Close Contact

John Sedlar

Professional trainer and champion-maker Freddie Roach

By Catherine Wagley

Freddie Roach and the making of champions

Two aggressive red and white signs hang outside the otherwise non-descript entrance to Wild Card Gym, an easy-to-miss venue on a grittier stretch of Hollywood proper. They warn that, starting April 4th, the gym will be closed from 2 PM to 5 PM. Though the signs give no explanation, none of the gym’s regulars need one. They know that April 4th is when Wild Card’s owner Freddie Roach, former lightweight and four-time Boxing Writers Association trainer of the year, returns to Los Angeles with fighter Manny Pacquiao, considered by all but a few detractors to be the best pound for pound boxer in the world. It’s also when training for Pacquiao’s upcoming fight—against baby-faced Shane Mosley, or “Sugar Shane,” a welterweight who went undefeated from 1993 to 2002—will get serious.

In 1995, Roach found this spot, tucked in off of Vine, above a laundry mat and behind an almost colorless mini mall that includes an Alcoholics Anonymous headquarters, a Thai restaurant and a barred-up Thai newspaper office. Sometimes, the only signs of life are a few transients hanging around in front and the steady sound of gloves against vinyl coming from Wild Card’s door in back. The gym still has no official signage. Instead, its name is spray painted graffiti-style on the front of the building—a four leaf clover hangs from the final letter—and, out back, a red on black banner hangs from the roof above the door. It cost $10,000 to build the ring by hand, and the walls, now plastered with photographs of boxers who have trained here and their idols, were once completely white.

Here, Roach has worked with the likes of Oscar De La Hoya, Mike Tyson, Steve Collins, Dimitri Kirilov, James Toney and Lucia Rijker, all world champions with seemingly incongruous pedigrees—from Tyson, a raw terror, to Rijker, a multi-lingual Dutch Buddhist and a woman in a man’s game. But, recently, at Wild Card’s crux has been Manny Pacquiao, the fighter from the Philippines who walked into the gym eleven years ago looking for a trainer. Roach remembers inviting Manny into the ring: “After one round, I said, ‘Wow, he can fight.’ He went to his managers and said, ‘We have a new trainer.’”

“The gym, it’s a pain in the ass,” Roach admits. “But if I didn’t open it, I wouldn’t have had Manny Pacquiao walk through the door.” Few trainers run a gym and fewer still are there from 8 AM to 8 PM, six days a week. But Roach shows up. That he’s gone now is a rarity, something that either means he’s away for a fight or, as happens once or twice a year, Pacquiao wants to train close to home. .

When I meet Roach, it’s still early March and he’s slated to leave for the Philippines in two days. He sits behind the chest-high counter that’s sandwiched between the gym’s front door and closet-sized office, taking cash from the men who come by (three women are working out at Wild Card this morning too, but, at least while I’m there, only men participate in this haphazard payment ritual).

I am leaning across the counter, holding my recorder close to the trainer’s mouth because there’s no where else to talk and Wild Card’s routine is in full swing. Roach answers my questions but is occasionally interrupted by a call or a question and, even when he’s not talking to anyone else, it still feels like he’s deep into a handful of other conversations. “So you’ll all be in Baguio City this weekend,” I say, implying a sort of togetherness, as if team, trainer and fighter should move as a unit. They don’t. “Manny’s already there,” Roach tells me.

Most recent profiles of Pacquioa—like the GQ feature that reads as a haze of thwarted encounters with the boxer, or even Gary Andrew Poole’s affectionate new book PacMan—go to great pains to depict the entourage of family, friends and supporters that follows Manny around. But when Roach appears in these accounts, it’s often as skeptical, patient onlooker. He may be essential, even central, to Team Pacquiao but he’s not necessarily a member. He’ll be going to Baguio on his own time.

The Americans designated Baguio City “Summer Capital of the Philippines” a century ago, a ploy to get U.S. officials out of sweltering Manila. Because it has an elevation of 5,000 feet and a mild climate, it’s nicely suited to endurance training. It’s also Pacquiao’s home turf.

Training for Pacquiao and, this time, Amir Khan, another of Roach’s world champion fighters, takes place at a gym called “Shape Up” inside a hotel called the Cooyesan, which has been their headquarters before. “Manny’s a creature of habit,” Roach explains. “He likes being at home, in close contact.”


