By Lyle Fitzsimmons

By the time some of you read this, Oscar De La Hoya will be gone.

At least that’s the bated breath guess from the BoxingScene.com bureau in Gainesville, Fla. – home of the defending BCS national champions, by the way – where the rest of Gator Nation isn’t exactly expected to grind to a halt while waiting for the up or down word from Golden Boy HQ.

Tim Tebow… maybe. But not Oscar.

At any rate, “His Oscarness” is scheduled to go live with future plans at noon Pacific time, when he’ll announce either a farewell or a welcome back in much the same way Ray Leonard pulled it off more than two decades ago in Landover, Md.

Documentaries have shown how that night at the old Cap Center contributed to the antipathy one Marvin Hagler had for Sugar Ray, feeling he and his team were duped into attending the gala under the guise that Leonard would be announcing a challenge, rather than an exit.

Obviously, Ray’s retirement ended up being only temporary. In fact, he fought seven more times in the subsequent 15 years, including a still-debated 12-round split-decision win over Hagler – I had it 115-113 Leonard – on April 6, 1987 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Oscar’s extravaganza figures to be anti-climactic in comparison, seeing how his best days are clearly behind him and his last actual in-ring performance – on Dec. 6 at the MGM Grand – ended in an on-the-stool surrender that few outside Manny Pacquiao’s guarded compound had predicted.

So, if he exits for good, well… so what?

He’s been a part-timer for quite a while anyway, lacing them up just four times since another Nevada surrender, errr… sorry, I meant legitimate KO loss… to Bernard Hopkins in 2004 after a well-placed – albeit hardly devastating-looking – left hand to the body.

And, if he comes back, well… why?

Though the loss to Pacquiao has been blamed at least to some extent on a dubious pre-fight weight loss that sapped his natural advantages in size and strength, there’s really little else for De La Hoya to prove were he to announce plans to stay in the game.

Another trip to 147 pounds is off-limits physically. Few of the names campaigning at 154 pounds inspire the sort of pay-per-view zeal that would make it worthwhile. And another trip to 160, where guys like Pavlik and Abraham have the same size edges Hopkins had, seems useless as well.

So, unless he’s got a bombshell planned – and no, fighting Julio Cesar Chavez’s peach-fuzz faced kid doesn’t qualify as one – I instead expect a few tears, a few regrets and a few winning smiles en route to an official end to his in-ring career… followed within seconds by a promotional reminder that the sport’s next big event, Pacquiao-Hatton, is available on PPV for $49.95 on May 2 and the second installment of Pacquiao-Hatton 24/7 will premiere April 18 at 9:30 p.m.

I only hope he doesn’t start singing again.

* * * * * * * * * *

Stop the presses! Winky Wright finally lost a fight.

Awww… now I admit I shouldn’t really shouldn’t be so hard on ol’ Wink, considering he’s a well-respected veteran pro, a fellow Floridian and was a good interview when I chatted with him a few weeks back, but it was kind of refreshing to see him voluntarily cop to a defeat after his 12-round weekend dance with freak of nature Paul Williams.

By convincingly losing at least nine – and on many cards 10, 11 or 12 – rounds to the perpetual motion welterweight-turned-middleweight-turned-who knows what’s next, Wright had no platform from which to pitch into an oft-repeated post-fight rant that he’d been screwed by the judges, the establishment, the promoters, the fans or whomever else had a stake.

And while I don’t pretend to speak for anyone other than a 40-year-old resident of Gainesville, I’m guessing I wasn’t the only one tired of the “the world is against me” script Mr. Wright had read after previous losses to Harry Simon (MD 12), Fernando Vargas (MD 12) and Bernard Hopkins (UD 12) and a three-way split draw against Jermain Taylor.

I spent 38 years in Buffalo and Philadelphia… I’ve heard every sports conspiracy theory there is.

To be honest, the Simon and Vargas fights are out of my realm of comment because I saw neither of them live. But upon seeing the others as they happened, I thought the Taylor bout in Memphis was dead even in 2006 – six rounds apiece. And, to my eyes anyway, Hopkins won at least seven or eight of 12 rounds a year later at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.

And even if you had them in Wright’s favor, neither was a scorecard crime of any substance.

I won’t go far as to say I was rooting for Winky to lose. In fact, unlike Emanuel Steward – who was dead on, as usual – I thought he was a live underdog against the young Williams and might have enough left in the tank to give him a legitimate 160-pound push. But I was rooting hard against a final nod that was anything resembling close, because I knew it’d prompt the same old whiny song and dance.

Thanks to Mr. Williams… it was instead a quiet coda.

* * * * * * * * * *

Lastly, I didn’t know Artie Curry.

My exposure was limited to having seen him a few times at cards I attended over the years, where we occasionally passed in a back hallway or while milling around adjacent to the press tables near the area reserved for the HBO ensemble in place to broadcast a particular fight.

But I’ve got to admit, after watching the raw display of human emotion around Saturday night’s “World Championship Boxing” show from Mandalay Bay, I do feel something of a twinge of a loss.

From the moment Michael Buffer’s voice cracked as he asked for quiet preceding the memorial 10-count, to the game three-pronged struggle by Jim Lampley, Larry Merchant and Steward to keep it together while discussing Curry’s death after the fights, it was clear that the man meant something awfully special to those with whom he was close.

Having lost a number of important people myself – my mother, who died in 1998, would have turned 80 yesterday – I’m all too familiar with what it feels like immediately after finality arrives, and the effort it takes to maintain composure when explaining to others what happened and how meaningful a role the person played in your life.

It’s as hard a task as I’ve ever faced in my 40 years.

But, to their credit, Lampley, Merchant and Steward stood tall in grief and maintained high-end professionalism, while simultaneously delivering as fitting a tribute to their fallen friend as could have been asked for under such circumstances. It was compelling. It was emotional. And it was perfect.

Well done, gentlemen. And, my condolences.

Lyle Fitzsimmons is a full voting member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. Reach him at fitzbitz@msn.com.