Oscar De La Hoya brushes off troubles in paradise with Canelo Alvarez, Ryan Garcia

It’s no secret that Golden Boy and lead man Oscar De La Hoya have had some prominently strained relationships with a couple of its fighters recently. The biggest one being an underlying discord with cash cow, Canelo Alvarez. A lot of that appeared to stem from miscommunication within the promotional company, which ultimately led to Canelo getting stripped of his IBF title soon after he took it off Daniel Jacobs earlier this year. Canelo would come out to publicly rip his promoter over they way the handled that situation.

Since then it’s been lauded prospect Ryan Garcia who’s been unhappy with Golden Boy. From the outside it appears that the fighter and promoter aren’t on the same page with how to handle Garcia’s career, with there being public disagreements over the opponents Golden Boy wants him to face. Garcia has since come out to say that his promoter ‘doesn’t want him to be great’ and suggests that the company may no longer believe in his talent as much as they once did.

Now speaking to the LA Times, De La Hoya has come out in an attempt to douse some cold water on all the red hot reports of disharmony within his stable, saying a lot of it has been coming from outside forces. Starting with Canelo Alvarez, De La Hoya responds to some of the criticism Canelo has publicly thrown his company’s way.

“With social media you tend to react in a certain way and you can’t retract it obviously,” De La Hoya said. “There’s a lot of voices in his ear. Being Canelo’s promoter, I have a huge target on my back. I know that. People were trying to sabotage our dealings and our relationship but there were no surprises. We’re still Golden Boy and at the end of the day we get what we want.”

De La Hoya goes on to say that despite whatever has been said in the media, he and Canelo have forged a successful relationship en route to the staggering $365M deal Canelo landed last year with DAZN. De La Hoya would also make it known that they still have Canelo under contract for his next 10 fights and despite the attempts to sabotage their relationship, everything is fine.

Turning back to the recent public spat with Ryan Garcia — with Canelo seemingly siding with Garcia by retweeting a number of Garcia’s criticisms of Golden Boy — De La Hoya brushes that off too, saying there are just a lot of people in Garcia’s ear as well, sewing seeds of discontent. And when asked about Canelo apparently taking Garcia’s side against his company, De La Hoya says Canelo is just supporting Garcia as a mentor.

“That’s fine,” De La Hoya said. “I think it’s great that he’s supporting him. Canelo is mentoring Ryan just the way I mentored Canelo, and maybe one day Ryan can mentor the next guy. But he’s not a world champion.

“Is he my best young fighter? No. Maybe next to Vergil Ortiz. Vergil Ortiz is the real deal. Ryan is in a very unique situation because of his social media following. The fact that he has so many followers is great, but it hasn’t transcended over to boxing. It just hasn’t. That’s the bottom line.”

De La Hoya suggests that to get Garcia over that hump he needs to become a world champion, and he’s exactly the right guy to put him in that position. To that end De La Hoya urges Garcia to not listen to all those voices in his ear telling him to make more and more demands, but rather just trust the process.

Despite that, Garcia took to Twitter late last night to ask De La Hoya for his release from the company if they no longer believe in him.

This storyline likely won’t be going away anytime soon...