But while great fighters often end up at high-profile gyms with high-profile trainers, most of them start in local boxing clubs, being trained by volunteer coaches: the men and women who are the real engine of the sport. Their facilities usually differ little from boxing’s most celebrated training venues, because all boxing gyms are more or less the same. It’s hard to make a small, closed room look and smell glamorous in the face of so much sweat and blood.
Not long after the episode with James, Fritzy decided that our pool of sparring partners was too shallow, especially for Jake, who was still keen to have his first fight as soon as possible. There was some truth to this notion—Dave and I weren’t much of a challenge, while Wally and Dan were simply too small to provide meaningful practice. So Fritzy began driving us to gyms around Sydney to get work from (or in our case be worked over by) the resident boxers. One of these venues was HK Ward Gymnasium at Sydney University, where we became a regular touring act.
A brutalist concrete bunker sitting at the end of a long gravel drive, HK Ward gazed mistrustfully upwards from its home at the bottom of the campus towards the distinguished sandstone buildings perched on the hill above. A small plaque behind the front desk noted the gym was named after Emeritus Professor HK Ward, Bosch Professor of Bacteriology, 1935–52, Rhodes Scholar, University blue and Olympian, in recognition of his valuable and devoted service to the Sydney University Sports Union as Chairman of the Ground Committee from 1937 to 1951. A fine chap to be sure. I wonder what he would have thought of the boxing gym that bore his name.
It comprised a grey linoleum floor, a ring, six heavy bags in various states of duct-taped decrepitude, two double-end bags, two speedballs and a rack of dumbbells. The clientele was an eclectic mix of pros, amateurs, office workers and total eccentrics. The cream of the local professional crop often trained there, while at other times it was full to bursting with students from the nearby residential colleges, big country boys with ruddy freckled faces training for the annual inter-college boxing tournament, a relic of Victorian muscular Christianity that survives into the twenty-first century.
Dave and I were sitting on the floor of this establishment one afternoon undoing our wraps and catching our breath after the hard work of being punched in the face by a succession of locals, when we were approached by one of the trainers. He was an athletic, sandy-haired man in his thirties, dressed in trackpants and a T-shirt.
‘Guys, listen, I’ve been watching, and you really need to work on your basics,’ he said in a clear treble voice. ‘How hard you hit doesn’t mean anything if you’re not in position to throw a punch.’ By this stage I thought I knew a thing or two about the fight game, and my first reaction was annoyance. This guy looked more like a music teacher than a boxing trainer. Who did he think he was?
‘Paul Miller,’ he introduced himself, offering a bulbously knuckled hand.
When I looked him up on Boxrec that evening I found out he was undefeated as a pro and had fought more than 180 amateur bouts. He’d competed at the Sydney Olympics and won a Commonwealth Games gold medal. But here in the gym his appearance suggested he had not the faintest idea about boxing. For starters, no tattoos. Then there was the face: handsome but almost feminine, with high cheekbones, straight teeth and a ski-jump nose.
Sensing my scepticism, he skipped to the other side of the gym. ‘Come over here, I’ll show you.’
The sun was slanting through the iron bars on the windows, warming the sticky floor and illuminating an armada of dust motes. Tired as we were, his tone brooked no dissent. We took up position by the mirror.
‘Show me a jab,’ he said, standing in front of us. We demonstrated our jabs, complete with the sibilant mouth noises that identify people who consider themselves Serious Boxers.
Paul took this in. He shook his head and sighed. ‘Guys, I’m not saying this to badmouth Fritzy, but to be honest your stance looks like crap. Your feet are too wide apart, so you can’t step into your punches properly, and you’re totally off balance. You’re getting hit too much because you can’t move.’
He spun around to face the mirror and dropped into his own southpaw stance. It only took one glance at Paul shaped-up—as relaxed and dangerous as a jaguar in a tree—to dispel my doubts. This guy knew exactly what he was talking about.
He slapped his left thigh. ‘The first thing you need to do is bring your rear leg up. Rotate that back foot and get up on the ball of it. You’re dragging that leg around, and that means you’re always going to be reaching with your punches. What you need to be doing is stepping…That’s it. Step. Step. Step.’
