Oscar De La Hoya has no regrets about not attending Ryan Garcia vs. Conor Benn.
Last month, Garcia knocked out Benn in arguably the biggest fight of his career. The bout was a co-promotion between De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions and Zuffa Boxing, but the Golden Boy CEO was noticeably absent from most of the promotion of the event. That extended to the actual fight night, and afterward, Garcia admitted to being disappointed that De La Hoya didn’t show up to support him. But the boxing Hall of Famer had his reasons.
“I wasn’t going to show up to be embarrassed,” De La Hoya told Fight Hub TV. “It was a Zuffa f*cking event. A ‘Zuffa event,’ a ‘Turki event’ [doing quotation marks with his hands]. I was not going to show up and be embarrassed, because that’s exactly what they were going to do to me. I was not going to do that. So I made the wise decision to not go.”
De La Hoya has a long history of bad blood with Zuffa Boxing CEO Dana White, which has only grown since White moved into boxing. And per reports on the Garcia-Benn event, De La Hoya was denied his appropriate ringside credential for the event as co-promoter of the fight, meaning he would be seated in the crowd. White denied these claims, but De La Hoya certainly feels that had he attended, it would not have been as part of the promotion.
“Oh yeah, so much shit happened in those dealings, in those contracts, but let’s just say I’m glad I didn’t go because I was going to be set up,” De La Hoya said. “You saw Teofimo [Lopez], how they didn’t allow him in the ring to have a faceoff with Ryan, and embarrassed him not going up there. It’s like, I’m not going to be embarrassed going to an event where my fighter is participating in. I just wasn’t going to do it.
“It would have been embarrassing. It would have created distractions. It would have been a mess.”
De La Hoya says that embarrassment wasn’t just aimed at him either, but at his fighters, too. While Garcia was the event headliner — with rumors abounding that the longtime Golden Boy product might make the move to Zuffa at the conclusion of his current deal — De La Hoya says that his other fighters were given short shrift, not to mention his staff that worked the event.
“Nothing is finished until you finish it. And I’m not done yet. I haven’t even started, let’s put it that way,” De La Hoya said. “But yeah, my personnel were complaining about how they were being treated wrongly and how the event was just not professional. It was bad.
“How can you put Alexis Rocha with [Jose] Ramirez on the second fight of the night? They fought at what, 2 p.m.? What an embarrassment for the fighters, and how damaging that can be to the fighter’s reputation. Putting two world-class fighters in the start of the evening is not professional. …
“Most likely [they did this on purpose]. Absolutely, I believe so. ‘Oh, those are Oscar’s fighters, and they’re Golden Boy? Let’s put them first so nobody will see them.’ Absolutely. I’m not born yesterday. I know how this works.”
