This is the third installment of a series on the December 6 matchup between Oscar De La Hoya and Manny Pacquiao, to be held at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Read Parts one and two here.

Before his loss to Floyd Mayweather, Jr., in 2007, Oscar De La Hoya turned to his trainer Freddie Roach in the dressing room and said, “I will never fight again without you in my corner.” Soon after, De La Hoya fired him. Roach first heard of this decision not from De La Hoya himself but from ESPN reporter Dan Rafael, in the lobby of a hotel. (De La Hoya claims Roach gave him the wrong strategy for the fight. Roach says De La Hoya deviated from the plan in the later rounds and “fought his own fight.”)

Meanwhile, in the Philippines, congressional elections had just ended. Manny Pacquiao had lost his first political campaign, oblivious that De La Hoya had just given him a generous consolation prize: a trainer’s undivided devotion to getting Pacquiao the fight of his life, against De La Hoya. If Pacquiao wins, Roach stands to earn a $1 million trainer’s fee from the fight. Although HBO commentator Larry Merchant first publicly proposed a De La Hoya–Pacquiao bout, De La Hoya told me, while dousing a spinach omelette with hot sauce at his training camp in Big Bear, California, that Roach more than anyone “wanted the fight…Freddie was the one. He was just chasing it down until he convinced everybody.” In war, two parties sit down at the end of fighting to sign an agreement of peace; in boxing, they sit down in peace to agree to a fight. Diplomacy among pugilists is an art of provoking—not preventing—epic battles. Trainers usually are powerless in the negotiating process, but Roach can persuade any two parties through a tactic so confounding it bends them to his will: he speaks the truth.

Read more, and view a slideshow of Oscar De La Hoya and Manny Pacquiao in training after the jump.

In boxing, training shapes styles, and styles make fights. In preparation for their match on December 6, Oscar De La Hoya and Manny Pacquiao, combined, will have studied hundreds of hours of footage, run more than 350 miles, sparred more than 400 rounds, and done more than 100,000 sit-ups. The number of protein shakes consumed is simply too astronomic to compute. When two champions face off in the ring, each boxer exhibits the refinement of an encrypted system programmed to decode the other. In the first round, this is accomplished through hesitant, awkward jabs to open up the nuanced combinations of later rounds. There is nothing more graceful than the knockout punch thrown with precision. Elegance is the result of infinite hassles.

De La Hoya-Pacquiao has been christened “The Dream Match,” a reference to its physical improbability. De La Hoya is slimming down from the super welterweight category (154 lbs) and Pacquiao is bulking up from lightweight (135 lbs). They are set to fight each other at 147 lbs, a fighting weight De La Hoya has not gotten down to in more than seven years. Pacquiao has never boxed over 135 lbs. His legendary promoter, Bob Arum, 76, tells me that if De La Hoya weighs in heavy, he would like Golden Boy Promotions, De La Hoya’s company, to pay Pacquiao’s team $3,000,000 per pound in excess.

Welterweight Oscar De La Hoya, left, fights Steve Forbes at the Home Depot Center in Carson, California, on May 3. De La Hoya won by unanimous decision. Photograph by Tom Hogan.This is the first essay in a series about boxer Oscar De La Hoya, his looming retirement and rebirth as a promoter, and the saga leading up to his upcoming bout against a five-foot-six-and-a-half-inch lightning bolt from the Philippines named Manny Pacquiao. The fight is expected to rake in at least $165 million, the most in boxing history. The bell sounds on December 6 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

Critics make poor morticians, so with sorrow many have told us: boxing is dead. They said it in England in the 1820s, when the bare-knuckle fighters of the time were said to pale in comparison to a champion in the 1740s named Jack Broughton. They said it in 1951, when Joe Louis retired from the ring. They said it after Muhammad Ali. They say it today. What they remember is the Ali-Frazier “Fight of the Century” at Madison Square Garden, where Frank Sinatra snapped photos ringside for Life magazine; they remember the unparalleled agility of Sugar Ray Robinson; and they long for the heroism of bare-knuckle heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan, who knocked out Jake Kilrain after a scant 75 rounds. Boxing is a sport whose popularity always seems on the decline—until a major fight is on the horizon. “My event with Manny Pacquiao is going to be probably the biggest in the history of any fight game—so that’s an indication boxing is alive and well,” Oscar De La Hoya told me recently. He was unwittingly paraphrasing the poet Randall Jarrell who wrote, “The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.”