Thirty years after opening the Wild Card Boxing Club, after a lengthy career that has seen him work in the corner of the likes of James Toney, Oscar De La Hoya, Miguel Cotto and Mike Tyson, Freddie Roach is preparing for one last ride with the fighter with whom he will always be indelibly associated.
He is sitting downstairs in the portion of the gym he opened specifically for that fighter and that is now the reserve of those boxers Roach has tapped as being worthy of extra attention. As we talk, some of his more promising contenders are thumping heavy bags and speed bags. He is asked if anything quite matches the feeling of having a young kid show up unannounced and begin the path to world championship glory.
“It’s a great feeling to have,” Roach confirmed as he recounted the most memorable occasion on which it happened, back in 2001, when a young Filipino called Manny Pacquiao and his team walked up the stairs in search of someone to work the mitts with him.
“This young kid with a couple guys behind him knocks on the screen door - doesn't even get to the real door – and says, 'I hear you can catch [punches with mitts] well. Can you catch me?’ I say, ‘I think so. Why don't you come in and let's go?’ So the first day with Pacquiao was a great day. He started throwing combinations and he had great speed. It was really good. He kind of made me forget about everyone else in the gym.”
A few weeks later, as Pacquiao was on the cusp of leaving California and returning to the Philippines, he got the call to replace Enrique Sanchez as the challenger for the IBF junior featherweight title held by South Africa’s Lehlohonolo Ledwaba.
“I had Johnny Tapia at the time, and Tapia’s wife was his manager, and she didn’t want to go near Ledwaba,” Roach told me once. “Nobody wanted to go near the guy.”
Pacquiao stepped into the ring at the MGM Grand and tore into South Africa’s Ledwaba, breaking his nose in the first round, dropping him in the second and stopping him in the sixth. Roach and Pacquiao had won their first world title together. It would not be their last.
***
That any of us – me, Roach, Pacquiao, the boxers hitting the bags downstairs, the beginners working out upstairs – had ever walked through the doors, that there were doors to walk through in the first place, is ultimately down to Mickey Rourke.
It is perhaps hard to recall now, but there was a period in the 1980s when Rourke was one of Hollywood’s hottest properties. Roles in the likes of “Body Heat” and “Diner” brought him to the attention of critics and filmgoers; starring turns in “Rumble Fish,” “Angel Heart,” “9½ Weeks” and more made him a bona fide leading man. If your offbeat movie needed a complicated antihero, Rourke was your guy. But like a lot of actors who speed to the summit, he descended back to Earth with shocking rapidity. A few clunkers and box-office failures later, Rourke resolved to quit acting and try his hand at a childhood love: boxing.
Rourke befriended Gary Stretch, a British middleweight who was heading in the opposite direction as he sought to become established as an actor. Stretch introduced him to an up-and-coming trainer called Freddie Roach. Rourke persuaded Roach to leave Las Vegas, where he was living, and move to Hollywood to train Rourke in a gym of his own. Roach agreed, but he soon found himself needing to bring his famous pupil down a peg.
“I wasn't training properly,” Rourke told me back in 2010. “Freddie just packed his bags and went back to Vegas. He says, ‘I'll see you in a month if you ever train the right way. I don't give a shit who you are. I don't train people to lose.’ I was in tears, literally. I said, ‘Freddie, please,’ and he said, ‘No, man, I'm not going to work with you with what you're giving me. If you want to train like that and be knocked on your ass, I'm not going to be in your corner.’”
“He tried to be the best he could, but it just wasn't enough,” recalled Roach. “He was a good fighter, but he's really a great actor.
“But one thing he did do, he did spend his money, and he built a great gym with wood floors like a basketball court. I slept in an apartment above the floor, and I could look over and see who's there, see who's not there. That was a nice place he built me.”
And when Rourke was done with his attempt at being a pro boxer, he left it all to Roach, who used the money to open the space on the corner of Santa Monica and Vine that would become the Wild Card Boxing Club.
