By Robert Morales

Oscar De La Hoya, fresh off Saturday's beatdown by Manny Pacquiao, was on hand at his Golden Boy Promotions offices in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

"He's bummed out, maybe in disbelief," said Richard Schaefer, CEO of Golden Boy. "But he is moving on. We're all moving on. He's a big boy and he'll be OK."

Actually, Schaefer said, there was very little talk about boxing in a meeting he had with De La Hoya. He said they talked about a new soccer stadium they want to build in Houston that would house the Houston Dynamo, a Major League Soccer team of which De La Hoya is part owner. They talked about other real estate developments.

"It was really a non-boxing meeting," Schaefer said. "He put his businessman's hat on, even though he wasn't wearing his businessman's suit."

Schaefer said that De La Hoya will be leaving in a few days to return to Puerto Rico, where he lives with his wife Millie and their children. Schaefer said the De La Hoya clan will celebrate the holidays there, and at the same time De La Hoya will reflect on his future as a fighter. 

"Sometime the early part of next year he will come back and he will make his decision known," Schaefer said.

According to HBO analyst Larry Merchant, there is only one decision De La Hoya can make - hang up the gloves.

"I think he should retire, but whether he will or not, who knows?" said Merchant, who was at Staples Center in Los Angeles on Tuesday for the news conference formally announcing the Jan. 24 welterweight title fight there between champion Antonio Margarito and "Sugar" Shane Mosley.

Merchant said De La Hoya may not want to "go out on a fight like this. But for a guy who says he's smart and wants to be smart, it would not be a smart thing for him to be coming back even if he could beat somebody." 

All the tests done on De La Hoya at a Las Vegas hospital following Pacquiao's 8th-round technical knockout victory came back negative. But that was the only positive thing De La Hoya got out of an embarrassment of gargantuan proportions.

Not only did he get beat to the punch from the opening bell by a smaller fighter, he at times cowered on the ropes as Pacquiao was doling out his speedy assault. It's one thing to get old in the ring, but it appeared that De La Hoya got old and scared. It really was a surreal sight. Even those few reporters who picked Pacquiao to win were shocked at what they witnessed.

As a mellow rock band played at the Nokia Theatre L.A. LIVE across the street from Staples Center about noon Tuesday, Merchant sat with a couple of reporters, and all were trying to sort out what transpired. Interestingly, Merchant said that perhaps De La Hoya would have done better against Margarito than he did against Pacquiao.

"Margarito would be coming to him, Oscar would be throwing combinations," Merchant said. "Oscar has faster hands still than Margarito, so it depends on the opponent. Older fighters, in particular, never want to fight younger, faster opponents if they can avoid it because those kind of guys will expose you.

"They still have a lot of stuff going but they don't want to get hit as much and they're not as quick and so they get exposed. You just look at the record of (Bernard) Hopkins. He lost twice to Jermain Taylor and to (Joe) Calzaghe, quicker guys than him, OK? And yet when Kelly Pavlik walked straight at him, certainly he (Hopkins) looked like he was 30 years old again. So that's part of the dynamic here."

Merchant suggested that, believe it or not, Pacquiao was simply the wrong guy for De La Hoya to fight at this stage of his career.

"What nobody really put into the equation is the fact that Pacquiao has become this terrific, well-rounded boxer-puncher," Merchant said. "Whereas when he first came here, he was just a force-of-nature guy who relentlessly overpowered guys his size. And now, to his great credit and (trainer) Freddie Roach's credit, he's a beautiful, well-rounded fighter."

Well, some of what Merchant said makes sense. But it's doubtful De La Hoya, 35, would have done better against Margarito. It is the opinion here he would have suffered a worse beating for the simple reason that he had absolutely nothing. Merchant talked about how De La Hoya was still faster than Margarito. Shoot, De La Hoya was slower than slow on Saturday.

However, Merchant did have one thought that probably anyone would agree with - being a part-time athlete in such a brutal game is not a good thing.

"Look, it was also part of the equation that Oscar had fought three times since he fought Hopkins - in four years - and in that time Pacquiao had fought 10 times," Merchant said.

Carlos Palomino weighs in

Carlos Palomino, a member of the International Boxing Hall of Fame, won the welterweight championship in June 1976 and defended it seven times before losing his belt to Wilfred Benitez in his eighth defense in January 1979. Five months later Palomino took on the great Roberto Duran in a 10-round welterweight fight at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

Palomino recalled Wednesday that a scale that he was promised would be in his room once he got the New York City never materialized. But since he had been making welterweight his entire career, he was certain he was on weight for that fight.

His manager/trainer, Jackie McCoy, wanted to make sure the morning of the weigh-in, so he took Palomino to a restaurant to weigh him on what was supposed to be a certified scale used to weigh meat. Palomino tipped that scale at 149 - two over the welterweight limit. He went back to his room, put on some plastic garb, turned on a hot

shower and jumped around in the steamy bathroom for a while.

"Then I go to the weigh-in and I weighed 145," Palomino said. "I believe I took off two pounds I didn't have to take off. I couldn't do anything. My arms felt like spaghetti. I saw that in Oscar." Palomino, who lost a wide decision to Duran, said he noticed that while De La Hoya was warming up, the television feed showed him being fed ice chips.

