ESPN Boxing

In the spring of 1993, George Foreman, on an old-fashioned whistle-stop tour to promote his upcoming fight with Tommy Morrison, elbowed Mark Taffet, the head of pay-per-view at HBO. Foreman's classic bout with Evander Holyfield two years earlier had launched the boxing pay-per-view industry; "The Fight Of The Ages" had generated a previously unimaginable $53 million in revenues. And the 44-year-old heavyweight was amazed at how big the business of boxing had become since his first heyday two decades earlier.

"You know who's going to be the beneficiary of all this?" Foreman asked Taffet. The big fella pointed to a 20-year-old riding the train with them, a super featherweight on the Foreman-Morrison undercard who was still a year away from his first title shot.

Foreman was right. That kid was Oscar De La Hoya.

Over the past dozen years, as the heavyweight division has gone into steep decline, De La Hoya has established himself as boxing's biggest star. He's had a long series of memorable fights, enduring appeal to both English- and Spanish-speaking audiences, and good looks amazingly unblemished by the brutality of his business. And today, he's on the cusp of becoming the biggest attraction in pay-per-view history. De La Hoya's May 5 fight against Floyd Mayweather should easily boost his career pay-per-view revenues past half a billion dollars, and beyond the totals posted by Holyfield and Mike Tyson.

But De La Hoya is after something bigger on Cinco de Mayo than the WBC junior middleweight title, and bigger than the latest addition to his career earnings total, already at $150 million. He wants to take over boxing from the inside and lead it out of its self-imposed exile. Another big night at the box office would give Golden Boy Promotions, the company founded by De La Hoya in 2001 that is co-promoting the Mayweather fight with HBO, added punch. The more eyeballs and corporate sponsors De La Hoya-Mayweather lures, the better De La Hoya can sell to the world the idea that he's the man to bring boxing back to the masses.

Old-school promoters scoff at De La Hoya's ambitions.

"Just like I can't go in the ring and jab and throw left hooks and right crosses, they can't promote," Bob Arum, who heads Top Rank Promotions, snarled about Golden Boy last year.

It's true that the tangle of promoters and matchmakers who have controlled boxing for decades have kept the industry closed to outsiders, and to fighters looking for second careers. Even as smart a boxer as Ray Leonard fared about as poorly at promoting fights as Dorothy Hamill did at promoting the Ice Capades. He just didn't have enough allies or money to sustain his bid, though recently he has found some success as a co-host of the reality show "The Contender."

De La Hoya, though, has always been able to sell himself as something special. The Golden Boy first burst into prominence by winning Olympic gold as a teenager at Barcelona in 1992. He had promised his dying mother he would win at the Olympics; and when he did, he dedicated his medal to her. De La Hoya also waved both an American and a Mexican flag -- saluting, he later said, his home and his heritage. For a few years afterward, De La Hoya would pull a laminated $1 food stamp out of his wallet and show it to interviewers -- a reminder, he'd say, of growing up poor.

There's a word for people who instinctively deploy symbolic gestures and believe their own popularity to be a vessel for the hopes of others: politician. De La Hoya is a natural.

To understand just how De La Hoya's conception of himself differs from the typical athlete, check out HBO's ads for the big May 5 fight. In one of them, Mayweather smirks into the camera as he munches on a snack and apologizes to his mother for talking smack about his opponent.

"Mom, I'm sorry I used bad language; I feel bad," he says. "But I'm going to f--- him up.

"Want a chip?"

That's the sound of a cocky, hardworking fighter, willing to play the heavy, looking to confirm his standing as the best pound-for-pound boxer in the business.

In contrast, the commercial featuring De La Hoya finds him narrating street scenes from East Los Angeles, where he grew up: "Life was a struggle . . . For myself, for my family, for those who need someone to believe in, like I did, I can give back. I'm living the American dream. Estoy viviendo el sueño Americano."

That's the sound of an instinctive campaigner who happens to have won world boxing titles in a record six different weight classes and earned $150 million along the way, looking to embark on his most ambitious run yet.

