Golden Boy Promotions president and former world champion Oscar De La Hoya is an avid — some might say pathological — user of Twitter. His stream of consciousness posts run the gamut from the mundane minutiae of his charmed everyday life to outrageous confessions of extramarital transgressions, from poorly expressed optimistic inanities to impulsive invective rants directed at Bob Arum and Top Rank Promotions, De La Hoya’s biggest business rival.
Following Saturday night’s controversial decision in the Brandon Rios-Richard Abril lightweight bout promoted by Top Rank, the boxing community expected Oscar to respond with another childish tirade against his competitor. Instead, his 370,000-plus followers were stunned when an unusually rational, thoughtful, unbiased tweet emerged from De La Hoya’s account.
“This looks like a bad decision but give the judges time to explain themselves. Fights can look different from ringside. #RiosAbril,” De La Hoya tweeted at 11:46 EST.
“I’ve read a lot of crazy tweets from Oscar, but he’d never caught me off guard with anything until I saw that,” said Yahoo! boxing reporter Kevin Iole. “I mean, he put together two articulate sentences expressing a clear insight, without resorting to vapid clichés or immature insults, he used proper capitalization and punctuation, it was like it was written by a completely different person. I figured it was some kind of ‘Flowers for Algernon’ thing.”
However, the glimpse of coherence amidst the chaos of Oscar’s unabridged psyche did not last long. A mere three minutes later, De La Hoya pulled the tweet and addressed the unexpected expression of reason.
“Srry 2 say My Twitter was Hacked!!!! Sick & tired of Toprank attacking Me!! pls Ignore my 11:46 tweet abril was Robbed #riosAbril” @OscarDeLaHoya tweeted at 11:49 EST in retraction.
He then retweeted numerous pro-Golden Boy tweets decrying the decision, including one invoking rape as a metaphor to describe it.
“That’s the Oscar I know,” said Iole.
(The Rabbit Punch is a satirical column. Any persons, events, descriptions, opinions, or insults contained herein are not intended to be taken seriously. You didn’t take this seriously, did you? Seriously?)
