They knew it would be a great fit. They just didn't know how to put it together.

	The elder Mayweather has now been paired up with the Golden Boy.

It was three years ago, and the folks at Top Rank were quietly hoping their superstar boxer, Oscar De La Hoya, would someday train under Floyd Mayweather Sr.

They thought De La Hoya would benefit from Mayweather's gritty, no-nonsense approach to molding fighters. It was a style that helped turn Floyd Mayweather Jr. into a boxing phenom for Top Rank and earn the old man manager of the year honors in 1998 (although the award was given as much for his training as anything else).

But no one, except perhaps De La Hoya's father, would dare tell the Golden Boy who should be in that corner. To date, he has gone through a rotation of trainers, having fired Robert Alcazar, Gil Clancy, Jesus Rivero, Al Stankie, Emanuel Steward.

The relationship between De La Hoya and his former promoter also dissolved, deteriorating into lawsuits and nullified contracts. He broke away from Bob Arum's firm and got out of his deal with pay-per-view network TVKO to sign with Univision boss Jerry Perenchio. And rather than fight the past eight months, De La Hoya basked in the afterglow of his Grammy-nominated CD, which included a tune that reached No. 1 on the Latin pop charts.

Yet when De La Hoya returns by fighting Arturo Gatti in a 12-round non-title bout Saturday night at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, at least one of the wishes of Top Rank's staff will finally have been realized.

Mayweather Sr. will be in De La Hoya's corner, and the teacher is hiding no pride in announcing how much better his pupil has become.

"I'm giving De La Hoya something he had not had," Mayweather Sr. says. "I am teaching him defense and offense all together. You have to have offense to win a fight. You have to have defense to keep your career going. I am teaching De La Hoya to make other fighters pay when they miss.

"Until now, he had pretty much been doing things on his own, and he did a great job on his own. Now I am teaching him what boxing is all about. If he did that good on his own, now that he has a good trainer, you are going to see a new and improved Oscar De La Hoya."

	“	I'm giving De La Hoya something he had not had. I am teaching him defense and offense all together. You have to have offense to win a fight. You have to have defense to keep your career going. I am teaching De La Hoya to make other fighters pay when they miss. Until now, he had pretty much been doing things on his own, and he did a great job on his own. Now I am teaching him what boxing is all about. If he did that good on his own, now that he has a good trainer, you are going to see a new and improved Oscar De La Hoya. ”
		— Mayweather Sr.

Which is what Top Rank had been looking for all along. They wanted to see if Mayweather Sr. could find a sixth gear. Now Top Rank will find out if they were right.

(A quick aside: Don't be surprised if Arum creeps his way back into De La Hoya's plans by working with Perenchio. Many people overlook the fact Arum and Perenchio are making money together right now through Top Rank's highly rated weekly boxing series on Univision. And Perenchio might one day need Arum's help to set up a pay-per-view arm -- Univision currently doesn't have one -- to show De La Hoya's major fights now that De La Hoya's deal with TVKO has been voided, thereby getting larger cuts themselves. Convenient, ain't it?)

Even with no trainer in his corner, De La Hoya (32-2, 26 KOs) would make quick work of Gatti (33-4, 27), a human heavy bag minus the durable stitching.

Gatti has more heart than several ordinary fighters combined, but his bouts feature more blood than a Clive Barker flick. He carries a styptic pencil in his shirt pocket. Reporters listening closely to Gatti's national conference call last week could almost hear his face slice open when he placed the phone to his ear.

	GRAHAM'S TOP 15
	Pound-for-pound 1. Felix Trinidad 2. Shane Mosley 3. Roy Jones 4. Floyd Mayweather 5. Lennox Lewis 6. Oscar De La Hoya 7. Fernando Vargas 8. Naseem Hamed 9. Kostya Tszyu 10. Erik Morales 11. Marco Antonio Barrera 12. Zab Judah 13. Mark Johnson 14. Paulie Ayala 15. Bernard Hopkins

"I will show the world that I am not just a bleeder," Gatti says. "De La Hoya will not intimidate me. When he is in the ring with me he is just a guy like me. I will show the people that I do not give a (crap). I come to fight."

Gatti, a former junior lightweight champ, will be lucky if the fight lasts three rounds. It will end either in a quick knockout or a bloody mess stopped by the ringside physician, who hopefully won't wear a white shirt that night.

"Mayweather is not God, that's for sure," Gatti says. "At this stage of De La Hoya's career you cannot teach him anything new. What he has is what he is. A trainer can be a motivator at this point, and that is about it."

But Gatti is mistaken, and that's why the fight will almost be secondary to the pairing of the 28-year-old fighter and his respected trainer. It's a marriage that eventually could place De La Hoya in position to reclaim the mythical pound-for-pound mantle and turn Mayweather Sr. into an even hotter gym commodity, placing him among the training elite.

Even though Saturday's bout probably won't last long enough to get a true sense of the Mayweather Sr.'s impact, it could mark the beginning of a De La Hoya rebirth.

De La Hoya has been widely discounted the past 18 months after losses to Felix Trinidad (although disputed by many; ESPN.com scored it a 114-114 draw) and Shane Mosley. De La Hoya's pursuant eight-month musical layoff further convinced the public the Golden Boy didn't have the hunger for boxing any more.

But De La Hoya still is a fabulous fighter, and he certainly could avenge both losses with the proper guidance.

He boxed circles around Trinidad -- Fernando Vargas certainly couldn't do that -- before making the grave mistake to run circles around Shane Mosley. De La Hoya easily was the better fighter that night, but because of his late-round evasive tactics, at least in the spirit of the sport, he deserved to lose.

"If I had Mayweather earlier in my career," De La Hoya says, "I would be undefeated and still champion. It is a shame that I had the other trainers I had before, but that is just the way things are. I guess I was a bit naive or the people around me were naive. Things are all good now."

	De La Hoya hasn't fought in a while, but figures he can still beat the best.

Against Mosley, De La Hoya turned in a valiant effort but obviously was not as well-conditioned as his foe. He fought evenly with Mosley, the man some now consider the best pound-for-pound boxer in the world, for 10 rounds before the champ pulled away.

De La Hoya's mouth was open at the end of both defeats. He was clearly running out of gas, and it would be interesting to see what would have happened had he not gotten on his bicycle against Trinidad. De La Hoya, despite his dancing, absorbed a couple hard shots in the final rounds because he was a step slower than when the bout began.

Conditioning, De La Hoya claims, is just another facet of training in which Mayweather Sr. is superior than his previous trainers.

"I thought I was doing the right things before Mayweather," De La Hoya says. "But now if you see the way I am working now, it is a whole different story. I am getting stronger as the rounds go by. That is all about the conditioning we are doing, the running, the chopping wood, sparring, hitting the mitts."

De La Hoya has been surrounded by a lot of Yes Men during his career, but his new trainer clearly is not one of those. Mayweather Sr. wouldn't even be a Yes Man for his own son, a fact that drove a wedge between them both professionally and personally.

"He is teaching me to dig down deep inside and train hard," De La Hoya says. "I have never really pushed myself to the limit. I will be able to do whatever I want inside the ring. Like Mayweather said, I won a lot of titles on natural talent, and it is about time someone teaches me. Waking up in the morning and going to the gym is fun again."

Of course, De La Hoya said similar things about his previous trainers, too.

"This is the real deal with Mayweather," De La Hoya says. "If everyone else (his former trainers) has one of those Hall of Fame rings, then give Mayweather 10 of them."

ESPN.com boxing writer Tim Graham covers boxing for The Buffalo News and The Ring Magazine, and formerly wrote for the Las Vegas Sun.