Anatomy of a Fight, Part Two
In boxing, training shapes styles, and styles make fights. In preparation for their match on December 6, Oscar De La Hoya and Manny Pacquiao, combined, will have studied hundreds of hours of footage, run more than 350 miles, sparred more than 400 rounds, and done more than 100,000 sit-ups. The number of protein shakes consumed is simply too astronomic to compute. When two champions face off in the ring, each boxer exhibits the refinement of an encrypted system programmed to decode the other. In the first round, this is accomplished through hesitant, awkward jabs to open up the nuanced combinations of later rounds. There is nothing more graceful than the knockout punch thrown with precision. Elegance is the result of infinite hassles.
De La Hoya-Pacquiao has been christened “The Dream Match,” a reference to its physical improbability. De La Hoya is slimming down from the super welterweight category (154 lbs) and Pacquiao is bulking up from lightweight (135 lbs). They are set to fight each other at 147 lbs, a fighting weight De La Hoya has not gotten down to in more than seven years. Pacquiao has never boxed over 135 lbs. His legendary promoter, Bob Arum, 76, tells me that if De La Hoya weighs in heavy, he would like Golden Boy Promotions, De La Hoya’s company, to pay Pacquiao’s team $3,000,000 per pound in excess.
Weight is not a concern to De La Hoya’s camp. His diet is carefully constructed around frequent blood analysis done to determine the nutrients his body best absorbs. If you ask him what he misses when at home in Los Angeles, he’ll wax nostalgic: “this taco truck comes all the way from Tijuana every Saturday. I actually crave those carne asada tacos.” His strength and conditioning coach, Rob Garcia, forbids them. “His perfect fruits in the morning are pineapple, guava, strawberry, mango, and banana,” Garcia tells me. “He’ll have that with a little bit of ice. Dinner-wise, he has his choice between Chilean sea bass, lamb, or steak…. It is all organic and antibiotic free.” This contrasts with Pacquiao, who recently invited me to sit in on a game of Chinese poker in a two-bedroom apartment currently sleeping six to ten men of his Filipino entourage. (The number of inhabitants varies each time it is asked.) The winner of the game had the honor of buying everyone dinner from Kentucky Fried Chicken as karaoke blared in the background. In terms of nutrition, such a meal is not so different from the recommended boxer’s breakfast of 1818, as described in the first history of the sport, Pierce Egan’s Boxiana: “beef-steaks or mutton-chops under-done, with stale bread and old beer.” Team Pacquiao’s standard feast is less indulgent, if equally delectable, comprised of beef bone stews, rice, and chicken kabobs. Grilled vegetables are laid out for guests, but not the host. “I do not like them,” Pacquiao tells me.
Training lasts eight weeks. The average day for both fighters begins around 5:30 a.m. and winds down around 9 p.m. Work consists of long runs with fellow fighters (Pacquiao’s Jack Russell Terrier, Pacman, usually sets the pace for him), drills, sparring, stretching, rub downs, and copious napping. De La Hoya receives acupuncture and electro-stimulation. Pacquiao plays darts. Both men are Catholic, and Sundays are for rest. Pacquiao trains in Hollywood at his trainer Freddie Roach’s gym, Wild Card. Filipino fans fill the parking lot to see their hero enter and exit. The last time I was over there, a call came in for Roach from someone claiming to be “a punch expert who wants to teach Pacquiao how to punch harder.” I asked Roach how often he gets calls like this. He shakes his head, “All the time.” He tells me sports psychologists call frequently, too. “Manny doesn’t have a confidence problem. He likes to say his own name when it’s announced at a fight.” Roach has duct-taped a picture of De La Hoya’s face to the body padding he wears when Pacquiao is working the mitts with him in the ring. During this exercise, Pacquiao listens to Dr. Dre, a remix of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” and “The Champion”—a song about Pacquiao by apl.de.ap of The Black Eyed Peas. (De La Hoya lately has been listening to Ozzie Osbourne's "Crazy Train" and classic Mexican singers like Vicente Fernandez.) For years, he and Roach would listen to Shakira, in part because it was considered lucky. It is the same reason Pacquiao continued to stay at the $85-per-night Vagabond Inn next to Wild Card for years after winning his U.S. debut under Roach, in 2001.
