The Olympic gold medal was the keeping of a promise, one that Oscar De La Hoya made to his mother before she died following a short battle with stage-four breast cancer. Or at least, that was the story. De La Hoya now admits that, through the warping of mass media and his own 18-year-old acquiescence, The Promise grew from something else that he told himself after Cecilia De La Hoya’s death—I’ll do it for her—to a founding myth of his public image.
He was what the business of boxing calls a crossover star, a broader celebrity who could draw Pay-per-view dollars from people who were not tuning in for a trademark barrage of vicious hooks. He was clean, marketable, “the anti-Tyson,” a prodigious puncher with a sharp jawline and soft eyes born to Mexican immigrant parents in East LA who proclaimed himself proud of his heritage and proud to be an American. He had women showing up for a boxing match holding signs above their heads like it was a rock concert. He would go on to take 11 world titles in six different weight classes and become one of prizefighting’s most formidable earners of all time. And he skirted disaster—and sometimes hit it—all along the way.
In a new two-part documentary from HBO, The Golden Boy (now streaming on Max), De La Hoya lays out in frank detail how that name—the ring-name that made his fortune—was a lie, a trick, a poof of smoke. It successfully obscured, for a time, a young man both tortured and made superhuman by rage and pain, much of it rooted in childhood abuse at the hand of his mother. “My first thoughts of my childhood are just being afraid,” he says in the film. At one point, after years of it, he stopped offering any reaction at all to a beating that his mother was giving him, and she started to weep while striking him. It gave him an intense and symbiotic relationship with pain when he got in the ring. He accepted getting punched in the face readily, as something that would fuel the retribution he would soon exact. And retribution he dealt, punishing his opponents with a raging ferocity he could channel at will. He started his pro career 31-0 with 25 knockouts.
All the while, he was getting wasted between fights and sleeping around prolifically. He’d started drinking at nine years old. There were big hazy chunks of his life between fight night and the next training camp where he got himself in trouble, including when certain photos of him were leaked. In an interview, which has been edited here for length and clarity, De La Hoya gives his thoughts on all that—along with the Communist trainer who brought his game to another level, the rise of Jake Paul and the celebrity boxers, and what credit he might deserve for the success of later superstars Floyd “Money” Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao.
ESQUIRE: In your classroom growing up, you said you wanted to be the world boxing champion and they all laughed, including the teacher. But when you looked through the window after you left, you saw the teacher crying. Do you think she worried that you had such a big dream and it wasn't possible for a kid from East LA?
OSCAR DE LA HOYA: When we were growing up, there was no relationship with teachers. The teachers were going through their own struggles. They were making their own living and working hard. And so I'm sure they were frustrated. A lot of times I’ve thought to myself, man, this teacher has to be hurting. She has to be in pain as well. Maybe she was just trying to be mean. It's all confusing. There's two things that cross my mind. Either she thought, Look, this dream is not attainable. This is not possible. Come on, you're a kid from East LA. Or she was just trying to be mean.
You say in the doc, “My first thoughts of my childhood are just being afraid.” Was it primarily that your parents would hit you? Was there more to it than that?
It was the fear of living in East LA. Me and my brother would sleep in a garage, and the noises we would hear in the mornings, late at night, it was scary for anybody. Being in the gym at five, six years old was terrifying. [Ed note: De La Hoya comes from a family of boxers, and he started training early.] What kid wants to get punched in the face at six years old? And then obviously, the physical abuse. What kid wants to go home to that every day? So basically, my whole life was all based upon fear. Fear of everything.
You’re frank that you consider it abuse. When I spoke to Shaq—and he faced corporal punishment of a similar kind from his father—he didn't seem to have much problem with it, and he thought it had helped him in his life. Is that a perspective that you understand, or for you, was it just a damaging experience?
To me, it was a damaging experience. Look, I didn’t go to college. I didn't have a mother or father who guided me, who told me what to do, who encouraged me. It was all the fight game. It was all do or die. It was all suppressing your emotions. It was all about not speaking up. So all that builds up.
I can understand Shaquille O’Neal saying, “Well, it taught me to be a man. It taught me to be organized or walk on a straight line.” I can understand that, because obviously we had different upbringings. I'm sure Shaq was the basketball prodigy, and he’s going through high school being protected and taken care of by his father or his mother. It was just all different for me. It was not knowing what exactly was going to happen to me every single day.
