Oscar De La Hoya: a Tortured Brute Who Was ‘Driven by a Lie’
Oscar De La Hoya comes clean in The Golden Boy, a two-part HBO documentary (July 24) that’s far more revealing, critical, and ambivalent than most like-minded authorized affairs.
Director Fernando Villena’s film is a story of uplifting athletic triumph, intense fame and fortune, and squandered potential. Even more compellingly, it’s an insightful peek into the formative experiences that allowed the decorated boxer to reach the pinnacle of his profession and then tore him apart, resulting in spousal and parental failures, tawdry scandals, substance abuse, and multiple charges of sexual assault. It’s a warts-and-all portrait told by De La Hoya himself, who comes across as a man willing to confront demons that clearly still plague him.
De La Hoya first rose to fame in the ’90s with a backstory fit for a feel-good fairy tale. Raised in tough East Los Angeles by immigrant Mexican parents, he was taught to fight by his ex-boxer father, Joel Sr., and encouraged by his mother, Cecilia, on her deathbed from cancer (at the age of 38), to win an Olympic gold medal for her. When he did just that at the 1992 Summer Olympics, the media transformed the attractive and fresh-faced kid into a celebrity. Upon turning pro, he knew that there was only one nickname that encapsulated his championship boy-next-door appeal: Golden Boy.