Mayweather-De La Hoya

I know we’ve been talking quite a bit about whether there’ll be any arrangement between the participants concerning the outcome of the Floyd Mayweather-Oscar De La Hoya fight.

But I wonder why real boxing fans have much interest in this fight.

I know I don’t. I see its outcome as almost a forgone conclusion; Mayweather wins as he chooses in a thoroughly non-compelling fight.

It’s hard to imagine enthusiastically looking forward to this event. Has either guy ever been in an exceptional fight? Oscar has had two very good fights with Vargas and Quartey, and Mayweather has had one against Castillo. I think that’s it.

In the last three weeks, there’ve been two fights (Raphael Marquez-Israel Vazquez and Juan Manuel Marquez-Marco Antonio Barrera) that you could anticipate would be fight-of-the-year candidates. Both fights were every bit as good as one could have hoped. These guys are all fighters who virtually never disappoint. These seem more like the kinds of matches you can get hyped up about.

Is this all about De La Hoya being a kind of pop star? If so, who makes up his audience? He’s getting kind of long in the tooth for teenage Latinas to care about.

What am I not getting here?