The Golden Boy removes the glitter

In a two-part HBO mea culpa, Oscar De La Hoya joins his own critics and, in fact, deafens them.

Oscar De La Hoya was a horrid, neglectful father. He was an underachieving boxer. He was cruelly disloyal to his wives. He was an uncontrollable drunk and party animal. Most treacherously,  he lied about the one part of his biography that he used to capture American hearts and wallets.

There’s an impeccable source for these condemnations and it is Oscar De La Hoya, during an uncomfortably compelling two-part, four-hour HBO documentary called “Golden Boy.”

Since De La Hoya’s casual relationship with the truth was hardly a secret even before this show, lots of eyes have been rolling over his repeated mea culpas, some of which come very close to the bone. 

But what does he gain from these confessions? His boxing career ended at the hands of Manny Pacquiao 15 years ago, and he is currently a promoter in a sport that continues to sink like a melting iceberg. He has a few stars like Ryan Garcia, Vergil Ortiz Jr. and Jaime Munguia, but he once had Canelo Alvarez and lost him, and he is suing Garcia, who is coming off a loss to Gervonta Davis.

At the end, De La Hoya says the goal these days is to face reality as long last. He talks to the camera quite a bit, always in black and white, his face puffy and unshaven. His prevailing mood is despair, a sense of regret too embedded to navigate. There are people to blame, of course, most of them inside his own family, but if this was a real person in your life, you’d be tempted to call out a 24-hour watch.

It’s ironic because De La Hoya, for so many years, persistently put the most antiseptic and happy face on everything. No one pandered to the camera more. It was like the old saying about authenticity: Once you can fake it, you’ve got it made. 

Underneath, he was fighting for identity, and the only place it lived was in the ring. “The Golden Boy was all bullshit,” he said, again echoing his critics. In another monologue, he recalls thinking, “Who am I? Who the fuck am I?”

Well, he was a fabulously successful businessman whose offices are high in an office building on Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles, a few miles west of the tough East L.A. neighborhood where dogs used to chase him on his 4 a.m. runs. 

He also carried the sport of boxing for maybe 15 years. His fights were the most resonant events. His fight with Floyd Mayweather Jr. is the fourth best pay-per-view fight of all time and was No. 1 when it happened. He captivated fight fans and he lured those who didn’t know Sonny Liston from Sonny Bono. Many of those were in their mid 20s and wore miniskirts, and some of those showed up just on the off-chance they might spend the rest of the night with Oscar himself, and sometimes those wishes were fulfilled.

Out of the ring De La Hoya ducked and dodged anything that resembled responsibility. In the ring he was the opposite. He lost six fights, but two of them were split decisions and another was a majority decision, at the hands of Felix Trinidad. He took on Bernard Hopkins when he shouldn’t have, gave Julio Cesar Chavez the second and third losses of his career, and stared down Manny Pacquiao, Shane Mosley (twice), Fernando Vargas, Pernell Whitaker and Ike Quartey. He was a skilled boxer who could become a blood-soaked warrior, and it usually wasn’t his blood. There are distinguished champions today, like Terence Crawford and Errol Spence Jr., who fight Saturday night. But we’re still looking for the guy who will straddle the sport for as long as De La Hoya did.

Along the way he ditched promoter Bob Arum, went through trainers like Michael Buffer goes through tuxedos, and fired business manager Mike Hernandez, who had revitalized his bank account. His friends and associates bit their tongues for decades. Yet he had the power and the control, even though he never had the pleasure of realizing it.

How different could it have been? A prime character in “Golden Boy” is Jesus Rivero, known as The Professor, who took over De La Hoya’s corner and gave him the playbook to beat Chavez twice. But De La Hoya did not bring him to the press conference after the first Chavez fight. Former trainer Robert Alcazar, a friend of Oscar’s dad Joel, was there instead.

As it turned out, Joel’s Catholic upbringing made him suspicious of Rivero’s eclectic tastes, including his devotion to the books of Karl Marx. Rivero was teaching De La Hoya about Shakespeare, too. When Oscar began referring to Rivero as a “second father,” that was pretty much it.

Other trainers like Emanuel Steward, Angelo Dundee, Freddie Roach and Floyd Mayweather Sr. are not mentioned. But they really were just bystanders to the real cast members.

The young, irresistibly likeable De La Hoya was able to get to Jay Leno’s talk show coach and to the slickest magazine covers on the basis of one anecdote. Oscar’s mother Cecilia was dying of cancer in 1994, and Oscar promised her he would win the Olympic gold medal for her.

Except Oscar never actually said that to his mother. “It was a lie,” he admitted.

Their relationship was as complex as any of his others, and Cecelia was as merciless a parent as Joel, beating Oscar so thoroughly that even she would collapse in tears. Oscar began envisioning his mother’s face, superimposed upon his opponent’s face, in the ring. That helped him punch harder.

The rest of the myth, Oscar said, is true. Cecilia was his inspiration, and, he said, would have been invaluable to him later. She might have even dissuaded him from betraying his wives and throwing down liquor. She was a talented singer, but in those days Mexican wives weren’t supposed to leave the house as long as there were diapers to wash and floors to sweep and dinners to make. The role of a woman in Mexican Catholic society, it was said, was either that of a virgin-turned-mother, or a whore.

Cecelia thus shelved her singing ambitions to work in a zipper factory. “Talk about the American Dream,” Oscar said bitterly.

Joel was the taskmaster, the one who threw him into the ring with Joel’s own grownup brothers when Oscar was only seven years old. Oscar began competing, and winning, as an amateur. Joel was also the constant critic and the second-guesser, and the source of much of the stress in camp.

The most painful segments are about the De La Hoya kids, Jacob and Atiana and Devan, all from different mothers, two of whom were Oscar’s pickups. Shanna, Oscar’s first wife, was a willing mother to Jacob until Oscar dumped her for Millie, a Puerto Rican singer. Manager Richard Schaefer had encouraged De La Hoya to choose a Latino wife for marketing purposes.

De La Hoya rarely interacted with the children and, in Devan’s case, was very late to acknowledge him. “I knew him through a screen,” Devan said simply. 

Oscar berates himself for all of this, and each of the kids eventually forged a relationship with him. After all, it’s family.

“If they fall 10 times, you pick them up 10 times,” said Eric Gomez, De La Hoya’s lifelong friend and a Golden Boy Promotions executive.

Then came the night with the Russian stripper and the subsequent affair and the pictures of De La Hoya wearing her wig and a fishnet negligee. His camp paid a million dollars to keep those clothes out of public view, and as soon as the check arrived, the Golden Boy/Girl was in all the papers. 

De La Hoya spent a lot of time and energy denying that was him, hiring experts to explain how the images were photo-shopped. Then he not only admitted that they were real, it turned out that he wanted his girlfriend to buy him such garments because, back home, Cecelia had dressed him up that way.

All those years, we kept wondering who the real De La Hoya was because we knew for sure that the one we saw wasn’t it. After four hours of watching him torture himself on a virtual couch, we still aren’t sure, but “Golden Boy” does inspire our sense of forgiveness.

The problem is that De La Hoya is looking for someone specific to grant that forgiveness, someone who can’t seem to.