De La Hoya trains in Big Bear, a mountainous resort town 100 miles east of Los Angeles where he has periodically trained since winning the Olympics, in 1992. For his past few fights, he has trained in Puerto Rico (where his wife is from and where he spends half the year), but this fight is about returning to his roots. That applies not only to geography, but also to his fighting style, and to his training season hobbies. “I’m going to paint several paintings,” he says. “I used to paint a lot. Probably last time I painted was six years ago.” The seclusion of Big Bear minimizes distractions, which should have no place in the ring. Back in 2000, De La Hoya was fighting at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. It was the only time he claims ever to have lost his focus during a fight. “It was like the Oscars…Everybody was there. I’m in the sixth round…just throwing it down like there’s no tomorrow. So I go back to my corner. I’m sitting down, breathing hard, sweating. My trainer’s trying to talk to me. So I’m curious and I look to my left just to see who’s out there, and there’s Jennifer Lopez and Salma Hayek. And I’m thinking, ‘fuck!’ I’m just distracted like there’s no tomorrow. The rest is history. I lose the fight.”
Many trainers discourage their fighters from having sex or consorting with women. In Shadow Box, George Plimpton quotes Hemingway as saying that “oldtime trainers would fit a ‘ring’ over the fighter’s privates at night, so that if he began to get an erection and was in danger of having a wet dream, the pain from the ring would wake him up and the trainer would rush in to throw a pail of cold water over him.” (Roach believes sex should stop 10 days before the fight, but as a boxer he used to stop six weeks prior—Pacquiao stops at five.)
The trainer is at once an athletic coach, paternal disciplinarian, cryptologist, therapist, and chess master. At 69, De La Hoya’s Mexican trainer, Ignacio “Nacho” Beristain, no longer holds the mitts for his fighters, preferring to impart knowledge from the corner. De La Hoya says of him, “I don’t need somebody to physically train me and prepare me to go 12 rounds. I need someone who’s going to work with my head. He’s the strategist. He’s the master.” With a moustache as thick as the frames of the sunglasses he wears indoors, Beristain resembles a German butcher with an exceptional tan. He seems to look you in the eye only when he wishes to emphasize how stupid he thinks you are. Unlike Roach, he is not from a boxing family. “My motivation to box came from the fact that I needed to defend my marbles in primary school,” he says. De La Hoya is the 16th world champion Beristain has trained. One of them, Juan Manuel Marquez, recently fought to a draw and then lost a stinging decision to Pacquiao (and Roach).
Each trainer believes this fight is theirs. Roach, who had trained De La Hoya in his fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. last year, speaks about that fight (which De La Hoya lost) with a boyishly mischievous grin: “I know why the jab stopped working, but I’m not going to tell you, because we’re going to take advantage of that…. I’ve known why the whole time. It’s not because Floyd made an adjustment. It’s because Oscar made a mistake. And I can’t tell you. I’m sorry.” Beristain seems equally confident, though more laconic. When I asked him if he thinks De La Hoya will have any difficulties with Pacquiao, he squarely replied, “No,” underscoring his point by lighting up a stogie.
The question remains whether De La Hoya can turn back the clock, or at least tie up its hands. De La Hoya has teased reporters about his retirement from the ring since 2000. Cynics say it’s just a ploy to drum up box-office sales. Yet De La Hoya is also driven by a passion to win, and wants to go out with a flourish. He told me, “it’s in the back of my mind of doing one of my last fights on free TV…Yes, I am the fight on pay-per-view and we’re going to have millions of buyers, but it’s really not going to bring boxing back.” A network fight would be a coup for both the exposure of boxing and the Golden Boy brand. I wonder if De La Hoya is smart enough to catch on his promoter hopes to exploit him so flagrantly.
We will see on December 6th if De La Hoya has perfected his juggling act—handling his business empire, family, and fighting career—or if the moment for retirement is at hand. Doing what is best rarely aligns with what is least painful. In life’s many spheres—business, love, and art—the divide is often hard to see, but if you were in a prizefight, one shotgun jab to the nose would likely correct your vision. Outside the ring, the complexities are harder to refine. Life is a brazen affair of inelegant hassles.
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