By Thomas Gerbasi

Unlike practically any other sport, boxing is the land of opportunity. On any given night, a fighter can be put in with a better connected, better publicized, and maybe just better opponent, and win, changing his life and his pay scale forever.

James De La Rosa always figured he was going to be one of those “haves” and not “have nots” in the boxing world, but after relationships with promoters Duva Boxing and Don King went sour and didn’t produce the opportunities he believed they would, the Texan found himself on the B side when faced Alfredo Angulo on September 13.

“The King” always had the talent to make some noise in the middleweight division, yet some believed that being under the bright lights on the Floyd Mayweather-Marcos Maidana Pay-Per-View undercard would favor the more battle-tested Angulo.  De La Rosa heard the talk, but he didn’t care. The ball was in his court now, and not to put too much of a melodramatic spin on it, but there were seconds remaining on his boxing clock in terms of getting more big fights anytime soon. Luckily, he wanted the ball to take that last shot.

“My whole mindset was that I had to win,” he said. “This is my comeback and there’s nothing that can happen or anything that can go wrong for me in this fight. This is my big opportunity here, so I need to take full advantage of it.”

He did, scoring a second round knockdown en route to a clear-cut 10-round unanimous decision win. Of course, the post-fight chatter centered on how Angulo had faded, but again, De La Rosa was unconcerned with what people were saying. He had a new lease on his career, a chance to live up to the promise.

“This was something I was waiting for years ago when I was signed with Don (King) and I never had the opportunity,” he said. “And now I have it, so I’m taking full advantage of it.”

After taking a little time off to celebrate, De La Rosa was ready for the next step and the opportunity to capitalize on his new status in the sport. It came fast enough, as he signed to fight unbeaten Hugo Centeno Jr. on this Saturday’s HBO Boxing After Dark card at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Again, he is seen by many as the B side against the highly-touted Californian, but De La Rosa looks at this fight not just as a winnable one, but one in which he can break an opponent that he thinks has some cracks in his armor after a controversial no contest against Julian Williams in September of 2013.

“I saw his fight with J-Rock and he took the easy way out so he wouldn’t take his first defeat,” De La Rosa said of Centeno-Williams, which was stopped in the fourth round after a clash of heads produced a cut on the side of Centeno’s face. “As a fighter, your instincts are to fight, not just sit there and say ‘I can’t see’ and this and that. He had a little cut on the side. Who hasn’t had a cut there and still fought? You’re gonna have a cut like that and say you can’t see? Come on.”

Forget insulting someone’s mother; the worst thing you can do to a fighter is question his heart, and De La Rosa didn’t hesitate in throwing that barb at his foe, who in return has questioned whether the Texan beating Angulo was even that big of a deal at this point. This back and forth has fans expecting a fight on Saturday night, and that’s fine with De La Rosa.

“I’m definitely looking forward to Saturday night,” he said. “He (Centeno) is saying that I’m gonna be in a tough fight. He’s in a tough fight. He’s talking that I beat an old Angulo, but a fight’s a fight. It doesn’t matter how somebody is. In the boxing business, all it takes is one punch.”

And De La Rosa believes he’s got the punch to make Centeno question whether he wants to continue or not. The San Benito product means that literally, but did he ever hit a low point while dealing with his promotional issues that made him wonder if he would ever be fighting on Pay-Per-View and premium cable shows?

“I never thought of it like that,” he said. “I just thought that I was going to have a whole lot harder road to go down to get up here. But it wasn’t that either – it just came.”

De La Rosa credits manager Adrian Clark for getting him the Angulo fight and believing in him, and when given the shot, he made the most of it. For him, that was enough to chalk up 2014 as the best of his professional career.

“It’s been a terrific year, and the Angulo fight did a lot of work for me,” he said. “My manager did so much to get that fight for me, and it came out good. That was the biggest win of my career, and to get a fight like this (against Centeno) before the year ends, it’s amazing.”

But the year’s not over yet. There’s one more fight to get through, and while 2014 will last with De La Rosa forever, he wants to leave the unbeaten Centeno with something to remember him by too.

“It’s something that will stay in the back of his mind after December 6th,” he said. “‘My first loss was to this guy, James De La Rosa.’”