And so began an impromptu lesson with no gloves, no wraps, no equipment at all: Remedial Footwork 101. Paul marched David and me up and down the length of HK Ward, prodding us in the legs with a broomstick when we got lazy, admonishing us all the time for dragging our back feet, moving off-centre or setting our stance too wide.
The sun had nearly set by the time the buzzer rang and Paul called an end to the torture. My right calf, unused to such heavy use, was spasming. I did not feel like Mike Tyson, the way I did with Fritzy smashing the pads onto my hands. I felt like a student who has spent weeks studying fractions, only to discover the exam is on differential calculus.
‘Oh shit, I’ve gotta go,’ said Paul as he ran out the door. ‘Give me a call if you want to train again sometime.’
Capable boxing trainers are few and far between. There’s a reason for that: it’s a difficult, complicated job. Angelo Dundee, who trained Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard, said the role requires a combination of qualities usually associated with doctors, engineers, psychologists and actors, plus (obviously) boxing knowledge.
Moreover, the trainer–pupil relationship is an intimate one. A trainer might spend decades with a single boxer as he makes his way from the amateurs to the pros, mentoring him as he grows up, matures and ages. Successful trainer–boxer relationships require mutual confidence—the trainer needs to know his charge will take his advice on board, while a boxer must rely on his coach to see things he can’t. Even more weighty is the authority to end a fight—fighters are expected to abdicate this responsibility and continue no matter what, with the understanding that their trainer will throw in the towel if necessary. It’s not a stretch to say that a professional boxer must trust his trainer with his life.
Trainers fulfil their duties in two stages. First, before a fight, when their job is to come up with a game plan and make sure their fighter is motivated, fit and kept out of trouble. Many top trainers also dabble in publicity and psychology.
Freddie Roach is a master of both. With his spectacles, trim physique and snowy hair, he looks more like the aging owner of a trendy cafe than one of the world’s most respected trainers. But Roach—a former featherweight contender and disciple of Joe Frazier’s mentor Eddie Futch—was the brains behind much of Manny Pacquiao’s success. The trainer even did most of his fighter’s PR.
Whenever Pacquiao was expected to easily beat a lacklustre opponent, Roach would go on the record expressing his disappointment and consternation: ‘Manny is way behind on training compared to his last fight.’ Of course, he wasn’t: the idea was to create some intrigue and boost pay-per-view sales, and it worked (at least the first half-dozen times).
That’s all in a day’s work for a trainer, though Roach’s dedication is nothing compared to what boxing historian Ronald K. Fried discovered in the manuscript of an unfinished autobiography by 1950s trainer Mannie Seamon. The notes included a long list of ways to unnerve an opponent, including putting a skunk in their training quarters and blowing a horn all night near where they are sleeping. ‘Another item on his list simply read, “itching powder”,’ reports Fried.
The second stage of the trainer’s art comes into play during a fight, when their job is to offer their fighter advice, encouragement and medical treatment between rounds. Whitey Bimstein, the potbellied Stillman’s trainer beloved by A. J. Liebling, could do all three, though he was perhaps most fa
mous for his motivational shenanigans. No shrinking violet, Bimstein would disparage an opponent or abuse his own boxer as he thought necessary, and was known for slapping his fighters, shaking them by the hair and, once or twice, poking them in the bottom with a pin. He once hit middleweight Fred Apostoli in the face during a lackadaisical performance, a ploy that proved so successful Apostoli returned to the corner at the end of the next round and said, ‘Sock me again, but hard, get me mad!’
Bimstein was also an accomplished cutman. Somewhere between a witch doctor and a ship’s surgeon in Nelson’s navy, the role of the cutman is to put a boxer back together even as he falls apart. This usually involves the application of ice to swellings, the jamming of cotton buds into noses and the smearing of adrenaline into split eyebrows.