The boxing world has had to take De La Hoya seriously since he emancipated himself from Arum in 2000 and hired his own accountant and lawyer. For one thing, he named Richard Schaefer, a former managing director at the Swiss Bank UBS, to be CEO of Golden Boy Promotions, and Schaefer has connected De La Hoya to serious corporate coin. Bally's, Cazadores, Starwood, Southwest Airlines and Tecate are among the companies Schaefer has helped line up as sponsors of De La Hoya-Mayweather. For another, De La Hoya has been convincing other prominent fighters to join forces. Bernard Hopkins, Shane Mosley and Marco Antonio Barrera (an eight-time world champion in four weight classes) all have accepted equity stakes in Golden Boy, for which they have become vice presidents. Mosley, who beat De La Hoya twice inside the ring, is even sparring with him in preparation for the Mayweather fight.

There's also this fact: Arum and Don King, who have dominated top-level boxing contracts for decades, will each turn 76 this year. They can't go on forever.

Most important, De La Hoya and his allies have a simple but powerful idea: Fighters should know what promoters make.

"It's OK with us if you hire an accountant or a lawyer or an agent," De La Hoya says. "We break down all the various revenue sources, and you will see every single cent there is to be made."

To understand why that concept could shake boxing's business model to its roots, you need to know that your worst suspicions about the sport are true: It's a crazy quilt of corrupt sanctioning bodies, haphazard contract enforcement and outright negligence. For decades, shady promoters and managers have thrown cash around to secure title bouts, fix fights, land contracts and evade state licensing and medical laws, then turned around and carved whatever chunks they wanted out of boxers' earnings.

Boxers can make anywhere from a few thousand to tens of millions of dollars for a fight, depending on the level of the bout. But whatever their purses, fighters can be sure they are earning what they deserve only if they have a truthful accounting of the cuts that promoters, managers and trainers are taking. Many boxers never expect real numbers, and others never bother to get interested in the math. By telling fighters that Golden Boy will be up-front about its fights' revenues and expenses, De La Hoya is promising them a level of honesty most have never experienced before -- and ultimately, more money.

"Other promoters will say, 'Here's your guarantee,' and maybe you'll be happy without ever understanding the upside," he says.

Schaefer believes De La Hoya himself left $7 million to $10 million on the table when he fought Felix Trinidad in 1999 by not sharing more fully in that bout's pay-per-view and international revenues.

Just as significant, De La Hoya and Schaefer are telling broadcast partners such as HBO and Univision that cleaning up boxing is a winning business plan. Essentially, they're arguing that as Golden Boy grows, squeezing rival promoters out of their unethical gains will shake loose so many dollars that everybody will win.

"Of all the businesses I've seen, boxing has the most opportunity for profit, because promoters are still running it the same way they were 40 or even 100 years ago," says Schaefer. "Boxing is a mismanaged asset, but we can bring it back."

The Golden Boy execs even believe that reforming their sport will draw sponsors that can take their fights beyond pay-per-view and cable audiences.

"We don't have corporate America knocking on our door because of tainted relationships in our business," says De La Hoya. "But when the Don Kings and Bob Arums are no longer promoting, that's our opportunity to go to the networks and say, 'We're a respectable company.' We want to bring boxing back to national television."

You can make the case that De La Hoya's desire to please the masses has served him better outside the ring than inside. He has yearned for acclaim from both hard-core and casual fans in both the English-speaking and Spanish-speaking worlds. But his "Golden Boy" nickname cuts two ways: For years, some boxing aficionados have carped that De La Hoya is pretty, overly glib, too West Coast, not macho enough. Sometimes, he has let that criticism get to him. De La Hoya has six feet of reach, good speed and one of the best left hooks in the business; but when he fought Mexican hero Julio Cesar Chavez in 1996 and 1998, he let the bouts turn into bloody messes. During the rematch in particular, De La Hoya took gratuitous punishment before he dispatched Chavez, as though he had to offer Latino and Latin American fans a dose of Hagler-Hearns to satisfy them.