It’s clear you absolutely loved your mother, but also you had all this pain attached to the relationship, and you created the promise story about that relationship. Have you reflected on why you chose that after everything that had happened?
I was 18 years old when I won the gold. When she passed, I did say, You know what? I'm going to do it for you. But when I got back from the Olympic games and the media, everybody kept on saying, “So, Oscar, how does it feel doing it for your mother? We heard that she wanted this gold medal and that you promised her that you would win the gold medal for her.” Being a kid, it's like, I'm not going to disagree. I'm not experienced with media.
So the story just broke out like wildfire. You can imagine, every single time I talk to the media, they're asking me, “So you're doing this for your mother?” And I'm thinking to myself, Wait a minute, this is getting out of control. That's when all the lies are living inside of you. That's when everything just becomes distorted. That's where it began, basically.
Watch the Trailer For The Golden Boy
You talk about the pain and the rage that you got from the beatings, and how it fueled you as a boxer, and how boxing was an outlet to unleash it. Your brother says, "There was this raging animal inside of him." Would you have been the same fighter if you hadn't grown up in that environment?
If I didn't live those moments, those experiences of abuse, of hating somebody so much, who knows if I would have had the courage, I guess, to step inside the ring and become who I became. I needed that anger. I needed that fuel to make me somebody that I wasn't. Because everybody who has interacted with me, they always say, "Man, how are you a fighter?"
Who knows what I would have done with my life? I did want to go to college and become an architect. That was my real passion. But life took its course, and made me this raging, angry fighter who was in control. That's the part where I don't really understand. I had all this anger and rage, but I knew how to control it. I knew when to turn it on and off.
The pictures of you that leaked, they seemed like the biggest threat to your career at the time. But in the film, you're like, "It shouldn't have been such a big deal." It seemed to me that you were in what you thought was a private place where you could express yourself, and it was supposed to be sealed off from the world.
I would escape from people, from loved ones, from my wife when I was married, and go to that person [Milana Dravnel, whom he met at a strip club and regularly traveled to visit over years]. Ironically enough, we never fooled around where we slept together. We never did anything like that. It was just more like, I want to feel safe with somebody. Somebody that will listen to me. And we would have these conversations that were very therapeutic. That incident with the pictures and the whole women's clothes and stuff, honestly, I don't remember, because I most likely was drugged up. But I do remember talking to that girl about my mother all the time, and I would start crying, and she would hug me and I’d have a shoulder to cry on. So, yeah, in a way, I had to escape and go to therapy.
That was therapy at the time.
Sure, because I can't tell my friends. I can't talk to anybody, especially back then. And in our culture, that's a no-no.
When you were accused of sexual assault, you denied it on the basis that it was out of character—it wasn't you. Do you remember those encounters specifically, or do you just feel it generally couldn't have happened as those women said it did?
The accusations, it’s all BS. I could never even hurt a little ant. It’s just not in my character, in my nature. Unfortunately, I've put myself in situations where people have said, Wait a minute, we can maybe extort or take advantage of this guy. He's a mess. So it's my wrongdoing for putting myself in that situation, but look, I would never even hurt a fly.
At one point early on, you talk about the feeling that your community in East LA had decided you were the chosen one. But then there’s the fight against Julio César Chávez, where he was the “authentic” Mexican and you were something else. How do you reconcile those two things?
Yeah, it's another dagger in the heart. It's another way of telling me that you don't belong, that you're not worthy, that you're not one of us. Being so young, I just never understood it. I had to figure it out myself. I stuck to my message: I'm actually very proud of my roots, and I'm proud I was born here in the USA. It was very painful, because every single day I would go out to the streets or whatever, it's like I was being hated on.
All those people that were against me, well, guess what? Now they have kids that were born here in the U.S. that are in my situation—being Mexican American and having literally no identity, because you're not from here, and you're not from there, so who are you? That's what I was living with all my life.
It was brutal. I would get eggs thrown at me if I was grand marshal of a parade. It was nuts. [There were] a lot of passionate fans out there that really didn't understand what I was standing for.
You said “the professor,” Jesus Rivero, was the best thing to happen in your career when he came in as a coach. Then a few years later, he was pushed out of your team. What happened there?