Bimstein learned his craft from a legend from the previous generation of trainers, Doc Bagley, who also happened to be a New York Police Department doctor. The rules about what substances and techniques cutmen can and can’t use were considerably more relaxed in Bimstein’s era than they are now; he was widely celebrated for using a silver dollar to cut open and drain a haematoma that was blocking Rocky Graziano’s right eye. Other cutmen of the time were known for even more dangerous tactics, including the use of adhesives, plasters, gums and other chemicals best left in the hardware store.
Primarily, though, a trainer is a teacher. And although it’s not true that there are no teachers left in boxing, as some say, there may never be teachers of Bimstein, Dundee and Seamon’s ilk again. The popularity of boxing up to the 1950s allowed them to gain a level of experience that would be impossible today. Dundee spent years carrying buckets and bags for other trainers before he started handling fighters of his own. What’s more, he was proud of it: ‘You gotta know how to handle a bucket: put the bottle here, the ice here, not too much ice,’ he explained more than forty years later.
This kind of apprenticeship was made possible by an incredibly busy boxing schedule. In the 1930s and ’40s there were dozens of venues in the New York metropolitan area alone, and it wasn’t uncommon for the Stillman’s trainers to be in action six nights in seven. Bimstein boasted about the time he seconded ten fighters in a single night. Many modern trainers would be lucky to supervise that number of fights in ten weeks.
No trainer embodied the era more than Ray Arcel. With his patrician features, tweed jackets and polished manners, at times Arcel looked more like a respected lawyer than a boxing trainer (A. J. Liebling compared him to a Talmudic scholar). Yet in a mind-boggling career he worked with twenty world champions, from Benny Leonard in the 1920s through to Roberto Duran and Larry Holmes in the 1970s and ’80s.
Even Arcel had to spend years earning his stripes, though, and started out working as a ‘towel swinger’ for Bimstein’s mentor Doc Bagley. (The job was self-explanatory: swinging a towel to cool fighters between rounds.) One night, assisting Bagley, he suddenly became very ill and collapsed, falling right off the ring apron. Onlookers called an ambulance, but nothing was seriously wrong. Arcel had simply passed out from a nicotine overdose while trying to emulate Bagley’s tobacco-chewing habit. It was a practical matter: when boxers got cut, Bagley used the juice as a coagulant.
After this inglorious beginning, Arcel became a master of the little things: the subtle observation and the quiet word in the ear. One of his signature tactics was to make sure his fighter emerged from every break between rounds with his face cleaned up and his hair combed neatly in place. Your opponent, said Arcel, should be thinking, ‘I’ve been hitting this guy all night and he still looks like that?’
Another story of Arcel’s mastery, related by the trainer Vic Zimet to Allen Bodner in his marvellous oral history When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport, involved a card in Washington DC. Zimet’s boxer, Marv Dick, was cut in the fifth round of a six-rounder against Herb ‘Biff’ Jones (who I’d never heard of before, but whose name demands to be included). After a bit of patching-up in the corner, Dick managed to survive the final round and get a decision. Afterwards, Zimet took his charge over to the ringside physician for an examination and possibly stitches. The doctor took one look, threw up his hands and said: ‘You better call Mr Arcel. He knows more about these things than I do.’
Arcel was at the peak of his powers in the 1950s. It seemed he had learnt everything there is to know about boxing, and earnt the enduring respect of fighters, managers and writers. But the mob felt differently. When Arcel started organising televised fights that competed with their interests, he was attacked with a lead pipe as he stood outside his hotel in Boston. His assailant was never caught and the experience prompted Arcel to retire from boxing to work as a purchasing agent in a metal manufacturing company. But nearly twenty years later, Panamanian millionaire Carlos Eleta convinced him to return, first to train Alfonso ‘Peppermint’ Frazer, then Duran, who Arcel transformed into one of the best fighters of the century. Yet right up to his death in 1994, Arcel was wary of claiming too much credit for himself. ‘You’re only as good as the fighter you work with,’ he said.