This sort of “close contact” may make Baguio more low-key than Roach would like, at least for Pacquiao, who ran for and won a seat in the House Representatives a year ago and is now a family man, which means he has even more opportunity for distraction than he did before (the boxer’s celebrity is such that even Roach, who calls himself “the most famous white person in the Philippines,” draws a crowd if he goes out in public). But when the team returns to L.A., shuts down Wild Card, and shifts into high gear, that’s when the real work will begin.

Once in L.A., they’ll have one week before Roach flies to London to help Khan through his April 17th fight against Brit Paul McCloskey. Then, after Roach returns (“I sleep well on planes,” he says), he and Pacquiao will continue working for three more weeks before heading to Vegas for the May 7th Mosley showdown at the long sold-out MGM Grand. It’ll be the Filipino fighter’s 24th fight since he began working with Roach in 2001. And, according to Roach, it will be another win: “Mosley’ll be dangerous for the first four rounds, but after that, Manny will destroy him.”

In fact, no one seems too riled about the PacMan-Mosley square off. It’s Floyd Mayweather, Jr., the only undefeated welterweight of Pacquiao’s caliber that most really want to see Manny fight. The Mayweather vs. Pacquiao buzz began over three years ago, and plans for a face-off keep falling through. (On the door of Wild Card’s changing room, there’s a poster with names of Pacquiao’s defeated opponents listed in black and crossed out. Mayweather’s name, written in dark, come-hither red, has the word “never” scrawled beside it in what looks like sharpie; though “never” more nearly means “not yet”).

Roach has called Mayweather “the only fighter out there who will give us a fight” and suggested that Manny take up the challenge and then retire—“there’s no competition after that”—, but famously overconfident Mayweather hangs the blame for foiled plans on the Roach camp. “The thing about Floyd Mayweather,” the boxer told Bloomberg News in 2009, “is he’s his own boss, but Manny Pacquiao has a boss.”

The history of boxing swarms with wily, fast-talking bosses (“The worst part about this whole game are trainers and managers,” Roach told Sports Illustrated two years ago)—the wheeling of now legendary, old-school fight fixers like Blinky Palermo and Frankie Carbo landed them in penitentiaries, as has the tampering of more contemporary slinks like Panama Lewis. Even trainer Floyd Mayweather, Sr., estranged father of Floyd, Jr., has a mouth on him. But Freddie Roach, with his blondish, spiked haircut, mustache and stubble, black rimmed glasses and the slight but growing slur and limp from Parkinson’s disease, the curse that comes from letting your body get beat too badly, isn’t that kind of boss. He never thought wielding an iron fist would work as well as straight-shooting and, when it comes to exerting control, he’s keener on the quiet kind that’s rooted in a well-felt presence.

Roach began boxing at age six. One of five boys in a family of seven, he didn’t start because he wanted to (it wasn’t even his favorite sport), but because his father, the 1947 New England Featherweight Champion and a man with a mean streak, expected him to. “It made life easier,” Roach says. “We had a boxing ring in our back yard, not a swing set.” It took a few years, but living with the sport led him to own it. “When that point came, I became the best fighter in the house,”—here Roach stops to point to his brother Pepper, older by a year and now a full-time fixture at Wild Card—“but he was the best fighter before me and he kicked my ass every day. Part of life.”

Of the five, the oldest and youngest brothers only fought amateur, while the three in the middle—Freddie, Pepper and Joey, who passed away suddenly two years ago—fought pro, building a fleeting reputation as The Fighting Roach Brothers. Joey and Pepper had between 13 and 15 fights each, while Freddie, the first to go pro and the last to retire, would fight 54 times.

In 1978, while still 18, Roach went with his father to Vegas, where he would begin to work with Eddie Futch, the man who trained four of the five boxers to defeat Muhammad Ali. “A lot of father-son boxing relationships, they usually don’t work out that well, because they get too personal,” Roach explains. “My dad was man enough. He knew that he had to let me go.”

Futch, good at “the small things,” the technical nuances, made Roach better. They worked together for ten years before Eddie told him to stop. “I didn’t think it was time,” says Roach, who has since taken on Eddie’s role, refusing to work with fighters like James Toney when he thinks they should step out of the ring for the sake of their health and sanity. In ’87, with his father back in his corner, Roach fought five more times and lost four. (“Like most abusive relationships, a boxer and his career usually do not part ways on the first try,” Peter Owen Nelson recently wrote in Vanity Fair.)

