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  American Son

  My Story

  Oscar De La Hoya

  with Steve Springer

  The credit belongs to the man…who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

  PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Preface

  I

  A Promise Made

  II

  A Promise Kept

  III

  The Cleanest Window in Mexico

  IV

  My Last Fight, at Age Four

  V

  Comeback at Six

  VI

  Food Stamps and Muggers: Life in the Hood

  VII

  My Roots

  VIII

  Tacos at Dawn

  IX

  Noise Monitor for Budweiser

  X

  Shysters on My Doorstep

  XI

  Neon Warrior

  XII

  Starving for Recognition

  XIII

  The Men in My Corner

  XIV

  The Biggest Bra I Ever Saw

  XV

  Chávez: The Myth and the Man

  XVI

  Straddling the Border

  Photographic Insert

  XVII

  Anguish to Rage

  XVIII

  Searching for Love

  XIX

  Tito

  XX

  Shooting for the Moon

  XXI

  Enter Richard Schaefer

  XXII

  Losing the Gold

  XXIII

  Burned

  XXIV

  Golden Boy Takes on the Big Boys

  XXV

  The Love of My Life

  XXVI

  My Guardian Angel

  XXVII

  Cashing in My Chips: A Gambler Reforms

  XXVIII

  More Men in My Corner

  XXIX

  Baring My Soul

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PREFACE

  From the window of my uncle’s car, I saw my dream home.

  I was only thirteen, just a teenager from East L.A., whose family, like so many others in the neighborhood, struggled to eke out a living. I was embarrassed that we often had to survive on food stamps and ashamed to admit the clothes on my back left my closet pretty much empty.

  No, the road to my success wasn’t always paved with gold.

  But the one thing no one could deny me was my dreams. When I spotted that huge home in Pasadena, I told myself I would live there someday. Just a kid with a wild idea.

  Well, through my corporation, I recently bought that very house for an investment.

  So many of my dreams have come true, from winning an Olympic gold medal to fulfill a promise I made to my mother before she died, to winning titles in six weight classes, to building a business empire, to having the perfect family.

  I couldn’t have done it without the efforts of so many. There were those who planted my family roots in Mexico and those who transplanted those roots in this country. There was my mother, who inspired me, and my father, who first put the gloves on me, and a family that has always supported me. There have been promoters, matchmakers, publicists, trainers, cut men, sparring partners who have prepared me, and opponents who have challenged me. There is Richard Schaefer, who has been the key to putting the gold in our ever-growing Golden Boy enterprises. There have been valued investors and business partners who have shared in our financial pursuits. There is Raul Jaimes and Eric Gomez, boyhood friends who are still with me in my adult endeavors. There are countless employees who toil vigorously in relative obscurity in my various businesses.

  And finally, there is, above all else, Millie, the love of my life, and my precious children.

  I have been truly blessed.

  I only wish I could bestow such blessings on others as well. That is why I am writing this book. I hope, through my story, that you, the readers, will be inspired to make your own dreams come true, whatever they might be.

  While I chose boxing, you might select other sports or completely different avenues, like medicine, law, politics, or business. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is the three Ds: dedication, discipline, and desire in pursuit of your goals.

  Don’t ever give up.

  I’ve been knocked down on occasion, and not just in the ring, as you’ll discover when you read this book, but I’ve always found a way to get up and fight back. You make mistakes, you learn, and you grow from that. That’s what life is all about.

  Finally, for those who do choose to pursue their dreams in the ring, there is a special message in this book.

  All too many fighters wind up broke, sometimes losing their homes, their health, and their dignity. Unfortunately, they often have neither the education nor the proper guidance to avoid the vultures hovering out there, waiting to swoop in.

  It doesn’t have to be that way. I am determined, through Golden Boy Promotions, to change that. It can be done. The future of boxing is in our hands. We, the fighters, can take control.

  I want to see a day when managers and promoters stop taking advantage of boxers. I want to see a day when boxers have proper health care and a retirement plan. I want to see a day when boxing can compete with the major sports—baseball, football, basketball, hockey—in terms of providing benefits for its participants. We are working toward these goals through Golden Boy Promotions, but we need the fighters to work with us.

  Maybe, with this book, I can encourage boxers to say, “I’m going to fight for myself just like Oscar did.”

  Life itself is a fight, so the lessons learned in the ring can be applied to one’s very existence. Boxing made me a hungrier, more ambitious person. It taught me everything I know.

