Breast cancer awareness month is something that Oscar De La Hoya is very passionate about because his mother battled with the terrible disease. He helped open The Cecilia Gonzalez De La Hoya Cancer Center is Los Angeles back in 2000, a state of the art facility dedicated to cancer treatment and now he’s teamed up with the Susan G. Komen’s More Than Pink Initiative that encourages people to take action to eliminate any more cancer deaths.
Latina caught up with the boxer in an interview where he talks about his mother’s battle with cancer. “It definitely taught me that my mother was a lot stronger than I was at any given day, whether it was inside the ring or outside the ring,” he says. De La Hoya was only 16 when his mother informed him that she had cancer, and she died when she was 39. “Here you have a woman who is too proud to go to the hospital and get treatments, or to get mammograms because she didn’t want to leave the household and make us worry,” he says.
Here is De La Hoya talking about how difficult the death of his mother was:
