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Anger Management
By Bernard Fernandez (April 27, 2007) Photo © HBO-PPV

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Don’t get mad. Get even.
D-Day to Flounder in “Animal House”

If there is one thing we should have learned about Oscar De La Hoya by now, it’s that he would have fit in very well with the Delta frat boys at Faber College.

Every time some pugilistic equivalent of Greg Marmalard (think Fernando Vargas) or Doug Neidermeyer (Ricardo Mayorga) has bad-mouthed the “Golden Boy,” he has taken them down like the Deathmobile took down Dean Wormer. And then, like Bluto, he rode off with Mandy Pepperidge.

Toga! Toga!

Of course, it helped that Vargas, Mayorga and other trash-talkers, like Rafael Ruelas, didn’t really have the goods to back up their impudent chatter. But the latest in a long line of De La Hoya taunters, pound-for-pound king Floyd Mayweather Jr., figures to be entirely another matter.

Or maybe not.

“I train hard for every fight,” De La Hoya (38-4, 30 KOs) was saying as the days ticked off to his May 5 megafight with Mayweather (37-0, 24 KOs) at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. “My work ethic is very professional. But when a fighter talks trash, for some reason it just sparks something in me. It takes me to a whole new level. I want to run extra miles, I want to spar more rounds.”

So, is a seething De La Hoya going to go after Mayweather like Mike Tyson went after Evander Holyfield’s ear? Like Bobby Knight goes after university presidents who have the temerity to try to discipline him? Like John McEnroe goes off on linesmen and pits-of-the-world chair umpires?

“I’m not going to fight angry,” De La Hoya explained. “I trained angry. There’s a difference.”

To hear De La Hoya tell it – again – this time the rancor he feels toward a disrespectful opponent is the real deal, a new high, or maybe a new low, in his ongoing quest to shut up a yakking detractor. The best way to do that, of course, is to stick a gloved fist into the guy’s teeth.

“He asked for it, and now he’s going to get it,” De La Hoya said of Mayweather. “I can’t wait for that opening bell so I can run across the ring and start fighting. I dream about it every night.”

Asked to compare his animus toward Mayweather in comparison to what he felt before he swapped punches with Ruelas, Vargas and Mayorga, De La Hoya said he is more stoked than ever to exact his revenge.

“It’s like night and day,” he said. “I mean, the way he acts, the way he carries himself … he didn’t choose to be a villain, he is a villain. That’s who he is.

“I did have respect for him as a fighter, but he goes over the top so much. Do I hate the guy? No. I’m not a person to hate anybody. But I definitely don’t like him. What comes out of his mouth is garbage. He is a little brat.”

Mayweather counters by saying that all he did was express the opinion that he is the best fighter in the world, which is what he always has said, and that De La Hoya is the one who made things personal.

“I like to, you know, talk trash about what I can do in the ring,” Mayweather admitted. “And I understand that it there has to be a good guy and there has to be a bad guy, but I didn’t say anything bad about his family. He has a beautiful wife, a beautiful son. I’m not Mayorga. I don’t talk disrespectful about nobody’s family.

“But in the media he spoke on me and my father (Floyd Mayweather Sr., De La Hoya’s former trainer). I never spoke on him and his father because I respect Oscar. I respect Oscar’s father and I respect his family.

“If talking trash keeps me in my comfort zone, let me do what I do. I’m Floyd Mayweather.”

Lest anyone think that a fight is a fight is a fight, even events presumably attractive enough to stand on their own merits have been goosed at the gate and in the court of public opinion by the appearance of an out-of-the-ring conflict. We live in the era of media shouters Jerry Springer, Howard Stern and Don Imus, of WWE entertainers who threaten to disembowel their opponents and spit in the wound. Civility is always the first casualty of boxing when the combatants’ tempers rise in correlation with spectators’ bloodlust.

All of which begs a question: How much of it is real, and how much for show?

Perhaps the foremost proponents of the public putdown are Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson, who took different avenues to the same destination. Ali smiled, composed trite poetry and hung cutesy nicknames on the men he was about to face. Sonny Liston was the “Bear,” Floyd Patterson the “Rabbit,” Earnie Shavers the “Acorn” and Joe Frazier the “Gorilla.” And so what if some – most notably Frazier, who still harbors resentment toward him after all these years – didn’t understand that for the most part Ali was just hyping the show. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can hurt, too, if properly applied.

Tyson was cruder and more direct. He snarled instead of smiled as he threatened to eat unborn children, to drive nose bones into brains, to make defeated foes whimper like terrified schoolgirls.