  Grateful for what the sport has given me, I want to give something back. Hopefully, in these pages, I will. I want to send a message that will empower the fighter, along with people from all walks of life—the gardener, the dishwasher, and even the stockbroker on Wall Street.

  If I can do it, you can do it.

  —Oscar De La Hoya

  I

  A PROMISE MADE

  What mother wants her son to be a fighter?

  But considering that my grandfather Vicente was a fighter, my father, Joel, was a fighter, and my older brother, Joel Jr., was briefly a fighter, we had no choice but to be fighters. When I say “we,” I’m talking about my mother and me.

  We were a team.

  She learned to love the sport. She’d go to my fights and overcome her fear that I was going to get hurt.

  When I was in the sixth grade at Ford Boulevard Elementary School, my class was asked to write an essay on what we wanted to be when we grew up. We then had to get up and read our assignment aloud. Kids said they wanted to be doctors, policemen, firemen.

  I got up and said I wanted to be an Olympic gold medalist in boxing. The class burst into laughter. They thought I was kidding. One kid said, “Yeah, right, you’re from East L.A. How are you going to be a gold medalist?”

  The teacher thought I wasn’t taking the assignment seriously, so she punished me by keeping me after class.

  I started crying, telling her, “I’m not kidding. That’s what I want to be.”

  When I was twelve, I had this poster from the Olympic Games—I don’t even remember where I got it—and I signed it Oscar De La Hoya, ’92 Olympic Gold.

  I still have tha
t poster today.

  Around my family, that became the goal: Oscar goes to the Olympics.

  Whatever my goal, it became my mother’s goal as well.

  When I would go running in the morning, she would get up with me to make me a little breakfast before I left. That meant having something on the table before I went racing out the door at 4:30 A.M.

  When my amateur career started to take off, I began to get noticed in the neighborhood. I remember being so excited because my name started to appear in our small local paper. No picture. No real story. Just an occasional line saying I had qualified for a tournament or won a trophy or knocked some guy out. To me, however, it was like being on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

  I told my mother about it and she was thrilled for me, but it was kind of sad because she didn’t read English and those references to me were only in English-language papers.

  She didn’t need to speak English to be my number one cheerleader. Her Spanish served her just as well. She was my inspiration even before I saw her fight a battle that was much tougher than anything I ever faced in the ring.

  I didn’t find out she had breast cancer for a while after she was diagnosed.

  I remember I had come home from school—I was seventeen at the time—and my mother came up to me in our living room, crying, and gave me a big hug. She was trying to hold it in and be strong.

  I said to her, “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”

  Instead of answering, she asked me if I could apply some cream, from a jar she had in her hand, to her back. I scooped up a handful of the cream and reached down under her shirt to spread it across her back.

  It was then that I felt something rough, like a scab. Her whole back was like that.

  I said, “What’s this?”

  She hugged me again and now I’m crying.

  She said three words I will never forget: “I have cancer.”

  I have never been hit harder in my life.

  I started hugging her through my tears and telling her it was going to be okay. All of the emotion that had been missing in our household burst free. I told her we were going to get through this. I believed it.

  Obviously, I wasn’t educated about the disease and she had been very effective in keeping things from us. She wore wigs or hats to hide the fact that her hair had fallen out.

  One time, when I finally noticed she had no hair, she said she had shaved it so it would grow back thicker.

  My mother had been a heavy smoker. She would send me to buy cigarettes when my father wasn’t around. Every two or three days, she’d tell me she needed more. I remember she smoked Kent cigarettes and they cost $1.05 a pack.

  As time went on, my mother was getting worse and worse. And the doctors weren’t being very positive about her condition.

  At that point I decided to quit boxing, hang it up. I felt like I couldn’t do it anymore even though the Olympics were less than two years away.

  My mother spent her final days in the hospital, where I would visit her every day.

  There was one time she didn’t even recognize me. I walked into her hospital room, filled with relatives and friends, and she said, “Who is this person? What are you doing here?”

  I told her, “It’s me. It’s your son.”

  I turned, walked down the hallway, and had a good cry. I knew it was the medication and her worsening condition that were causing the mental lapses, but it still hurt deeply. Especially because she knew everybody else in the room.

  When next I saw her, that sparkle of recognition was back in her eyes. We held each other and cried together.

  One day we were together five, six hours, even enjoying a few rare laughs. It was then I noticed that on the finger where she normally had her wedding ring, she was wearing a ring with a little diamond in it, a championship ring I had won in the bantamweight division at the 1989 National Golden Gloves tournament.