Few of today’s coaches possess even a sliver of Arcel’s wisdom. When New York nutritionist-turned-boxer Chris Algieri got an unlikely shot at Pacquiao in 2014, his former-kickboxing-partner-turned-trainer Tim Lane proved how little he knew by repeatedly telling Algieri he was ‘doing beautiful’, even as Pacquiao beat him from pillar to post, knocking him down no fewer than six times. The unintentional comedy reached a high point during round nine, when Lane told HBO commentator Max Kellerman he was about to let Algieri ‘out of the cage’. Pacquiao sent him to the canvas (and presumably back into the cage) just seconds later.
If Lane could make his way into a corner during a world title fight, imagine the coaches circulating at lower levels of the boxing ecosystem. For a certain sort of bloke, there’s something attractively macho about donning the mitts and a body protector; perhaps a little beanie like Burgess Meredith in Rocky. Working the pads looks cool, as does leaning over the ropes while you oversee a sparring session between novices.
Such underqualified supervision would be quite harmless in a sport like golf. But being punched in the head has serious consequences. One hard sparring session and a bloody nose is unlikely to lead to lasting damage, but over a period of years a gung-ho trainer who doesn’t teach defence can have a lasting effect on his charges’ health.
Yet the bar to being a trainer is set so low. In many jurisdictions you simply pay an annual fee, and you can appear in corners at officially sanctioned fight nights. In the really strict ones you’re required to go to a course for a few hours on a Saturday. If you’re lucky they might even give you some No sparring without headgear and mouthguards stickers to put on the wall of your gym. Either way, there’s no checking up on what you actually teach or how you supervise sparring. And given the state of boxing administration around the world, only an extreme optimist would believe that’s ever likely to change. If you want to learn to box, you just have to turn up to a boxing gym and hope you get lucky—like David and I did, eventually, with Paul.
What about Fritzy, though? That was the question Dave and I pondered the next day, sitting in the cafe behind the university.
‘Fritzy’s going to hit the roof if he finds out we trained with Paul,’ said David, between bites of a chorizo omelette.
This was undeniably true. I’d heard Fritzy talk about enough ‘fucking dogs’—everyone from motorists who had cut him off to former friends who had wronged him—to know he was the type to hold a grudge.
‘I guess we just don’t tell him. But I really liked that session with Paul,’ I said.
‘Yeah. I’m no expert but I know that guy knows more about boxing than Fritzy,’ said David. ‘He’s had, like, two hundred fights. How many did Fritzy ever have? Five?’
I nodded and sipped my long black. It was starting to feel like we were cheating on our coach.
‘We can’t train with both of them,’ I said.
‘Are you saying switch trainers?’
&nbs
p; ‘Be a bit of a dog move…’
‘Well, yeah, but it was a massive dog move to put us in that little ring with James and laugh while he belted us,’ said David.
I nodded. The headaches and the bloody messes whenever I blew my nose had disappeared after a few days, but there were still the wine-coloured bruises on my hips to remind me.
I doubted our dismay over the sparring session had registered with Fritzy, and I was pretty sure that if we’d said something, he would have thought we were wimps. Only he wouldn’t have put it that nicely. We never brought it up with him, though, so who knows? James never reappeared and the issue never came to a head. (I don’t know what happened to James, but Boxrec says he never fought again. So much for needing to get the work in.)
‘I mean, I like Fritzy. He’s been pretty good to us apart from that,’ Dave continued, sounding like he was trying to convince himself.
It was true, though. I had a lot of affection for Fritzy too. As rough around the edges as he was, as loud as he was, he was lovable, and he had accepted us into his crew without a second thought. He’d taught us to the best of his ability, built us up, goofed around with us and accepted us as we were—even if we weren’t exactly what you’d call prime fighting material.
‘What about Jake and Wally and Dan?’
God, things were getting serious. We were talking about who got custody.
‘I reckon if we go with Paul we’ll just have to spar with the guys at HK Ward,’ Dave said, ‘but it’s up to you. Boxing’s more important to you.’ Dave was happy to train but had not caught the bug in the same way I had. He waved his hand like it was all too much for him.
‘I think we go with Paul,’ I said.
Dave nodded and stared into his espresso cup. ‘So are we going to write Fritzy a dear John?’
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