The Right Stuff

For all his achievement and for all his acclaim, Oscar De La Hoya remains oddly unsure of himself. You can hear it in his voice when he wonders why he can't get the approval of those he respects most. You can see it in his dark, nervous eyes every time he mounts the national stage. You can almost feel it when he flinches in the face of some totally anticipated danger.

At these instants of self-doubt, he seems the hollow man, a pay-per-view creation whose ready smile has catapulted him onto magazine covers and billboards in advance of his talent, a 26-year-old boy whose commercial potential has been realized far ahead of his athletic promise. What's worse, he seems fully aware of the entirely cynical process. He sits in his room before a big fight and, his brows furrowed, wonders if he's really all he has been made out to be. "What if I lose?" he says, with an apprehension that is more natural to him than, say, a milk mustache. "The same fans that are there for me now, where do they go? Do they still buy tickets?" On the eve of his biggest fight, he ponders his own comeuppance.

This is the Golden Boy, who has earned more than $75 million in purses, who has won titles in four divisions, whose crossover charisma is considered boxing's last stand. He is a champion whose fans sometimes jeer him for the prettiness of his fighting, whose promoter has steered him through a lucrative career of unimportant matchups, whose generally admiring press clippings sometimes call him chicken, whose father has never told him he has done well. "Of course I am insecure," he tells you.

So even he recognizes that his fame and fortune are no substitute for character. So even he wonders if he has any.

Yet, as was finally demonstrated last Saturday in Las Vegas, there really is something there, something inside him after all. De La Hoya came fully into his own in the combustion of the 12th round of his WBC welterweight title defense against Ike Quartey of Ghana. There will be arguments over whether De La Hoya was the better athlete, and even arguments over the scoring, which awarded him a split decision. But anybody who saw him swarm Quartey in that last desperate round, flooring the undefeated challenger at the outset with a left hand and then cornering him with a brutal barrage that left Quartey woozy, must now certify De La Hoya's manhood, if nothing else. There's something there, all right.

It was a startling finish to a bout that had been promoted as De La Hoya's first true test, "my first big, dangerous" fight, as he himself called it. Quartey, who entered the ring with a 34-0-1 record and who had been the WBA welterweight champion until his title was stripped when he pulled out of a mandatory defense, is heavy-handed, with a punishing jab that had earned him the nickname Bazooka. If De La Hoya's education had been his 29 wins without a loss against fighters too small or too old to validate all that Olympic gold medal promise, Quartey was to be his graduation rite.

Even though De La Hoya had demanded that his wary promoter, Bob Arum, set up the bout, by fight time he didn't look like a guy who was 100% sure he'd done the right thing. Although he always looks serious in the ring, he seemed especially tentative in his approach to Quartey, whose sneer throughout the fight was meant to announce his superiority to this pampered brat.

De La Hoya, who earned $9 million for the bout and preserved his position as boxing's non-heavyweight superstar, was clearly not overconfident in either his demeanor or his style, giving the shorter Quartey (who earned $3 million) plenty of room and, as he said later, "way too much respect." De La Hoya appeared nervous and reluctant to close the gap between the two. When he did cross into Quartey's turf, the African challenger, with drums beating up in the high seats somewhere, answered smartly. A trickle of blood appeared at De La Hoya's nose in the first round, and swelling around his left eye began after the fifth.

The most severe penalty for De La Hoya's encroachment was a sixth-round knockdown that De La Hoya admitted "actually dazed me." That electrifying round began with De La Hoya dropping Quartey with a crisp left hook. But when De La Hoya attempted to press his advantage, Quartey delivered a beautiful left hand, flush on the cheek, sending the Golden Boy down for only the third time in his pro career.

Reflecting on the moment later, De La Hoya said he simply determined that he "wouldn't quit, that I'm not a quitter." Quartey sniffed at that. "He's just surviving," he said. "That's all he did all night."