As excitement built for a rematch this month, Mayweather stunned the boxing world by announcing his retirement, so De La Hoya will instead fight Manny Pacquiao, the World Boxing Council lightweight champ and a less magnetic presence. The boxers will meet at the welterweight limit of 147 pounds, a weight De La Hoya has not fought at since 2001. Pacquiao has never fought above 135 pounds. No one expects pay-per-view sales to set rec­ords, or even come close.

Because De La Hoya as a fighter has a huge impact on the success of De La Hoya as a promoter—particularly when it comes to his arrangement with HBO—he now says he has three or four more fights in him. Regardless of how much longer he competes, some see the Pacquiao matchup as a portent of boxing’s future: De La Hoya and HBO arm in arm, setting up lackluster bouts that further sour the public on the sweet science. “Before long, Oscar will have all the fighters and all the dates, and nobody is going to watch boxing anymore because the quality is so bad,” says Kathy Duva of Main Events, which has nurtured 19 world champs during the past 30 years. “Golden Boy Promotions will be the death of the sport. Basically, it’s the Wal-Mart of boxing.”

A brilliant midsummer sun blooms over the Ritz-Carlton in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Valets sweep up the parking lot. Desk clerks bring bottled water to lounging guests. When De La Hoya pulls his BMW in front of the hotel, he is quickly recognized. A gaggle of employees drifts over from the lobby and surrounds him. De La Hoya gives a wry smile. He is unfailingly friendly, charming, even kind to these working stiffs. “Usted es uno nuestros los propios,” says a waiter. You are one of our own.

De La Hoya’s business is based in Los Angeles, but he spends about seven months a year in San Juan. Settling there was the idea of his wife, the Puerto Rican chanteuse Millie Corretjer. Before they were married, De La Hoya told her, “My home is in California, my business is in California, my training camp is in California. It only make sense that we live in California.” Millie smiled sweetly and said, “Oscar, we’ll live in Puerto Rico.”

Before his courtship of Corretjer, De La Hoya fathered three children by three other women. Last year, photos surfaced showing him in a wig, high heels, and a fishnet bodysuit. They were taken by an ex-stripper, who later recanted her claim of the photos’ authenticity but sued De La Hoya for slander (and $25 million). This summer, she withdrew her claim; De La Hoya’s attorney insists the woman had been paid no hush money. “Yes, I was unfaithful to my wife,” the fighter says. “The photos that woman took were doctored and, thank God, the truth eventually came out. I created a lot of pain for Millie, but we worked things out through a family therapist, and now we’re happier than ever. I haven’t been this happy since I was a boy.”

The middle child of Mexican immigrants, De La Hoya was raised in a one-bedroom house in the barrio of East Los Angeles. His father dug graves, and the family often didn’t have money for food. He was six when he fought his first amateur bout, and 10 when he started training at the Resurrection Boy’s Club Gym, a former church. By the time he graduated from high school, he had become a national Junior Olympic champion, amassing 223 wins and only five defeats. De La Hoya entered the national spotlight in 1992 at the Barcelona Olympics, where he was the only U.S. fighter to win a gold medal. He became the darling of NBC’s Olympics coverage and celebrated the triumph by parading around the ring with Old Glory in his right hand and the colors of Mexico in his left, in tribute, he later said, to his home and his heritage. After dedicating the medal to his mother—who had died of cancer two years before—he became known as the Golden Boy.

A murderous left hook was perhaps the least of De La Hoya’s assets. He was articulate, good-looking, and bilingual. A couple of local agents signed the 19-year-old to a $1 million management contract, then the richest deal ever for an Olympic boxer. In his professional debut, he sold out L.A.’s 6,000-seat Great Western Forum, punching his opponent hollow in less than two minutes. But the contract turned out to be worth quite a bit less than $1 million. The promised “$250,000 home” turned out to be a rental house; and the Acura NSX sports car, on lease. “All I saw from the deal was about $75,000 in cash,” says De La Hoya, who subsequently fired the agents and hooked up with Bob Arum.

Ever since the days of bare-knuckle brawling, boxing promotion has been riddled with corruption, from lax contract enforcement to extortion to fixed bouts. Fighters, denied the protections afforded to athletes engaged in less perilous pastimes, depend on the benevolence of promoters and managers. “When problems crop up, there’s no commissioner to step in and decide what’s in the best interests of the sport,” says Seth Abraham, president of HBO Sports from 1975 to 2000. “In boxing, it’s everyone for himself.”

Or as Don King, the impresario known for his showmanship and ruthless opportunism, puts it in an interview, “Boxing is the last vestige of capitalism. It’s Adam Smith. It’s free enterprise. It’s The Wealth of Nations. It’s political economy. It’s supply and demand. It’s the invisible hand.” (When it comes to nonstop nonsense or dodgy dealings, no promoter is in a class with King, a onetime numbers runner who has been convicted of manslaughter and acquitted of tax evasion and fraud.)

Jay Larkin, the former executive producer of Showtime Boxing, says network television abandoned the sport partly because programming executives got fed up with buccaneer promoters who routinely gouged purses, doctored ring records, and used bait-and-switch tactics with fighters. “The execs would buy A versus B and then watch helplessly when X versus Y showed up,” says Larkin. “Major media companies could not operate on that level of street bargaining. The fight business is like a bag of snakes. You throw it in the corner, and it changes its position.”

Of all the public utterances credited to Arum, the most enduring is this: “Yesterday I was lying, today I’m telling the truth.” A tenacious Brooklyn native and a graduate of Harvard Law School, Arum worked as a tax expert on Wall Street and a Justice Department attorney during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He got mixed up in the financial end of boxing in 1962 after Sonny Liston knocked out Floyd Patterson to win the heavyweight title. Arum headed a government task force that held up the proceeds while investigating one of the promoters, Roy Cohn.