***
It all began with Eddie Futch.
Futch – whose lengthy career included, most notably, guiding Joe Frazier to world championship glory – was Roach’s trainer when the Boston-born slugger was fighting, and his teacher when he turned to training.
Even now, almost a quarter-century after Futch’s passing, his memory and imprint remain evident at Wild Card. Roach offers up praise for him unprompted on a regular basis.
“Eddie started it. He was like a book, and I came up paying attention to Eddie,” Roach said. “It was so fucking difficult at first, because he’s low in his voice, you know? And I've got to get in a position where he says everything in my ear, so I’d stand right behind him with my ears right beside his mouth. And he would give the guys instructions, and I’m going along with him the whole way. And it worked well. And being behind him was maybe even better, because he would show me what he meant. He wouldn’t just tell me what he meant. If a trainer can show you what he’s up to, maybe he’ll make you great someday, right?”
It is one of the fundamental truths of boxing that, in the grand scheme of things, there is little to be taught about how to succeed in the ring that hasn’t already been taught by Futch, or Ray Arcel, or Angelo Dundee, or any number of the past greats. The day before, I had watched with Roach as two of his current charges, junior middleweight Callum Walsh and welterweight Gor Yeritsyan, tore into the heavy bag for 30 seconds, eased off for 30, and unloaded again, each spell of 30 seconds following directly after the other, over and over, until their back and arm muscles must have been screaming.
That, said Roach, was something Futch taught him.
“Conditioning is probably the key,” he explained. “And so, how can I get this guy in the best condition of his life? And sometimes you have to revert back to the thirties. I mean, because thirties are repeatable: 30, 30, 30, 30 – the whole routine goes for 30 seconds, and when I watch these guys do it, I’m thinking about Eddie getting his guys ready for these big fights in the same way. And this is what I have to do to get my guys ready for the big fight. Because thirties are not really complicated or anything like that. But even the best fighters can struggle with them at first.”
He glances up at a poster on the wall, featuring the face of one of the more famous fighters he has both trained and gone up against.
“Oscar De La Hoya, he got really, really, very fucking tired doing his first thirties,” Roach revealed of the man he trained to face off against Floyd Mayweather Jnr in 2007. “I thought that maybe he couldn’t make it, you know, because he wasn’t doing as great as I thought he would in the thirties; but then the next day, he showed up. I told him, ‘Give me what you need to give me,’ and he did.”
Two fights later, the two men were in different corners as De La Hoya faced off against Pacquiao and, as Roach tells it, “Pacquiao went out there and kicked his ass. I went into it thinking he’s fresher, he’s better and he’s not fucking around. And the other guy was maybe a little bit of a playboy. Pacquiao wasn’t the playboy type. He was the get-ready type “
Roach believes that Pacquiao’s very greatest night, however, came against Miguel Cotto, whom Roach would then train for the final phase of his Hall of Fame career.
“I told Manny, ‘Don’t fucking get caught on the ropes. Stay the fuck off the ropes, because this is the only way that guy can beat you,’” he said. “But at first he kept going to the ropes. He says, ‘I'm just seeing how strong he is.’ ‘How strong is he?’ He says, ‘Strong. But I can take his power.’
“Cotto took charge early and beat the shit out of Pacquiao’s body for a while. And then Pacquiao did turn it around, but it looked for a moment like it wasn't gonna happen, because Cotto on fight night, he was for real.”
***
At its peak, Wild Card was the ultimate go-to destination for boxers at the highest level. Since the retirements of Pacquiao and Cotto, the star power has been of a lower wattage, although Roach has high hopes for Walsh and Yeritsyan, who are at present the most established of perhaps 14 fighters Roach trains in the downstairs inner sanctum. Before Wild Card absorbed it, the area was a laundromat. He is not entirely joking when Roach says the motivation to buy it and turn it into another gym area was not just to provide private space for Pacquiao but also to claim the assigned parking spaces that came with it. Sparring days conclude with either Walsh or Yeritsyan in the ring – or, as on this day, the two men sparring each other.
