Los Angeles: The proud father, Oscar De La Hoya, grabbed his phone to display a vacation video of his 19-month-old daughter standing atop a swimming pool tile in Puerto Rico.

“You’ve gotta see this,” De La Hoya said. Victoria De La Hoya, smiling widely, bent her knees, let out a shout and jumped into the water with no floaters. She began swimming, smiling the whole time.

Her dad can relate.

More than a year removed from the throes of alcoholism and a bitter split with Richard Schaefer, long-time chief executive of De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions, the former six-division world-champion fighter has taken daily control of his boxing company.

Many in boxing doubted De La Hoya was capable or motivated to perform the everyday duties of fight promotion. But De La Hoya, 42, has already staged one of the best fights of the year, a victory by his junior-welterweight fighter Lucas Matthysse over Ruslan Provodnikov in April.

New campaigns

And Golden Boy will close 2015 with other big promotions, including at Madison Square Garden on October 17, when De La Hoya’s International Boxing Federation middleweight champion David Lemieux fights undefeated World Boxing Council middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin. And, the following month, Golden Boy’s most popular fighter, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, takes on World Boxing Aossociation middleweight champion Miguel Cotto in Las Vegas.

Beyond that, the Golden Boy is a constant presence at his crammed, twice-monthly downtown club fights at the Belasco Theatre, and in local gyms as he looks for promising fighters.

De La Hoya waves off the idea of a cushy retirement, noting that he shortened the Puerto Rico vacation because of his obsession with work. “Because I can. Because I found it in me,” he said. “Those grungy gyms where I started? That’s where I’m going to discover the next Oscar De La Hoya.”

That resolve was hatched in one of his darkest moments, De La Hoya recently said.

Nearly two years ago, a week into his third rehab effort to find sobriety, De La Hoya said Schaefer arrived at a treatment facility with an offer to sell Golden Boy to a Kansas City investment group.

“I had just checked in, under medication, in a fog, a [expletive] zombie, and [Schaefer] took those papers to me and said, ‘I have a buyer for your company’,” De La Hoya said. “Something just told me not to. I got this bad feeling, this intuition, ‘No, I cannot’. This is my baby. Golden Boy is my baby.”

‘Laughable deal’

De La Hoya declined to reveal the price, but when he factored in his company’s partial ownership of Major League Soccer’s Houston Dynamo, a franchise valued at $125 million (Dh459 million), The Ring Magazine and other projects, he says the offer was “laughable”.

The Kansas City group later backed Al Haymon’s Premier Boxing Champions promotions company. Haymon, a powerful, reclusive figure in boxing, is Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s manager. Premier Boxing Champions has time-buy broadcast deals with NBC, CBS, ABC and ESPN, among others. And the new firm has a roster stacked with fighters formerly promoted by Golden Boy.

While De La Hoya was battling personal demons, he claims Schaefer allowed Golden Boy’s promotional contracts with Haymon’s fighters to expire, giving the manager leverage to negotiate fight-by-fight deals.

Recollection of betrayal

He said Schaefer routinely replied: “I’ll take care of it.”

“Never happened,” De La Hoya said. “We let so many contracts expire ... But after 10, 15 fighters, you’re like, ‘What’s happening here?’.”

Schaefer disagrees with De La Hoya’s account.

“Oscar’s ‘selective’ memory does not surprise me, but disappoints me,” Schaefer wrote in an email to The 
Times.

De La Hoya and Schaefer worked together a dozen years, after the fighter’s split with veteran promoter Bob Arum’s Top Rank Inc. They built up Golden Boy by promising better deals for boxers, giving some shares in the company.

But the partnership deteriorated amid De La Hoya’s unstable behaviour.

Going ahead, De La Hoya insists he’ll work with any promoter, other than Premier Boxing Champions. And Golden Boy’s upcoming bouts for Alvarez, Matthysse and Lemieux are all co-promotions.

— Los Angeles Times