By Michael Leahy, Washington Post
LOS ANGELES -- If you're an aging professional athlete, there are plenty of sports where you can hang around without endangering yourself. It's just that this isn't one of them. You hang on too long here, you leave damaged. The man with the tremors in his left hand knows it. When especially tired or under stress, his entire body quivers like a tuning fork. He has Parkinson's disease. A few people pleaded with him to stop fighting, but he didn't listen. "Fighters don't want to quit," he says.
Nowadays a trainer, 50-year-old Freddie Roach keeps a careful eye on Manny Pacquiao, the best of his fighters, perhaps the best fighter on the planet, a dazzling pugilist he cares about like a son. He loves him, love being the word he never uses -- too soft for the maniacal world of a boxing gym. But it is the right word; it accounts for his ferocity when it comes to all things Pacquiao. At 5-6 1/2 , with his toothy grin, close-set eyes and dark-framed glasses, Roach looks like a pint-sized Buddy Holly.
"You get closer to a fight, you always have questions keeping you up," he says. The question spinning in Roach's head at this moment is this: When does he get Pacquiao out of this game, so that the younger man doesn't run the risk of ever suffering like he does? He is contemplating the question while sitting behind the counter of the Wild Card Boxing Club, a small cramped gym he owns in a seedy part of Hollywood, located on the second floor of a cheap strip mall where the gym sits above a laundromat.
There is no easy answer. A marvel of health and conditioning, Pacquiao is at the peak of his powers. He has won titles in a record seven different weight classifications since his career began in the 1990s, ranging from the flyweight division to welterweight. But he is already 31 and already on the cusp of a boxer's twilight years.
At most, Roach would like him to fight twice more, and be out of the ring for good by early next year. One fight is coming Saturday, a defense of Pacquiao's WBO welterweight title against a tough but little-known Ghanaian named Joshua Clottey. The next fight, as Roach sees it, would be one of the most ballyhooed, most profitable, most contentious fights in boxing history: Pacquiao against the gifted, flighty and undefeated Floyd Mayweather, with whom negotiations for a bout have collapsed once before. The fight could bring each man $30 million.
"With everything else Manny has earned, that should be enough for him," Roach says. "I've told Manny I'd like him to retire as a fighter after that. I want him healthy, wealthy and happy. I don't ever want him having to take all the medication I have to take. I might retire, too. I've been doing this a long time."
Some of his friends in the gym tell Roach he's nuts. Pacquiao is your meal ticket, they say. Why are you talking about leaving millions more on the table? But that's Freddie, they say. Freddie says what he damn well wants to say to anyone, and that includes to Pacquiao.
Theirs is an unusual relationship. As most promising fighters develop into superstars, they, not their trainers, dictate what they'll do and not do. But Roach plays second fiddle to no one. Last year, when Roach noticed Pacquiao looking sluggish during training for his junior welterweight title fight with British star Ricky Hatton, the trainer pointedly asked the fighter why he seemed so sleepy. Pacquiao's lack of an answer only heightened Roach's irritation. When someone in Pacquiao's entourage told him that the fighter, an aspiring singer and actor, had been up into the wee hours singing karaoke with his friends, Roach erupted.
"This is not a singing contest you have coming up, Manny," Roach said. "You have a big fight. Curfew is 9 p.m. I'll put you in your bed if I have to. Never again.'"
No one else in recent memory had spoken like that to Pacquiao, a man talked about in his native Philippines as perhaps a national leader one day, a fighter of enormous courtesy but also enormous pride. Now he had been chastised like a child in front of his entourage.
For the next two days, Pacquiao didn't speak to Roach. Even as they worked out and Roach held up the big mitts that Pacquiao pounded during their ring work, the fighter made a point of not meeting his trainer's gaze. Roach considered the possibility that he might soon be out of a job. "I wouldn't have liked being fired, but I wasn't going to let Manny just do anything -- I'm not going to let him get hurt or lose a fight because he's not prepared," Roach says. "I can't work any other way."
They are not buddies, he emphasizes. They do not hang together. They do not sing duets of karaoke, or make plans to co-star in one of the films Pacquiao does back in the Philippines, or plot strategy for Pacquiao's current campaign for the Philippines Congress.
Roach is about one thing: making sure Pacquiao wins and doesn't get hurt. His sternness resembles a father's.
"I'm not his friend in that usual way of being a friend," he says. "I'm his trainer. I am like his dad. I have to be the one person who cares more about protecting him than complimenting him or being liked by him. And so I'm probably going to have to be the person someday who tells him it is time to retire. . . . He's worked too hard in his career not to leave healthy. He brought himself up from almost nothing. I know what that's like."
'Wish I had listened'
Roach sprung from fury and chaos, one of Fred and Barbara Roach's seven children. His late father, a former fighter, pushed him into boxing at age 6, along with his four brothers, in their native Dedham, Mass. You don't need to know a lot more about Roach's background than that his mother sometimes walked around with shiners from his dad's fists.
For a while as a teenager, Roach followed his dad into working as an arborist, a job title that roughly means tree maintenance man.. Always, boxing was seen as the ticket out. As a professional, he climbed to No. 8 in the world in the super-bantamweight division. But the wear-and-tear of those ring wars dating back to his youth caught up with him. He remembers finding himself on the ring canvas of a Las Vegas hotel at age 26, already an old man getting pummeled in a televised bout. It was the same year his renowned trainer Eddie Futch told him he should retire, that he was taking too many punches. Roach wept.
"I was angry at Mr. Futch for telling me to retire," he remembers. "But I wish I had listened to him."
