LOS ANGELES – Former six division world boxing champion Oscar De La Hoya, the “Golden Boy”, announced his retirement from the ring on Tuesday.
The 36-year-old Los Angeles native, who last fought and lost by TKO to the much smaller former featherweight champion Manny Pacquiao, felt it was time to call it quits and focus on his boxing promotional company Golden Boy Promotions.
De La Hoya was the biggest welterweight boxing star of the 90s and early 2000s, he ends his professional fighting career with a record of 39-6 including 30 knockouts.
“Boxing is my passion, boxing is what I was born to do,” an emotional De La Hoya told a news conference in downtown Los Angeles. It is always hard for a fighter to quit but, alongside his friend Golden Boy Promotions CEO Richard Schaefer and his wife Millie, Oscar announced to the press in front of the Staples Center that he has to come to grips with retirement.
Oscar has fought Julio Cesar Chavez, Sugar Shane Mosley, Tito Trinidad, Pernell Whitaker, Bernard Hopkins, Fernando Vargas, Arturo Gatti, Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao just to name a few. He is a guarantee for the boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York.
