By Brett Conway
About a year ago, many in the sports media were all a-twitter about Floyd Mayweather’s junior middleweight match against Oscar De La Hoya. But they didn’t praise. They gloated. Would it prove to be the last gasp of boxing? Would boxing finally show that it is a sport that is out of date, for criminals, lowlifes, and bums? Would this last event be a fitting denouement for a sport that boasted athletes that transcended the red-light district of sport – athletes like Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, and Sugar Ray Leonard?
As the sporting world watched and the sporting press, including “Sports Illustrated,” circled from above, waiting to pick over the corpse of boxing, something funny happened. The event showed boxing doesn’t need the super event to keep going. It just needs good match ups. The completion of the Vazquez-Marquez trilogy, the Marquez-Pacquiao rematch, Cotto-Mosley, Calzaghe-Hopkins, and, yes, even Jones-Trinidad – all these fights showed there is still a lot of interest in boxing and that it is far from dead. Boxing picked itself up, brushed itself off, and once again sprang forward, windmilling.
But even with sports fans able to look left and right, up and down, and see a series of interesting fights between fighters in different divisions, between “Ring” champions and alphabet titlists, and even between club fighters like Andrey Tsurkan and Jesse Feliciano on “Friday Night Fights,” there is still a man, a certain man, threatening to suck the attention back onto his pretty face. With wealth and fame, he's still the same – his best laid plans, all three of them, will monopolize the boxing media.
Step one is a tune up bout on free television; step two is a super event; and the final step is a farewell fight. The super event is what he wants – a rematch against Floyd Mayweather Jr. at welterweight instead of junior middleweight, the weight they fought at last May. A victory in this match is his Rosebud.
Who is this one? This favorite son? I'll bet you five, you're not alive if you don't know his name. Of course, it’s Oscar De La Hoya. But before his super event, he must get past the tune up match. On Saturday night in Los Angeles, airing live on HBO, De La Hoya must defeat Steve Forbes.
And this fight matters for those of us who recognized the Mayweather-De La Hoya II as being more about showbiz hype and filling up a couple of bank accounts than a match having real repercussions in the welterweight or super welterweight divisions. This plan to have a Mayweather-De La Hoya rematch leads us to one inevitable conclusion: it must be scuttled. And for that to happen, Steve Forbes must win on Saturday night.
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