In 1999, De La Hoya fought Puerto Rican hero Trinidad with smarts and finesse, only to be punished for it. He crushed Trinidad for eight rounds, and then, convinced he had the bout in hand, danced the rest of the way. The judges handed Trinidad a gift decision. So the following year, De La Hoya again chose to punch a puncher, allowing Mosley to turn the final rounds of their first fight into a slugfest. But again, he lost a decision. Veteran De La Hoya watchers knew what had happened: The Trinidad fight was in his head. And De La Hoya himself said, "I fought as if I was out to prove something to the fans and not to myself."

Meanwhile, Golden Boy Enterprises, the collection of business ventures De La Hoya started in 1999, has acquired a stake in ImpreMedia, the leading publisher of Spanish-language newspapers in the U.S., as well as a 13-story office building in downtown Los Angeles. In 2005, De La Hoya and James Long, an L.A. real estate developer, jointly invested $100 million to form Golden Boy Partners, which is investing in housing as well as retail projects in southern California Latino neighborhoods. This is where De La Hoya's fame, good looks and easy manner turn out to be unambiguous assets: in striking business deals and meeting with local officials and zoning boards.

Of course, boxing cynics -- and there are plenty of them -- roll their eyes when De La Hoya says he wants to "clean up" boxing or describes Golden Boy as being "a company for the fans, for the people." They point out that the Golden Boy hasn't been above indulging in old-school tactics. Last September, De La Hoya handed super featherweight Manny Pacquiao a suitcase filled with $250,000 at a Beverly Hills steakhouse to get him to sign a contract, as first reported by the Los Angeles Times. (Arum's Top Rank later paid $1 million to Pacquiao, who apparently will sign anything put in front of him, and two promoters have been battling in court over the fighter ever since.)

But De La Hoya's tactics aren't fundamentally altruistic; they're capitalistic. He's telling fighters they can make more money by signing with him. The results have been pretty impressive so far. Golden Boy Promotions has amassed a stable of 47 boxers. Last year, De La Hoya's company generated about $80 million in revenue and had a hand in promoting 60 percent of all pay-per-view fights. He is gathering true believers.

"Like Oscar says, we need to get all these boxers to make all the money they can while they can, and, when it's over, give them an outlet to do something else," said former junior middleweight champion Winky Wright when he allied his own promotion company with Golden Boy last year.

Golden Boy and HBO certainly are pulling out all the stops for De La Hoya-Mayweather. It's not just that they conducted an 11-city media tour earlier this year, or that they're plastering media outlets from cable TV to billboards with ads, or that they have secured distribution of the fight to a record 176 countries. Golden Boy merchandise has been in Las Vegas stores since April 6. HBO developed an original series about the fight, and is airing it after "The Sopranos" and "Entourage" on Sunday nights. And while the fight's corporate sponsors may not be super heavyweights like Ford or Citigroup, they are unusually extensive and mainstream for boxing.

All of these efforts are designed to pay off on fight night. De La Hoya-Mayweather, which will take place at the MGM Grand, has already set a boxing record for gate receipts, with $19 million in ticket sales. It will probably break the record for pay-per-view buys of a non-heavyweight fight (1.4 million, for De La Hoya's 1999 bout with Felix Trinidad). It may even approach the record for all fights (1.99 million, for Holyfield-Tyson II in 1997).

The Golden Boy, however, also wants and needs to prove he can promote the planet's biggest fights after May 5. De La Hoya has charm, powerful friends at HBO and among other fighters and as much crossover appeal as any Spanish-speaking athlete on the planet. After he faces Mayweather, he'll also have another $30 million or so in the bank that he can use as venture capital if he likes.

What he doesn't have is much more of a career in the ring. So it's not clear yet whether De La Hoya's efforts to leverage his popularity are just taking off or just about to peak. We won't know that until he works full-time for a while as a promoter.

But make no mistake about his ambition.

"Ultimately, I am fighting not just to secure my legacy and because I enjoy a challenge," De La Hoya says. "It so happens that I can use this as a vehicle to get the word out that Golden Boy is the company to make boxing respectable again. It works hand in hand."

Make that hand in glove.

Peter Keating is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine.