De La Hoya Talks Honor

Oscar De La Hoya's interviews have always been notably vanilla, agreeably disingenuous, and oddly contradictory. (Other compound modifiers also apply.) For years, I've struggled to figure a way to quickly capture the essence of a De La Hoya media appearance, but I think I finally have it: he's a telenovela caricature of a boxer. He's got the pretty-boy face, the instinct for transparently manufactured melodrama, and the plastered-on emotions (even when they are genuine). Mexican novela fans, couldn't you imagine Sebastián Rulli or Fernando Colunga saying the following about an opponent:

"When he looked into my eyes and I looked into his eyes, and we shook hands and we had a deal, and he talks about honor? I never thought I would fight him," De La Hoya said. "That's also one of the reasons why this fight is so personal to me, because of that night when we signed the deal and he turned his back on me. He's going to have to pay come [Saturday]."

Not that I doubt the sincerity of his feelings; Pacquiao screwed him big time a few years back. It's just that, like a good novela actor, he always succeeds in overdoing the logical emotion by about sixteen degrees of magnitude.