Freddie Roach Goes the Distance

By Pablo S. Torre

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For Freddie Roach the Wild Card gym holds a wealth of memories as well as the daily action that keeps him going. Robert Beck/SI

This article appears in the November 16, 2009 issue of Sports Illustrated.

He wouldn't have gone to that funeral no matter whose it was, and no matter who urged him to go. Not his mother's. Not his older brothers'. Not for Mike Tyson or Manny Pacquiao or Oscar De La Hoya or any of the other 24 world champions he has trained.

So on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend -- the day Joey Roach was buried back home in Dedham, Mass. -- Freddie Roach was at his Wild Card Boxing Club in Hollywood. His body trembled as he alternately answered phones behind the front desk and wrapped hands and slipped on the mitts out on the floor. It's the kind of multitasking he performs six days a week, Christmas included.

What about the sadness?

The gut-wrenching reality that Joey, his younger brother and favorite sparring partner, had died in his sleep at age 47? It would have to creep in later, as Freddie Roach, 49, fell asleep still wearing his horn-rimmed glasses, a video of Pacquiao's next opponent, Miguel Cotto, playing on the TV. Until then the best boxing trainer in the world would be at work.

"Last time I saw a dead person was 1981," says Roach. "I went with my girlfriend to see her father's body the night before his funeral. Ever since, all these great memories I had of the guy have always ended with him lying there. I don't want that to be the last thing I remember about someone."

The walls of the Wild Card are plastered with memories of Freddie's choosing. There are rows of posters from his fighting days as the Choir Boy, a speed-bag-busting lightweight who had the legendary Eddie Futch in his corner. There are posed shots with actors such as Christian Bale and Mark Wahlberg, who come to spray sweat with the $5-a-day regulars. There are photos of Roach's brigade of titlists, a floor-to-ceiling who's who of the sweet science: Tyson, Pacquiao, De La Hoya, Bernard Hopkins, James Toney and Wladimir Klitschko, to name just a few.

"Freddie Roach is up there among the all-time greats," boxing historian Bert Sugar says. "Like a jockey with a racehorse, a trainer is known by the productivity of his fighters. And Freddie's done one hell of a job."

But as Roach prepares Pacquiao for the most anticipated fight of the year, a WBO welterweight title bout against Cotto on Saturday in Las Vegas, what is most remarkable about all that productivity is its context. Few people know exactly how hard it is for Roach to do the job he loves. The man with three Trainer of the Year awards -- the most ever won by one person -- not only trembles involuntarily but also suffers other symptoms of Parkinson's disease, the result of his own career as a boxer. "What Freddie does is amazing," says Joseph Chung, Roach's neurologist. "No one understands the pain he's in every day."

And there's a reason no one understands. Around Roach's gym and training camps only three topics are verboten: politics, religion and the boss's mortality.

"We're fighters," says former cruiserweight Marcus Harvey, one of several former boxers employed by Roach as trainers. "We know time is ticking, but why would we want to imagine that?"