Some Final Thoughts From the De La Hoya-Forbes Fight

Ed. note: Yeah, so this is my bad. Large intended for this to be posted yesterday, but I was too busy not working. They're still relevant and enjoyable today nonetheless.

If you want to have a glitzy, glamorous homecoming stadium fight in L.A. that brings out all the Hollywood A-listers, don’t have it on Derby Day, and don’t have it ten miles down the 405. Not that there weren’t a few big names littered amongst the Chicanos in Carson last night – Tobey Maguire, Anna Paquin, Brooke Shields (and btw, what is it with Brooke Shields and the fights? every fight I go to Brooke Shields is there...), not to mention Captain Crazy himself, Mike Tyson. But it wasn’t exactly the Jack and Brangelina-type crowd that it might have been on a day where the ponies weren’t paramount.

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Another note on the celeb scene at the fight – when Michael Buffer read out the list to the crowd, pretty decent list of famous mofos too, the loudest roar by far was provoked by the presence of Stallone. That surprised me. For myself, they can keep their Rockys and their Axel Foleys and their erstwhile Mr. Agassis. Alexis Arguello was there, and thus it was a royal occasion.

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Nicole Scherzinger of The Pussycat Dolls sang the Natty A and let me tell you something – the wackness was thick. Girlfriend had all her bootyliciousness stuffed into an unflattering dress about four sizes too small (a somewhat overweight journalist to my left muttered, “see, what I do is I just wear bigger clothes”) and had her quite possibly man-made cleavage heavily oiled and then proceeded to take about six minutes getting us to the home of the brave. In the meantime, there were histrionics. Fingers were wagged. By the end I didn’t know if I was saluting my country or getting ready to do le freak by the fire on a rug made of panther-fur.

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Stevie Forbes coming into “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This” was the ill mcdill. Most righteous choice and a high score for unpredictable style. In contrast, Oscar coming into the mariachi brigade was weak, although his Houston Dynamo-inspired orange-and-black robe was pretty dope on the whole (check it out here). But even with shouting distance of East L.A., the guy trying to pull the hardcore Mexican thing is ridiculous. What with his wife and his training camp in San Juan, he’s more Puerto Rican at this point. When they were playing the Mexican national anthem (which was strange in its own right in a fight between two 100% American fighters), someone behind me yelled, “is the Boricuan anthem next?” Exactly.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.