When he left for good after 53 fights, he didn't have a buck. He bused tables at a Vegas hotel for a while. But mostly he drank. Drank every day for six months, he remembers, ballooning from 130 to 177 pounds and making a habit of getting into bloody street fights. A worried Futch sat his former fighter down and told him about a mutual acquaintance, another ex-fighter whose street fights had come to a sudden end. "Mr. Futch told me the guy had gotten shot dead somewhere," Roach remembers. "He said, 'Freddie, you're on that path right now. I don't want that to happen to you.' "
For the next five years, he worked as Futch's assistant in Las Vegas, helping to train light-heavyweight Virgil Hill, the first of 27 champions whom Roach has guided. Along the way, the late Futch poured out a treasure trove of tips on how to make fighters winners -- and save them from becoming ruined hulks.
But it is Pacquiao who is his great obsession. He regularly frets over whether he is doing enough to make him better and protect him. In 2005, when Pacquiao lost his last fight to Mexican great Eric Morales, Roach flogged himself for having failed to teach the southpaw Pacquiao how to throw a better right hook. "I'd heard all the talk that he was a one-armed fighter, no right hand," he says. "I told myself to get off my ass, make him a two-handed fighter, and work on his movement, improve his balance."
Perhaps no elite fighter has ever improved as much as Pacquiao did over that next year. The right hand has become a potent weapon. "We studied and worked very hard," Pacquiao says. "Freddie is like a father, like a brother -- I trust to do what he says."
In 2006, Pacquiao beat Morales into submission, the first of two knockout victories over the rival. The list of Pacquiao's other notable victims over the last decade reads like a Who's Who of boxing's lower-weight stars: Marco Antonio Berrera, Juan Manuel Marquez, Oscar De La Hoya, Hatton, Miguel Cotto. "So what's left?" Roach says and answers his own question. "Nothing except Mayweather. That will be it."
Eyeing Mayweather
Pacquiao despises Mayweather, says Roach, an unusual emotion from a fighter who has never before expressed contempt for a looming opponent. But then again no other opponent has suggested that Pacquiao might be using steroids. Pacquiao responded by filing a defamation suit against Mayweather and his promoter, Golden Boy Productions. "It's an honor thing to Manny," Roach says. "Manny says things to me like: 'I will knock him out; I will crush him.' He's never talked like that about another fighter."
Weary over the ugliness of their last failed negotiations, Pacquiao now just wants the fight to happen. "Doesn't matter if the posters say Pacquiao-Mayweather or Mayweather-Pacquiao," the fighter says to Roach. "Mayweather can be first on the posters. He can act like the champion. I'll go into the ring first, I'll do whatever he wants. . . . He can run from me just so he fights in these four corners."
Late during a training session on a Saturday, three weeks before the Clottey fight, Pacquiao suddenly pulls up and grimaces while pounding the heavy bag. Within a minute, several worried members of his entourage have huddled around him. It is a reminder that he is the sun beneath which they all depend for light and their professional lives. Finally, Roach saunters over. He looks down at the leg and frowns.
"Let's cut it off," he says to Pacquiao.
The fighter manages a laugh.
"Listen, son, we gotta take care of this leg problem now," he says.
"That's what I told him," says Alex Ariza, Pacquiao's conditioning coach, sounding exasperated.
"I'm going to run tomorrow -- I am," Pacquiao says, making it clear he wants to take what has become his typically six-plus-mile training jaunt on concrete and hard compact dirt around Los Angeles. Roach and Ariza have long preferred that he run on softer surfaces.
Ariza throws up his arms. "I can guarantee if you run tomorrow you will aggravate it," Ariza says. "We haven't had this trouble for five fights, bro. Why? Because you listened to me. And now you aren't. And look what's happened. No running tomorrow."
The conditioning coach and Pacquiao bicker.
Roach rolls his eyes. "Son," Roach says firmly, commanding attention. "If you are going to run, I want you to do it on grass or a soft track. A flat easy jog. Not on the roads. We agreed?"
"Yes," Pacquiao says.
"Something else," Roach says. "You seem tired today. You are getting up late again. When people keep you up late, it affects your workouts. . . . I'll enforce the curfew if I have to. If you have to come to my house, you'll sleep on my floor."
Pacquiao smiles crookedly. "You're the boss."
'Two fights left'
It is late in the day, the sun is already falling, and Roach is tired. He sits behind his desk, his tremors getting the best of him. He is suddenly that quivering tuning fork again. He goes into a bathroom to take some pills for his Parkinson's. He reemerges, munches on a few peanuts for protein, and looks out across the gym, in search of a little peace.
The strangest thing is that he always finds it here, he says. The sport that damaged him is now his best medication, his salvation. A young fighter shyly shuffles up to him, looking for advice, and Roach turns, mumbles something about the importance of using the jab and sends the kid on his way. And then Pacquiao reappears, draping an arm around him, whispering something in his ear.
"Son, nine o'clock, remember," Roach answers. "Don't make me come over. It's important."
Fighter and trainer look at each other for a moment. What passes between them is as powerful as a jolting uppercut, the very thing that sometimes redeems this brutal sport, and the men in it.
Pacquiao nods. "Word of honor, coach."
"You know I gotta watch after this, Manny."
Roach watches the fighter stroll back to his worshipful entourage. "Two fights left," Roach says, that trembling left hand carefully inserting another peanut in his mouth. "That's what I hope. Just two. I'm the one who has to make sure he gets out of it okay."
Source:
washingtonpost.com
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