued. We wound up together again in the same room to give depositions, along with Raul, Hernández’s girlfriend, and the lawyers.

  After a long morning session, there was a break around lunchtime. I went over to a wet bar in the corner to get some coffee. Raul remained at the table, where Hernández confronted him.

  “What the hell are you doing with Oscar’s life?” Hernández asked him.

  I looked over and saw Raul was scared. He had always felt threatened by Hernández.

  Hernández hadn’t realized I’d overheard the conversation until I got in his face.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked him. “My life is perfect.”

  “Oscar, are you really happy? Look at the big mess you’re in, the way your career is going,” he said, referring to my controversial loss to Félix Trinidad. “All this is happening because you’re making the wrong decisions.”

  “I’m happy,” I told him. “Leaving you was probably the best move I ever made.”

  I could see the frustration in Hernández’s face, which was turning red. Getting nowhere with me, he turned his fury on Raul.

  I stepped between them and told Hernández to back off.

  It felt good after all those years of mindlessly nodding at everything he proposed to finally fight back.

  Hernández immediately backed down, unable to even look me in the eyes. He wasn’t used to seeing me act this way. In his heart, he might have thought he’d be able to get me back at this hearing. I think, right then, he knew he had really lost me.

  “Don’t do this,” he said in a soft voice. “We don’t have to do this.”

  “I’m standing up for myself,” I replied. “I’m not the kid anymore.”

  And that was that. We ended up settling and Mike Hernández was, finally, totally out of my life.

  XXI

  ENTER RICHARD SCHAEFER

  When Raul and I left the hearing, I was feeling pretty good about myself. As we got into my Bentley and headed home down Sunset Boulevard, I felt like a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders, like I was sailing along with my tires not even touching the ground.

  How wrong I was.

  Suddenly we heard a bang, felt a lurch, and my car began to shake. I pulled over to the side of the road, right across the street from UCLA. I had a flat tire.

  “Do you want me to call a tow truck?” Raul asked.

  “No,” I replied, “let’s do it ourselves.”

  It seemed so fitting. On the day I shed myself of the man who had run my career, I was rolling up my sleeves to take control of this minor mishap on the road. It was a first step in taking control of my life.

  With Hernández in my rearview mirror, what lay on the road ahead for me?

  Raul, knowing where I wanted to go, came up with a shortcut. I had figured I would hire some good lawyers and do the kind of research on finances that I should have done years before. Raul suggested I first talk to the husband of his aunt Lilia, a banker named Richard Schaefer.

  The name was not completely foreign to me. We had met two or three years earlier. When Raul brought Schaefer’s name up, the first thing I did was break into a big smile.

  This was a guy who had taken me over the edge and left me soaked for all I was worth. Not exactly a performance that leaves you with a lot of faith in the man.

  Except, I’m talking literally. He hadn’t steered me into the wrong investment, just into a shallow lake.

  I had gone with Raul and some other friends to Palm Desert to play golf. Richard, who had a home in the area, was a big boxing fan, so Raul teamed us up. We even shared a golf cart. Bad idea.

  It was a friendly game. We talked boxing, not business. Raul hadn’t told me what Richard did for a living or who he worked for.

  With Richard driving the cart, we found ourselves with a small mound to ascend in order to reach the green on our next hole. Coming down the other side, Richard was speeding on grass that was still moist and slick from the morning dew. From one side, my brother and Raul suddenly came into view, also speeding down on a collision course.

  Richard made a sharp turn to avoid them, throwing us into a spin that ended with us splashing into a lake. Our clubs were drenched and we found ourselves ankle-deep in water, trying to push the cart back onto the grass.

  It was hilarious.

  So yes, in my first meeting with Richard, he definitely left an impression.

  Richard and I talked occasionally after that about investments. I thought he had a brilliant mind for finance, so I asked him if he would educate Mike Hernández, who was still my business adviser at the time, about some of the programs Richard’s bank offered. I thought maybe Richard and I could do some business together. Richard had the same idea when we met. He was in the private banking business and what better client could he find than a young millionaire with a growing income?

  Richard went to the car dealership, but when he sat down in Hernández’s office, he knew right away that Hernández was not going to be receptive to an outsider.

  “What do yo
u want?” Hernández asked him.

  “I would like to explain to you what our bank does,” Richard said, “some of the services we offer.”

