It’s clear by his latest tweet (on X as the social media outlet is now known) that Oscar De La Hoya years for the more active days of boxing from years gone by. Like many of us, De La Hoya is disheartened by the way the top stars of the sport often fight just once a year. Guys like Terence Crawford, Tyson Fury, Oleksandr Usyk, and plenty of others have fought just once a year for a while now, while even the more active stars/champions fight just twice a year.
In response to this trend, former multi-weight champ De La Hoya has issued the following challenge via a message on X:
“They will never ever make 90s fighters the same. I will personally give a championship fighter $5 million dollars to fight 5 world title fights in 1 year.”
Now, that’s quite a challenge, quite an offer. It does, however, seem to be far too unrealistic to expect any active world champion to engage in five world title fights over a one year period. The sport has simply changed too much for any fighter to be able to be so active even if he or she wanted to be so active.
But De La Hoya is not putting out a challenge that he himself was never up to meeting. When we look back at 1997, we see how the peak De La Hoya, who was fighting at 140 and then 147 pounds during the year, indeed fought five times inside 12 months. De La Hoya defeated Miguel Angel Gonzalez in January of ’97, he then moved up to 147 to defeat Pernell Whitaker in April, before De La Hoya defeated David Kamau in June, Hector Camacho in September, and then Wilfredo Rivera in December of the year. And all five fights were world title bouts.
It really is quite incredible when we look back at how active De La Hoya, the number-one superstar of the sport at the time, really was. Has any world champion fought five times or more in a 12 month period since?
Will any current world champ take Oscar up on his offer of a cool $5 million to fight that many times in a year? Somehow, I doubt it. But you have to admire De La Hoya’s desire to try and get the sport back to what it once was. Recently, De La Hoya called for “all promoters” to come together and make the big fights. Now, De La Hoya is willing to pay a bundle in order to get a current world champion to do what he himself did back in 1997.
Say what you want about De La Hoya, but he really does both love and care about his sport.