Reports have Roach drinking heavily and brawling on the Vegas strip right after exiting the sport, but, even if that happened—and it likely did—it’s a brief hiccup in a life that’s otherwise a straight arrow. He returned to Futch’s gym within the year. At the time, Olympian Virgil Hill was one of Futch’s prospects. “Eddie was busy with Michael Sphinx and Larry Holmes and guys like that, and Virgil asked me if I’d help.” Hill became Roach’s first world champion and the aspiring trainer worked, mostly for free, as Futch’s assistant for five years. He would take early morning shifts as a telemarketer to make ends meet, averaging, at best, $300 a week. “I sold pens, keychains, baseball caps, coffee mugs with jokes on them,” Roach remembers. He wasn’t much for selling, but he soaked up the trainer’s craft quickly and scrupulously. Like Futch, he developed a feel for the finer adjustments. “There’s a lot of Eddie still in me,” Roach says. Though there’s also a lot that’s not. “Eddie was one way and one way only, but I’m more acceptable. I don’t believe in right or wrong so much, I believe in what works.”

Roach left Futch’s tutelage around the time he met Mickey Rourke, then frustrated as an actor and drawn back to the sport he’d thrived in at a teen. The two decided to open a gym together in Hollywood, where Roach would train and Rourke would fight. Called Outlaw Boxing Club, they ran their venture out of two locations in Hollywood, mainly catering to actors and friends of Rourke, though Roach trained pros in the spaces too. Near the mid-90s, anticipating Rourke’s financial difficulties and wanting a gym he could shape himself, he started looking his own place, against the advice of most friends and mentors, including Futch. “Eddie told me don’t do it. People said it’s too much responsibility. It is,” says Roach.

The morning I meet with Roach, it’s only when he starts pointing out who’s here, working out today, that he seems wholly engaged in one task: there’s Sammy, sitting on a table top outside the ring, he’s a trainer now and “one of my ex-fighters”; there’s “two-string Paul,” a fighter who was “on the wrong road for a while and now he’s back on track.” There’s a teen in the ring—“he thinks he’s the next Manny Pacquiao, but he’s not”—and a woman heatedly jumping rope in the corner, who works as a trainer somewhere else; “she’s ripped, but she doesn’t dress like it.” “I’m not married. I don’t have a wife or anything like that,” Roach says. “I put the hours in. It’s what I do.”

He also watches—and trusts his gut. Before Pacquiao’s last big fight, against bad boy Antonio Margarito in November 2010, Roach appeared with Pacquiao, Margarito and Margarito’s trainer, Robert Garcia, on Face-Off with commentator Max Kellerman. Kellerman began by praising Pacquiao for his diplomacy then scouring Margarito for the recent hand wrap scandal that cost the fighter his license. Roach looked pensive the whole time, and when Margarito said, “I believe, after defeating Manny, people will think differently [of me],” his expression showed the quiet frustration of an expert used to navigating the rest of world’s ignorance. “What do you think about that, Freddie?” Max asked. “I think Manny’s going to knock him out inside of eight rounds,” Roach said. Margarito protested, and Roach managed to shrug without moving his shoulders. “I saw your last two fights.” In fact, Margarito hung on for all twelve rounds but then was hospitalized. The fight should’ve ended sooner.

Roach, who doesn’t sign contracts with his fighters, relies on intuition to get him inside their heads. “I get close to my fighter mostly on the mits,” he says. It’s easier to read people in tighter quarters.

Intuition failed him only once, circa 2004, when he worked with boxing’s complicated “Baddest Man.” “I spend a lot of time with my fighters,” says Roach. “The one fighter I couldn’t get to was Mike Tyson.” Before their first fight together, Roach looked into the boxer’s eyes, and thought, “I’m in.” “I thought it would get easier after that,” he says. They never connected again.

But Tyson’s newest venture, Taking on Tyson, an Animal Planet show about the pigeons he began raising before he started boxing, has reminded Roach of the fighter. Tyson used to fly his birds before each practice. “Did you know they have to fly the male and female pigeons separately? It’s because they’re like humans,” Roach says, “and they fuck all the time.” That’s Tyson’s wording, Roach is quick to clarify.

I don’t doubt Tyson said it, but I do doubt he meant it. Mainly because it isn’t true. Pigeons are flown separately, not because they’re distracted by the next conquest, but because they’re too fixated on the one they’ve already made; they mate for life, and keeping one partner at home ensures the committed—and jealous—bird will return again and again.

Sometimes, when Roach leaves Hollywood, either for training or a fight, attendance at Wild Card slackens noticeably. A lot of patrons come because they want to be near Roach and watch him work. Luckily, he rarely leaves for long. “I work hard at what I do,” he says, meaning all of it—the mentoring, gym-running and champion-making. “I can’t help myself.”

 

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