Photo: Brad Barket / Getty Images
By: Kike Frías Updated 26 Sea 2022, : 55 pm EDT
Just as he reached the top with boxing, the Mexican Óscar de la Hoya was involved in the twilight of his career in drug addiction and excesses.
Such was his addiction to alcohol and cocaine that had suicidal thoughts
before entering a clinic where he began his recovery treatment, motivated by his family: “On one of those nights when I was drunk, I asked myself: ‘Is it worth living?'”, he assured in 2019.
In a conversation with the also retired boxer Erick ‘Terrible’ Morales, the still called ‘Golden Boy’ said that throughout his life he has had to face different giants, but the most difficult so far has been his drug addiction, which could have left out of its promoter.
“I started to hanging out with bad people, I found drugs, my life was going downhill (…) it cost me a lot of time. My hardest fight was against drugs”
Óscar de la Hoya
On the podcast One More Round, De la Hoya explained what motivated him to take illegal substances after retiring from the sport: loneliness.
“When I retired I felt that something of me left, my soul, I don’t know. I always felt empty, alone. Boxing was my love (…) I thought that if I didn’t have boxing I had nothing “, he admitted.
Óscar de la Hoya could have lost Golden Boy Promotions
With all his experience of more than 20 years in lawsuits, De la Hoya founds in 2002 promoter Golden Boy Promotions, eight years before he retired from boxing. One of his partners, Richard Schaefer apparently tried to take the company away from him for very little money, assures Óscar.
The retired boxer he assured the Terrible Morales that it was his wife who made him see reason so that he entered a rehabilitation clinic. Spent a day in that place, and after the effects of the medications that he was prescribed that had him heavily doped, Schaefer visited him with some documents that he wanted to be signed.
“He told me that boxing was not mine, to think of my family and leave him. That there was a buyer of the company for $100 millions. At that time I was almost dead, like a zombie, I couldn’t think straight and I was going to sign”, says De la Hoya.
But when he was ready to sign, he stopped and told his partner that he wanted those papers to be reviewed by his legal team, to which the latter did not react in the best way.
After his lawyers reviewed the documents, they informed him that he was only going to receive $3 million from the sale, something that the American -of Mexican parents- considered an insult.
Finally the relationship broke down and Schaefer left Golden Boy Promotions in 2014 with several of the boxing talents that were in the promotion.
In the interview De la Hoya also talked about his rivalry against “El Great Mexican Champion” Julio César Chávez, whom he faced twice in the 90 ′.
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