Roach’s eyes really light up at the mention of Cain Sandoval, the 22-year-old junior welterweight whom Roach has so far trained for just one fight but who has already assumed a key place at the Wild Card, living in the apartment directly attached to the gym – as Roach himself once did.
“I am excited about Cain,” he confirmed. “I think Cain is one of the future guys out there. He shoots very well. And, you know, he just lives next door. He walks down the steps and through the doors.” Roach then pauses and smiles. “I remember those days. But he brings it. And when those two other big shots are done, he wants to take over and show them who’s the real guy around here.
“I think he’s the next one. He has that potential. I think I have a future star, but he’s gonna have to show up and go. He could have a bad day anywhere along the way, but that’s not what I want. I want good days, every day.”
***
In about 48 hours, Pacquiao will return to Wild Card to begin preparing for his first fight in four years: his July 19 challenge of WBC welterweight titlist Mario Barrios. Until the announcement is official, Roach attempts to be circumspect about his knowledge of the situation and involvement in it, a pretense that’s tough to maintain when he is watching videos of Barrios fights on his laptop in the gym office.
After the two men shared a seemingly unbreakable bond for the best part of two decades, the relationship between Roach and Pacquiao appeared to fray a little over the final few outings of the Filipino’s career, the boxer chafing against the trainer’s gentle but public encouragement for his charge to hang up the gloves. It is clear, however, that the partnership remains intact and that Roach played a role in Pacquiao rolling the dice one last time.
“Now we’re hearing rumors about him making the comeback and stuff like that,” Roach said, affecting ignorance. “I really don’t want to see him make a comeback, because I think he’s already been great. He’s already done everything he can do. But he says, ‘I just have one more in me.’ He says, ‘Yeah, I just want to show the world that I was for real and I am for real.’ One day, he came down to a show near here, and he sat with me, and his wife sat with me. And the most unusual thing that happened that day was that his wife said she wants to see him in one more fight. I’ve never seen that. I’ve never heard that or seen that from her in any aspect. You know, she was always ‘Retire. Retire. Retire.’ But we’re sitting at ringside and she says, ‘I think he’s ready for that last fight.’
“And then they asked me, ‘Who do you pick?’ I said, ‘We’re going for one fight. We’re going for the best fight.’ It’s somebody that he can dominate. And I think that he can do it.”
***
It is no secret that even as boxing has given Freddie Roach everything, it has exacted a terrible toll. The Parkinson's he developed from ignoring Futch’s advice and fighting too many fights past his sell-by date is a daily challenge that is not exactly diminishing.
But he still comes alive in his happy place: in the ring, holding mitts for a boxer.
He still does somewhere between six and eight rounds at a time with all his fighters, although some are tougher than others.
“Callum’s hard to catch,” he says. “He’s fucking heavy-handed, that boy. He knows how to sit down on his punches and he has power that people don’t see. He comes out and lets them fucking go and I’m like, ‘Fuck this company!’
“But when they get out there and we start school and heavy sparring starts, that means they’re getting close to where I want them to be, and they know where I want them to be. And I think the world knows where I want them. I want them to say, ‘This fucking guy can still train.’ Because I know how to be a good trainer, but I know how to be a bad trainer, too.
“I think I still learn a lot. Mitts have taught me a lot. Over the years, I watched Eddie Futch working mitts and making moves that he made to perfection. I can still do that. Can I still do it good? Yeah, I think so.”
Kieran Mulvaney has written, broadcast and podcast about boxing for HBO, Showtime, ESPN and Reuters, among other outlets. He presently co-hosts the “Fighter Health Podcast” with Dr. Margaret Goodman. He also writes regularly for National Geographic, has written several books on the Arctic and Antarctic, including most recently , and is at his happiest hanging out with wild polar bears. His website is www.kieranmulvaney.com.