The humble push-up is a staple in many athlete workouts, and now Oscar De La Hoya wants to weaponize the exercise to fight the Coronavirus pandemic. De La Hoya laid out his idea of working out to raise funds for charity in an interview with TMZ Sports.
“The last nine days, I’ve done about 250,000 push-ups and for every push-up, I donated a dollar,” he said. “So why don’t we do this, let’s challenge our peers, our friends, business leaders, politicians, or business or sports owners and donate money, create awareness.”
Creating awareness for Oscar’s totally insane push-up regimen! If De La Hoya didn’t mis-state the numbers, he’s claiming to have done 27,778 push-ups a day over the past nine days. Beastly. The $250,000 worth of push-ups was paid out to the Adventist Health White Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles.
“Instead of challenging everybody to do push-ups, why don’t we challenge everybody to do push-ups but every push-up you do, donate a dollar,” De La Hoya said. “If you do five push-ups, donate five bucks. If you do 10 push-ups, donate 10 bucks. Imagine millions and millions of people doing this, we can help out a lot, a lot of people especially the people that are helping us in these hospitals.
“You don’t need to donate crazy amounts but you could create awareness so America could start donating money as well,” De La Hoya continued.
De La Hoya is hoping his push-up challenge goes viral, but he’ll need the help of other influencers to make the idea spread Ice Bucket style. To that end he called out some people he hasn’t always seen eye-to-eye with: UFC president Dana White and retired boxing great Floyd Mayweather.
“Floyd, let’s match what I donated, for instance,” he said. “Or I challenge you to push up contest. Whoever wins, you gotta donate more money. Let’s do this, let’s help people out!”
It will be interesting to see if White or Mayweather are interested in participating, considering how nasty their past feuds with De La Hoya have gotten. White and De La Hoya fell out hard during the promotion of McGregor vs. Mayweather, with De La Hoya attempting to organize a boycott of the ‘joke’ ‘circus’ fight. Later, De La Hoya would start Golden Boy MMA and criticize UFC’s payscale, resulting in White calling him a “cokehead junkie.”
All that animosity sure could power a lot of push-ups.
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