"That told me he was dehydrated," Palomino said.

Palomino said that during the promotion he heard De La Hoya in an interview with Jim Rome, and that De La Hoya told Rome he had been put on this special diet that included ostrich meat. Well, whatever diet De La Hoya was on, he was under the 147-pound limit for at least three weeks before the fight. 

Considering he had not fought at 147 for 7 1/2 years, that was surprising. It's also the reason why De La Hoya looked like a completely shot fighter, Palomino said. 

"I don't know what the hell he was thinking," Palomino said. "To weigh 145 (at the weigh-in) and then come in at only 147 the night of the fight was a huge mistake. He had nothing because he left the fight on the scale. If you remember for his fight with Miguel Cotto, Margarito weighed in at 146 1/2 and then came in at 160 the night of the fight."

Margarito was the much stronger fighter in the second half of his July bout with Cotto and he stopped Cotto in the 11th round. Palomino said he finds it difficult to fathom that De La Hoya didn't know his own body after being a boxer since the age of 6. He also finds it hard to swallow that nobody in De La Hoya's camp realized what he was doing to himself.

"Somebody must have seen something and should have said something," said Palomino, who said De La Hoya should have weighed at least in the mid-150s at fight time. "That straight left Pacquiao was throwing was more like a jab and it was going right through Oscar's gloves, and he never got out of the way."

Palomino said that being ultra-thin is great "if you are doing an underwear commercial. But when you fight, you need energy. It didn't look like he had one carbohydrate in his body. It was sad." Palomino said that if De La Hoya decides to take another fight, "He's going to have to take on somebody he thinks he can beat. It's not going to be a big fight."

Schaefer, Mosley, EPO and steroids

Schaefer on Tuesday was asked if Mosley-Margarito was moved from Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas to Staples Center because Mosley might have had difficulty getting his Nevada license renewed. Last week it was revealed in the New York Daily News that during grand jury testimony in 2003, Mosley admitted to injecting himself with EPO and taking the steroids "the cream" and "the clear" prior to his 2003 fight with De La Hoya in Las Vegas.

Mosley, who is now promoted by Golden Boy but wasn't then, won that fight via narrow unanimous decision. 

Schaefer categorically denied the switch was made because of that. He said that he and Bob Arum, Margarito's promoter, were asked last week by Mandalay Bay executive Richard Sturm if Mosley-Margarito could be moved to Jan. 31, the night before the Super Bowl, because Sturm was concerned that the casinos would not be filled until Super Bowl week. Needless to say, having them filled two weeks in succession during these times is a lot to ask.

When HBO, which is televising the fight, balked at the date change Schaefer said he immediately thought of Staples Center. Schaefer said Tim Leiweke, CEO of Anschutz Entertainment Group - which operates Staples Center - had already asked him two weeks earlier if he could bring Mosley-Margarito to Los Angeles.

At the time, Schaefer couldn't do that because Mandalay Bay had already been announced as the site. But when that deal went sour, Staples Center was signed, sealed and delivered.

On an even more serious note, Schaefer was asked if De La Hoya planned on taking any action against Mosley, who won that second fight over De La Hoya by two points on all three scorecards while jacked on EPO and steroids.

"The fact is I haven't really discussed it with Oscar," Schaefer said. "That was five years ago and we believe what Shane has said throughout. Remember he went through a lie-detector test. I mean, it doesn't excuse it - but (we believe) that he was told that this is OK and it's safe. And maybe it was naive (on Mosley's part) to think that, but the fact is that we believe that he didn't take it knowingly.

"My feeling is let bygones be bygones. It was five years ago. But again, I haven't really discussed it with Oscar. It (the Daily News report) just happened and it wasn't appropriate last week and I don't think it's appropriate this week to discuss it with Oscar. Eventually I will discuss it with him. But right now my focus, my company's focus, is on promoting this great fight."

While Mosley admitted taking the substances, he has denied knowing that the EPO was banned or that "the cream" and "the clear" he was spreading into his bloodstream were illegal steroids. His grand jury testimony was taken during an investigation into BALCO.

BALCO founder Victor Conte has said that Mosley knew all along exactly what he was taking. Conte is being sued by Mosley for defamation in New York State court, the Daily News reported. When asked Tuesday if he could comment on his EPO and steroid use, Mosley said, "No."

New trainer in town

Nazim Richardson, who trains Hopkins, is Mosley's new trainer after Mosley fired his father Jack for the second time. Mosley was willing to discuss that situation.

"Well, I wanted to work with Nazim because I feel he's more of a thinking type of trainer, where he strategizes and you get different things done," Mosley said. "I've been with him before already and we're already working pretty good."

Mosley was asked why things didn't work out with his father. Again, he was open about this subject.

"Me and my father, we tend to clash sometimes," Mosley said. "Maybe he'll say maybe it was me and I'll say maybe it was him. We go back and forth. But we were just too ... it was almost like a brother and a brother arguing about different things and we couldn't ever get anything done on a mental level."

Robert Morales covers boxing for the Los Angeles Daily News, ESPN.com, Long Beach Press-Telegram, and BoxingScene.com