Before I met him, even though I was so young, my career was starting to almost spiral, with drinking in between fights, not being as focused as I was pre-Olympics. When the professor came in, all he did was be an ear to me. All he did was listen. All he did was explain to me philosophies about life, and he would start talking to me about subjects that nobody ever took the time to explain to me. It seemed like he cared for me, which obviously I attached myself to. And you can imagine, when the powers that be fired him, I was devastated. I was like, what the hell just happened? I didn't even say bye to him.
So your management team were the ones that fired him?
Right.
He’s a full-on Communist, and you went on to be a serious prizefighter and a big-time promoter as well. What might he have thought as you were becoming somebody who's dealing in hundreds of millions of dollars promoting fights?
In a way, we helped each other. Here you have this man who was an atheist, who was a Communist, who was so hard and real and raw. You could never give this man advice, because it was his way or the highway. But I would tell him sensitive stories about my life, and he would listen, and I felt like I was teaching him something as well. I went to visit him just recently in Tulum, and man, he started crying. As if I was, like, coddling a little baby, because he's a tiny man. And he just hung on to me, and we just embraced.
You fought Floyd Mayweather and then you promoted 14 of his fights after that. Along the way, he went from “Pretty Boy Floyd” to “Money Mayweather.” What role do you think you played in the trajectory of his career?
Floyd got it. He understood the business. He understood what it took. He embraced being the villain. You need the good guy, the star, and then the villain, right? He played that part perfectly.
I remember him fighting on my undercards on HBO for a couple of million bucks. And then when we fought, that's when he turned into “Money Mayweather.” I understood that his career would catapult to new heights, because millions of people were watching. Once you get that fan, then you're in the industry forever. I have to take a little credit for his success inside the ring. I don't think Floyd Mayweather would be “Money Mayweather” if he didn't fight me. And Pacquiao as well. When he beat me up in my last fight, he became Manny Pacquiao, the greatest thing in boxing.
Do you feel like you created this modern super-fighter model? As this big media presence, being able to drive a lot of Pay-per-view subscriptions? Or was that something that already was there before you?
Well, I think it started with George Foreman when he fought Evander Holyfield. I remember that being the very first Pay-per-view fight. And it was successful. But it was only targeted towards fight fans. Our audience, it's global, but it's not to the masses. When I won the gold and my story resonated with a lot of people all over the world, my publicist at Top Rank, Dena Duboef, decided, let me go a different route and get him in Harper’s Bazaar, put him on Playgirl. To go after the female fan was outside the box. It was brilliant on their part.
You find a lot of people in the boxing business now who aren’t really boxers. They’re celebrities, the Jake Pauls of the world, who’ve taken up boxing after becoming prominent elsewhere. How do you feel about that development for the sport?
I’m kind of torn, because boxing is a very dangerous sport, but if you're going to take it seriously, like Jake Paul has—I respect him for taking it seriously. He's in the gym. He has his training camp in Puerto Rico. He spars. He trains. You see him work out every single day. He knows what he wants.
What I don’t respect—what I worry about—is these YouTubers who want to do it one time, or they want to go out there and just fool around. This is not a game. You don’t play boxing. That's where I have my issues with it. But as far as Jake Paul and YouTubers who want to take it serious, I respect it.
Nate Robinson is an example. He fought Jake Paul and got knocked out in a really dangerous situation.
We know how to take punches when we're trained professionals. When you're not, one bad punch can change everything.
You’re honest in the documentary that your relationship with your kids and your family is still fraught, and you say, “Now most of my relationships are transactional.” Is that the way you want it at this stage of your life?
In a way I prefer it that way, because I can now just focus on myself. And I can finally, for the first time in my life, rely on myself. Because I'm present. I'm here. I've done all the work to restructure my foundation. My foundation was broken all along. One little shake and the house comes crumbling down. Now my foundation is solid. So I'm just starting to build my little mansion.
You won 11 world titles in six weight classes, but at the end of it all, you're still saying, “I could have been.” What more could you have been?
That's conditioning from my father. It was never enough for my father. You’ll hear him say, "Well, he could have won more world titles." Or, "If Chavez was the same age [not 10 years older], I don't think my son would have beat him." It's all conditioning. And that's the sad part of this story, all those years of neglect and abuse, whether it’s physical or emotional. It sticks with you. There's times where I have to fight to convince myself that I'm worthy.
Jack Holmes is a senior staff writer at Esquire, where he covers politics and sports. He also hosts Unapocalypse, a show about solutions to the climate crisis.