But even Tyson, who bit off not only a piece of Holyfield’s ear in the ring but a chunk out of Lennox Lewis’ thigh during a press conference that turned into a mini-riot, has suggested that his rages weren’t always genuine.

“I mix truth with lies,” Tyson, with the air of a petulant child, said a few days before he served as the “celebrity referee” for WrestleMania XIV in October 2000. “Some of it you can believe, and some is b.s.

“You know, Lennox doesn’t have any kids. I knew that.”

Ali has said he developed his “I am the Greatest” persona not from another fighter, but from wrestling’s Gorgeous George, the 1950s bleached-blond preener of the packaged insult whose every appearance was enough to incite crowds into a frenzy.

Once upon a time, personal feuds were usually rooted in reality. America was divided along racial lines when Jack Johnson fought the comebacking James J. Jeffries, and it was more a question of national ideologies when Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, two very nice men, squared off at a time of global unrest. In a sense, all were victims of circumstance.

Oh, sure, there has been real dislike between certain fighters – Carmen Basilio didn’t much care for Sugar Ray Robinson’s haughty ways, for example – but Basilio didn’t feel the need to take it to the soapbox. He kept his grudge on the inside, using it as fuel for use as needed.

Now, you can hardly stage a high-visibility boxing match without each fighter grabbing a microphone and saying, na-na-na-na-na, that the other guy’s mother wears combat boots.

Promoters, of course, seize upon every imagined slight toward their fighters and sell it as the sizzle that goes along with the steak. Before Marco Antonio Barrera and Erik Morales had their rubber match on Nov. 27, 2004, Morales’ promoter, Bob Arum, was almost gleeful in describing the intensity of their shared dislike.

“In all my years in boxing, I have never seen such a legitimate, mutual hatred than the one which exists between these two fighters,” Arum told anyone wielding a tape recorder or a notebook.

Sometimes the taunting is tactical, designed to elicit a response, to make an opponent so infuriated that he loses focus. Does it work? See Roberto Duran vs. Sugar Ray Leonard (their first fight), Bernard Hopkins vs. Felix Trinidad.

Recognizing something as a ploy is one thing, putting it into proper perspective can be quite another.

“I don’t need to bump my head against the wall, whoop and holler, rant and rave,” Michael Spinks said before his 1988 showdown with the more-than-slightly unhinged Tyson. “I’m just in there to do the best I can … to do a job.”

That was in keeping with trainer Eddie Futch’s dictum that an angry mind is a cluttered mind.

“I hate to have a fighter be angry at his opponents, or anyone,” Futch said. “I haven’t had any fighter go in angry. I monitor the situation. I want his complete attention, and if he’s angry he can’t give it to me.”

Unfortunately for Spinks, the attention he might have given Futch was compromised by Tyson’s power and zeal for destruction. In this case, rage won out over reason; Tyson needed only 91 seconds to get the job done in what have been his last fully realized performance as the youthful phenom so many care to remember.

Ruelas tried to stoke himself into a frenzy by citing De La Hoya’s passion for golf as an example of how he had sold out his Mexican heritage; Vargas got his back up about a perceived indignity foisted upon him by De La Hoya when both were training at Big Bear Lake, Calif., and Mayorga fell back on his tried-and-true formula of dismissing everyone other than himself as a faggot. He also said something about wanting to have sex with Oscar’s lovely wife, Millie, which in another time would have resulted in pistols at dawn rather than fisticuffs at 11 p.m.

De La Hoya has as much capacity to forgive and forget as to perpetuate a feud. After Hopkins threatened to rearrange Oscar’s face before their Sept. 18, 2004, bout, De La Hoya shrugged and said, “It’s all talk. That doesn’t bother me. He talks about having been in prison and all this street stuff, and he thinks that’s going to intimidate me. But he’s wrong. He’s not going to win any battles before we get in the ring. That stuff has never bothered me. Hopkins is a bully. That’s his style of fighting. He’s a bully in the ring. A bully can be stopped.”

Hopkins didn’t rearrange those matinee-idol looks, but he did knock De La Hoya out with a left hook to the body, the only loss by stoppage for boxing’s most bankable superstar. Shortly thereafter De La Hoya made the bully a partner in his business, all past indiscretions having been forgiven for the sake of profitability.

Baseball’s Leo Durocher once said nice guys finish last. He wasn’t necessarily speaking of popularity-challenged gentleman fighters like Chris Byrd, but he might have been. How many more pay-per-view buys can De La Hoya-Mayweather generate by presenting us with the age-old conflict of good vs. evil?

Two highly skilled fighters are going to be on display May 5. That should be enough to capture our interest. And if it isn’t, well, they can always call each other names just a while longer.