Amateur Career
De La Hoya's amateur career included 234 wins, 163 by knockout, with only six losses. Of those six losses, one came at the hands of Shane Mosley. In 1989, he won the National Golden Gloves title in the bantamweight division. In 1990, at the age of 17, he won the U.S. National Championship at featherweight and was the youngest U.S. boxer at that year’s Goodwill Games, winning a gold medal. The joy of victory was tempered by the news that his mother, Cecilia, was terminally ill with breast cancer. She died in October 1990, expressing the hope that her son would one day become an Olympic gold medalist.
With the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, approaching, De La Hoya turned his mother’s dream into a strong focus for his training. After an upset victory in the first round over the Cuban boxer Julio Gonzalez, De La Hoya defeated Marco Rudolph of Germany to win gold. The U.S. media publicized his quest to fulfill his mother's dying wish and dubbed him with the nickname "The Golden Boy," which has remained with him throughout his career.
Read more about this topic: Oscar De La Hoya
Famous quotes containing the words amateur and/or career:
“The true gardener then brushes over the ground with slow and gentle hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favourite; but he is not thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is only the amateur like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer.”
—Freya Stark (1893–1993)
“My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)