  “Can you guarantee him ten percent return?” Hernández asked.

  “No,” said Richard. “If you want a guarantee, put your money in CDs and right now the CD rates are five percent. If you want more, it depends on what kind of risk you are willing to take. If you are in bonds, you can make this much; if you are in equities, you can make that much. You have to tell me the risk profile he has, his overall asset allocation, and how Oscar invests his money. He’s a high-income taxpayer. We could look at municipal bonds, maybe some stocks, some international stocks. We could put together an investment portfolio to make sure he’s nicely diversified.”

  “Let me stop you right there,” Hernández said. “If you can’t guarantee him ten percent, you are wasting your time.”

  “Why?” asked Richard.

  “Because I can guarantee him ten percent,” Hernández said.

  “How can you do that?” Richard asked.

  “Because he’s investing in my dealership,” Hernández said.

  “Oh, wow; well, good luck,” said Richard, who immediately got up, took his briefcase, and left.

  He told me there was no use in talking to Hernández because he didn’t make much sense.

  It was three years before I dealt with Richard again.

  When I said good-bye to Hernández, Raul again mentioned Richard as the ideal guy to help me set up a team of business advisers and lawyers.

  We didn’t go to Richard with the idea of asking him to take over my financial affairs. I wasn’t looking for that. I had just been burned by depending on one guy for all my monetary advice and I wasn’t anxious to fall into a similar trap. I wanted a team around me.

  “Richard will help you,” Raul said. “He’s a nice guy and he’ll give you some direction.” I needed a few days to think about it.

  The more I considered the idea, the more I liked it. After I retained the services of Bert Fields, perhaps the most respected attorney in L.A., Raul and I went to see Richard in his Swiss Bank Corporation office on the sixty-fourth floor of the Library Tower.

  Very impressive. Even more impressive than a car lot.

  We reminisced about our adventure in the lake, talked a little boxing, and then got around to finances. It was a pleasant conversation, leaving me with a good feeling about Richard.

  I told him, “I don’t know what I’m doing as far as my money is concerned. I need help. I just terminated my relationship with Mike Hernández. I want to have more control over my business dealings. And I hope you could help me.”

  Richard agreed.

  “I’ll help you out,” he said. “I’m a boxing fan, I like you, you’re a friend of Raul, and he is part of the family.”

  Leaning heavily on Richard for advice, Raul and I began an extensive search for the right people to form my financial team. We were at it from 7 A.M. to 7 P.M., interviewing money managers, agents, and lawyers, all the top-notch people in their respective fields.

  I already had two reliable agents, Bruce Binkow and Leonard Armato of Management Plus, who had been with me since 1998.

  I talked to Jerry Perenchio, the majority owner of Univision and the man who had promoted the first Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier fight. He had become a good friend and I valued his advice. I signed up with a top-notch accounting firm. But most of all, Raul and I met with Richard again and again.

  I kept asking Raul, “How much am I going to have to pay this guy? What’s the deal here?”

  Raul told me not to worry about it.

  My concern was understandable. Everybody also told me I had nothing to worry about when I was with Mike Hernández.

  That one visit to Richard turned into hours, days, and then weeks. He spent a great deal of time organizing my finances and discovering how much I had and where it was.

  I told him, “I want to get out of anything I was involved in with Mike Hernández.”

  Richard kept at it, but he never asked me for any compensation. More importantly, I could tell he was honest and that meant a lot. It’s funny. As a fighter, you feel invulnerable in the ring, but very vulnerable outside of it, especially when it comes to money.

  I remember Richard drawing a pie split into four pieces. He said I should invest this much in one piece and this much in another. The days of banking on the best interest rate for the savings account were over.

  It was safe to assume Richard Schaefer didn’t keep his money under his pillow. I realized this was the guy I had been looking for since I first put that gold medal around my neck.

  I also had problems, serious problems, outside the ring. I was being sued by a woman who falsely claimed I had raped her, had a paternity suit pending against me, and I would soon be involved in lawsuits with Hernández.

  The Golden Boy was tarnished.

