Oscar De La Hoya

Olympic Gold Medalist and Olympic speaker Oscar De La Hoya is known as “The Golden Boy” of professional boxing. De La Hoya’s parents moved from Mexico to Montebello, California just before he was born. His family seemed to have boxing in the bloodline with a grandfather who was an amateur boxer in his day and his father a professional boxer in the 1960s. Oscar became interested in boxing at a young age when his idol, Sugar Ray Leonard, returned to the US as a newfound celebrity after winning Gold at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal.  Just a few years later, Oscar’s boxing career began at the young age of six, since then, he has fought and won against seventeen world champion boxers, earned ten world titles, and has an outstanding record of 39 wins in a total of 45 fights throughout his professional career.

Oscar De La Hoya won the US National Championship in the featherweight division making him the youngest American boxer in the Goodwill Games that year at age 17. That same year, Oscar’s mother passed away from breast cancer after sharing her dying wish that her son would go on to win an Olympic Gold medal. His opportunity came two years later at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain. De La Hoya defeated his German competitor, Marco Rudolph, to win the Olympic Gold medal that his mother wanted so badly for her son. Upon his return to the United States, Oscar received a lot of media attention for his story, earning him instant celebrity status, much like his idol before him, and his nickname, “The Golden Boy”. Oscar De La Hoya’s fame only grew, and by the time he retired from the sport of boxing in 2009, he had made almost $700 million of pay-per-view income for his televised fights, the most money earned by a boxer in history.