By Greg Bishop, The New York Times
LAS VEGAS — Naazim Richardson cuts an imposing figure, his arms the size of pony kegs, his full beard long turned gray, his baritone voice dispensing wisdom culled from a lifetime spent in boxing gyms.
As Shane Mosley nears his most important fight, against Floyd Mayweather Jr. on Saturday at MGM Grand Garden Arena, he credits Richardson with revitalizing his career. Richardson is the camp’s conscience and comedian, a trainer jailed as a teenager, a devout Muslim who nearly died.
“I love everything about him,” Mosley said. “At first, he doesn’t say much, just watches, real tough. But he’s a big teddy bear underneath.”
To say the teddy bear loves boxing is to diminish how he feels about the sport. Boxing took Richardson from the streets that almost swallowed him in north Philadelphia, bestowed him with energy and purpose. He emulated old trainers in grimy gyms. He studied film until 3 a.m., a habit that remains.
On Sunday, no matter the Mosley outcome, after HBO’s “24-7” cameras stop following him around, Richardson will fly to Arkansas for the Golden Gloves, then head back to Philadelphia for another fight. Four boxers, three bouts, one tournament, with varying degrees of magnitude.
This all makes perfect sense to Richardson. Boxing is simple, familiar, not part of the routine but its entirety. Everything else gets complicated.
“Once you face a man one-on-one, you know exactly who you are,” Richardson said over breakfast Wednesday morning. “Everything else seems a little easier after that.”
Even the events of March 25, 2007, when Richardson returned home from training and a water bottle slipped from his hands. He picked the bottle up. It fell again. He squeezed the bottle harder, but it fell once more.
The left side of his body went numb. He tried to walk and toppled over. His sons thought Richardson was joking, but when he pulled out his mat and began to pray, they grasped the seriousness.
Richardson had had a stroke. Doctors stood over him in the hospital, and even though they believed he could not hear them, he hung on every word. They said he needed a brain operation, that he would lose the use of his left leg and, potentially, his life.
He felt nothing on the left side of his body, but he sensed the family that surrounded him. There were fighters from the Concrete Jungle Boxing Tribe, friends, so many people that the nurses received reprimands for the numbers crowded into his room
At night, after everybody left, Richardson taught himself to walk again. First one step, then two, then five. Therapists brought a walker, which Richardson immediately rejected, telling them that in Philadelphia, the walker would “make me look like a wounded animal in the Serengeti,” and that “they might as well write, ROB ME, on both pants pockets.”
On the day those therapists were scheduled to teach Richardson to walk again, he already knew how. He left the hospital soon after, with diabetes complications that later disappeared, without needing brain surgery.
His first stop after release? The gym, where the boxers, some of whom had fathers and uncles trained by Richardson, watched Mayweather beat Oscar De La Hoya on TV.
Richardson kicked himself for missing one of Bernard Hopkins’s fights, a loss to Joe Calzaghe, but the gym had a way of healing. He loved everything about that gym. When his mother, Leah, underwent a bypass operation a few years back, she banished him from the hospital, reasoning that “the boys at that gym need you more than I do.”
She died in 2008, after slipping into a coma while Richardson trained Hopkins for Kelly Pavlik. Hopkins knew how to lift his trainer’s spirits, boosting them with boxing. He dispatched Richardson to the hospital and trained harder than before.
After her death, Richardson returned to the gym once more, training his son, Rock Allen, and two much younger cousins, the Dargan brothers, whom Richardson had raised.
These were boys who learned fighting in the living room, couch cushions and pillows guarding the television from their blows. They grew up in that gym and grew used to Richardson’s unorthodox training methods, which Allen described as “the average person sees a blocked street; my dad sees a wall, a rope and a way around.”
They even came up with their own anthem, which goes in part:
“Concrete jungle, giant killers
You say they’re bigger and stronger
It don’t matter
They’re taller and longer
It don’t matter
They’re quick and faster
It don’t matter
Concrete jungle, giant killers”
The Richardson that Mosley helped put into the spotlight was on display then. He remains something of a comic, in contrast to the imposing exterior.
During training recently in California, he teased Mosley for wearing makeup at the “Lopez Tonight” show. He said: “There was greatness to Vanilla Ice. It’s just nobody will admit it!” And: “I only know one guy who liked to get hit. And he’s in an institution, where he belongs!” And: “I can say I’d dunk over Shaquille O’Neal with a trampoline. That’s freedom of speech, baby! Let Mayweather talk.”
All this from a man who as a teenager left home at 14, who later called his mother often at 2 a.m. to apologize for the indiscretions of his youth. From a man who found Islam and turned to faith and boxing, who after the television taping stationed his son outside the green room so he could pray, while everyone else received Chris Rock introductions.
Allen met Mosley at age 10, and he talked so often about him that Richardson suggested that Allen move into Mosley’s house. Now, they are part of Mosley’s camp, aiming for a big upset.
“Brother Naazim is like the uncle we never had,” said Hassan AbdulRahim Jr., the camp coordinator. “He’s full of wisdom.”
Family and friends implore Richardson to slow down, spend less time inside the ring with fighters, take on more of an advisory role. But the man who carries a white towel with him everywhere — to hit unaware fighters — refuses to wave any sort of white flag.
“I don’t know no other way,” he said.
Source: nytimes.com
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