  Schaefer came from a banking family back in his native Switzerland. After graduating from a business school in Bern, he worked for the esteemed Swiss Volksbank and then spent a dozen years in the U.S. offices of Swiss Bank Corporation. During that time Swiss Bank merged with UBS, another Swiss banking company, and Richard was put in charge of their entire U.S. operation west of the Mississippi. By the time I came to him for financial help, Schaefer had twenty of the forty wealthiest people in the western half of the country as clients and was deputy CEO for the company’s private banking operation for the whole country. He had been so successful, the bank’s West Coast branch, which had begun in 1987, was bigger than the East Coast operation, which had started in the 1930s.

  I reached a point where I wanted to be his only client.

  “This is all too much for me,” I told Richard. “I can’t handle both my boxing career and the business side. I need a CEO for my financial interests, a quarterback to run the show.”

  Replied Richard, “Why don’t you go talk to other people as well and then we’ll talk again. I will help you to identify that person.”

  That was not necessary.

  “I don’t want to talk to anybody else,” I said. “I have already identified the person. It’s you. I don’t know how to ask you this and I figure you are probably going to say no, but I want to hire you. Would you leave the bank to come work with me?”

  Richard’s first reaction was, “Wow!”

  Having worked with him for months to construct a game plan for my future business dealings, I found a kinship with a man who, on the surface, didn’t have much in common with me. He was nearly fifteen years older, came from Switzerland, grew up in a family where finance was the focus, had attended prestigious schools, and had made his mark in plush financial institutions. Yet he was every bit the fighter I was, just as driven, as competitive, as determined to win the gold. The only difference was, his gold was stored in vaults.

  Once he caught his breath, Richard told me he was “surprised, but honored at the offer. I know there are an awful lot of people who would love to have this kind of opportunity. And that’s what I view this as, an opportunity.”

  Richard went home and talked to his family and we soon had an agreement.

  He found himself making a career leap he couldn’t have imagined before stepping onto the golf course that day so long ago.

  Richard’s father, a Swiss banker himself, still couldn’t imagine it. When the younger Schaefer called home to say he had decided to resign from the bank to become the business adviser of a boxer, his father was stunned.

  “It’s time to come back to Switzerland,” his father told him. “You’ve been in America too long. You are going from banking to boxing? At least come home first and talk.”

  The younger Schaefer wasn’t going anywhere. At thirty-eight, he had made a life-changing decision. He would lend a golden touch to the Golden Boy.

  I had no doubt he would succeed. I couldn’t have given Richard a better glimpse at the cutthroat world he was entering than my 1999 fight against Félix Trinidad. I ha
d given him tickets to the blockbuster event. What he saw was a horrible decision, in the eyes of almost every boxing writer sitting ringside, followed by a bitter postfight press conference. Don King, who promoted Trinidad, announced to the media with his trademark cackle, “The lights are going out in Arumville.” He went on and on, as only King can do, prompting my publicist, Debbie Caplan, to reach behind the lectern and pull the plug on King’s microphone. That further enraged him.

  Seated in the audience, Richard had to be thinking just how bizarre this whole boxing universe was, especially in comparison to the boardrooms in which he conducted business.

  But when the chance arose to become part of that universe, he never blinked. As I soon learned, he could be just as tough a fighter in his business suit as I was in my trunks.

  When Richard told his superiors he was leaving, and why he was leaving, they were just as mystified as his father.

  And even more determined to stop him.

  If it was sports Richard was interested in, they would give him a sports-and-entertainment group to run. If it was travel that intrigued him, they would make him head of the company’s Monte Carlo bank in Monaco.

  None of these opportunities gave Richard second thoughts any more than had his father’s concerns. He was going to come to work for me.

  But for how much? I may not have been a financial whiz, but I knew bank executives didn’t come cheap. Especially one like Richard, who was the highest-paid private banker in his company worldwide.

  Again, I was very impressed with him. He pulled out a sheet of paper and wrote down some figures. It was very professional. He told me the banking industry had provided him with a very lucrative income and he wasn’t willing to sacrifice it. But he also didn’t feel comfortable taking more than a business manager should, so he would work to generate enough income to satisfy both of us.

  Who could argue with that?

  “I know you’ve been talking about retirement,” Richard told me (remember, this was back in the year 2000). “It would be awfully foolish of me to leave behind the amazing job I have to go to work with a guy who is contemplating retirement. So why am I doing this? Not to be a part of your boxing career as much as being involved in your fantastic opportunity, as a true Mexican-American icon, to capture the growing Hispanic market in this country in a way no one else can.”