  It was the first championship I had won on a national level, but to my mother, it was like a world championship. Her son had achieved success in a world she couldn’t imagine. How much additional joy would she have gotten out of putting my gold medal around her neck, or seeing me win professional championships in six weight classes? At least she had the thrill of wearing that ring.

  Although seeing it sparkle on her finger made me feel good, I told her I wasn’t boxing anymore. Not even training.

  “What for?” I said. “I want to be here with you.”

  She started lecturing me, telling me that I had to do it, that the Olympics had been our dream, hers and mine. She said, “I want you to go even though I’m not going to be there.”

  When she said that, oh my God, it was like somebody had stabbed me in the heart.

  “You have to be strong,” she said. “You are going to go to the Olympics and win that gold medal.”

  The very next day, following my normal routine, I was coming back with lunch for her, taking the elevator to her room. As I looked around, first in the lobby and then in the elevator, I realized the people—all family, lots of aunts and uncles—were all crying.

  No one had to tell me what had happened. No one wanted to tell me.

  But I knew. I felt it.

  I went running to her room and found she had indeed passed.

  My mother, Cecilia Gonzalez De La Hoya, was dead at thirty-nine.

  It was October 28, 1990, the most devastating day of my life.

  It was the only time I ever saw my father shed tears. And it was only one tear. One tear.

  Obviously, he loved her, adored her. They had been together for twenty-five years. But he’s a strong man, one who doesn’t show much emotion. His generation had to be tough.

  When I saw that tear, I thought, My God, he’s really hurting inside.

  I didn’t think about boxing for a couple of weeks after that. Then one day, I was coming home from school and my mother’s words came into my head. I could hear her talking about the Olympic dream.

  And I said to myself, You know what? I’m going to do it for her.

  Once again, she had inspired me, even in death.

  II

  A PROMISE KEPT

  As the adrenaline coursed through my body, I could feel the suffocating force of the grief that had enveloped me dissipate. I felt free and strong for the first time in months, no longer shackled by the exhausting effects of anguish and inactivity.

  Looking back, I compare it to that scene in one of the Rocky movies where, after his wife, Adrian, comes out of a coma and implores her husband to win an upcoming fight, Rocky’s trainer, Mickey, yells, “What are we waiting for?”

  I had thought that was corny at the time, but now I was living it. What was I waiting for?

  I jumped up and ran out of the door of my house, heading for the gym five miles away. I ran the whole way, becoming more anxious, with each thrust of my legs, to put on the gloves and spar with somebody, anybody.

  When I got there, I got into the ring with Rudy Zavala, who later became a good pro fighter. But that day, I gave him a beating. Something came over me. I was letting out all my anger, my frustration. I kept hitting him even after the bell rang. Even after the trainers yelled at me to stop. I didn’t want to stop. I just kept on going even as I started crying. Finally, I pulled back, sobbing.

  After that, I got back to work, back to serious training.

  But I always found time to go to the cemetery. I would be there every other day by myself, sometimes for hours. I would lie down beside my mother’s grave and talk to her.

  One day, I felt like she actually responded with her blessing. It was like she was saying, Go win that gold. You are going to do it.

  It certainly seemed as if I had a chance, considering the success I had enjoyed as I moved up the amateur ranks.

  Entering a Golden Gloves tournament in Lynwood, California, I found myself in my first competition against the big boys. I was placed in a sixteen-and-older division, meaning that, as a sixteen-year-old, I could theoretically face
someone twenty-five or thirty.

  That could have been an intimidating situation, but the experience I had gained by sparring against pros had armed me with seasoning well beyond my years.

  As a result, I made a big splash. I knocked out four of the five guys I faced. And the only reason I didn’t knock the other guy out was that he was on his bike, backpedaling all over the ring to stay out of my reach.

  By then, I was competing at the national level, so I also made several trips to the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs.

  In the meantime, my trainers kept coming and going. After leaving the downtown gym, I briefly trained under Al Stankie, a former cop who, in 1984, trained another gold-medal winner from my area, Paul Gonzales.

  Al was a good trainer who would make you work like there was no tomorrow. But, plagued with a drinking problem, he was unpredictable, crazy.

  One afternoon during my high school days, I was sitting in our living room with my mother and brother watching television. All of a sudden we heard the screech of brakes, footsteps running hurriedly up to our screen door, a furious rattling, and in walked Stankie. Without so much as a word to any of us, he stormed into our kitchen, pulled open the refrigerator, grabbed an egg, cracked it on the sink, poured the yolk into a glass, added orange juice, gulped it down, slammed the glass down on the sink, and stormed right out the door.