Oscar De La Hoya made official his retirement today. (See that story here.) Which triggers several thoughts.

1. Boxing is in trouble as a spectator sport. And now one of the last great public figures in the sport is done.  I suppose boxing can survive the end of DLH’s career, but it won’t be easy.

2. This guy had to be the most-loved American boxer in the last half-century and the best-known since Muhammad Ali. I assume there are people out there who never heard of Oscar, but I don’t know any of them. And at least a few fight fans must not have liked him … but they were absolutely in the minority.

3. Of all the boxing figures whose careers intersected with my own … I imagine I saw Oscar De La Hoya fight, in person, more often than any other. A dozen times? More? A lot.

What made this guy memorable?

Well, he was good. That’s where it starts.  He had quick hands. He was a heavy puncher, at least when he was fighting in the lighter weight classes. He could take a shot.

He was packaged well. Both in a good sense and, yes, in a bit of a plastic sense. He won Olympic gold in 1992 (I saw him in earlier rounds, as I recall)  and made much of how he had dedicated the whole process to his mother, who had died. It was a little too perfectly tailored for major media. As was nearly his whole career. His pro career started with carefully chosen opponents his handlers were sure he could defeat. And that sense of him and his handlers scripting his career, sculpting his image … was always there.

He had charisma. Men were fascinated by him. Women often were entranced. That baby face. He didn’t look dangerous, but his record said otherwise.

He was perhaps the first completely successful Mexican-American cross-over sports figure. Before, we had athletes who were one or the other. Mexican. Or American. Oscar really was both. His Spanish was learned at home, and he really did come out of the barrio of East Los Angeles. But he also was an American born in the USA with unaccented English. He managed, almost always successfully, to be embraced by both communities, like no one before him.

And, at the end, he in fact earned his respect. De La Hoya dodged no one. He fought every significant opponent even remotely in his weight class during his career, sometimes to his detriment, as when he got older and was moving up in weight into divisions with guys who were just too big for him.

Julio Cesar Chavez? Fought him twice. Destroyed him, the first time, beat him comprehensively the second time. Pernell Whitaker? Handled him. Chavez was 97-1-1 the first time Oscar fought him. Whitaker was 40-1. Both were later dismissed as washed up, but neither man knew it when they got into the ring with Oscar.

And unbeatens? Oscar fought scads of them. Gennaro Hernandez was 32-0-1 in 1995. Miguel Angel Gonzalez was 41-0 when Oscar fought him in 1997. Ike Quartey was 34-0-1 when Oscar met him in 1999. Felix Trinidad was 35-0 in 1999, Shane Mosley 34-0 in 2000 — and those were bouts Oscar lost, although both were debatable outcomes, especially vs. Trinidad. Fernando Vargas was 22-0 when Oscar hammered him in 2002. Mosley was still unbeaten (38-0) when they fought a second time.

In the final years of his career, he took fights that probably shouldn’t have happened. Against Bernard Hopkins, who was just too big for him, and Floyd Mayweather Jr., who was too young and too quick.

I saw most of those fights. All of them? Maybe. Without digging into the archives I can’t be sure because fights have a surprisingly (to me, anyway) light grip on my memory. And the company I worked for during the first decade of Oscar’s career had a Web site so rudimentary that no electronic proof of my pre-2007 coverage exists.

I know I saw the first  Chavez fight, and probably the second. I know I saw the Quartey fight. Both the Mosley fights. The Trinidad fight. The Whitaker fight. The Hector Camacho fight and the Ricardo Mayorga fight. I saw the Hopkins debacle, and I saw Mayweather dance away from him. I did not see the Manny Pacquiao fight, his last.

OK, yes, Oscar did trigger some distaste, in some quarters. Some Mexicans (and even Mexican-Americans), in particular, thought he was too slick, too contrived, more Madison Avenue than Cesar Chavez Avenue. Some fight fans thought he was far too careful in picking opponents, early in his career. He sometimes went long stretches between fights; he was 39-6 as a pro, in 17 years.

But, in the end, it is hard to fault his career as a boxer. He fought everyone. He almost always carried the action, often to his detriment. He moved forward. He wasn’t a great puncher, he didn’t have amazing speed, but he had significant punching power and was quicker than most. He fought intelligently (aside from thinking he had the Trinidad fight won, and bunkering in for the final few decisive, as it turns out, rounds). Some journalists got annoyed at his avoidance of saying anything truly provocative, and the barrier between what we perceived to be the man and the image. Oscar talked, but he didn’t really say much.

But that is quibbling.

Looking back, Oscar De La Hoya consistently put on a show in an era (1992-2008) when boxing too rarely did that. He was perhaps the last fighter almost all America had an opinion on. His fights were big events, and fans loved those fights. He sold cable buys like no one ever had, heavyweights aside.

He wasn’t the greatest boxer I have seen. Sugar Ray Leonard was better. Marvin Hagler probably was. So was Tommy Hearns. Mike Tyson was, too, before he began that decline into disaster.

But Oscar presented the greatest package. He had great staying power, both as a fighter and as a star, and he was more important to his sport than any of them. More important than any fighter in the last 100 years who wasn’t Ali, Joe Lewis, Rocky Marciano and maybe the original Sugar Ray (Robinson).

He will be missed by a sport that is reeling. Now he can turn his full attention to promoting, and see if Golden Boy Productions can mean as much to the sport as did the Golden Boy himself.