Roach perseveres, beats the odds

HOLLYWOOD, Calif.

Though Freddie Roach has worked with 25 champions, the case for the world’s best trainer is usually made by the world’s best fighter, Manny Pacquiao, who fights tough Ghanaian welterweight Joshua Clottey this Saturday night at Cowboys Stadium.

In the years since he arrived here, at Roach’s Wild Card gym, Pacquiao has added six of his seven titles — going from flyweight to welter — and acquired great proficiency with his right hand. No fighter has done what Pacquiao has accomplished under Roach.

But on the trainer’s 50th birthday, I was moved to reconsider the conventional assessment. Roach’s greatest glory isn’t Pacquiao, but Roach himself.

You give me a boxing story; I’ll lay 3-to-1 it ends tragically. Lives lived in such close proximity to violence are not earmarked for success. Rather, violence tends to beget more violence, not to mention poverty, depression and dementia.

Freddie Roach didn’t seem like an exception, certainly not on the night of Oct. 24, 1986, at the Lowell Auditorium, in Lowell, Mass. — his less than grand finale as a professional pugilist. Roach was 39-12, but had lost four of his last five fights. His opponent, David Rivello — “good kid, but nothing special” says Roach — was 9-0.

“I’m getting ready for the fight, thinking: 'What am I doing here?'” he recalls. “I won the New England Golden Gloves five years in a row at Boston Garden. But I never won here in my life.”

His state of mind did not improve once the fight began. “In the second round, I started thinking what I was going to do after. Go out to eat? Maybe a party. I retired in the second round of that fight.”

As it happened, “Irish” Freddie Roach — who, in fact, is French-Canadian — lost a 10-round majority decision, thanked his fans, and made it official, telling the emcee, “You’ll never see me in the ring again.”

When he returned to the dressing room, his father was waiting. Paul Roach was a former New England featherweight champ, a violent man, but one whom his son admired. After all, says Freddie, “He taught me how to fight.”

“What happened?” his father asked.

“What do you mean?” said Freddie.

“How could you have been so good and end up like this?”

“Go f--- yourself,” said Freddie.

That was the last he saw of his father. But almost 24 years later, what hurts most is that the old man turned for the door instead of turning to fight.

There had been plenty of father-son action over the years, with Paul Roach going undefeated against Freddie and his four brothers. “We weren’t the best kids in the world,” he says. “If we got a beating we probably deserved it.”

That wasn’t the case with his mother, though. Barbara Roach never deserved it.

“No,” says Freddie. “One hundred percent, no.”

Still, something offends him in the way his father left. “So passive,” says Freddie. “You know what? I liked him better when he was mean. Now he was beat. He stopped socializing. He stopped going to the gym. He gave up.”

Paul Roach’s sons were raised to do one thing: fight. It was bad enough when Freddie’s older brother, Pepper, closed out his career with a six-rounder and meth habit the year before. But Freddie’s retirement signaled Paul Roch’s ultimate defeat.

“When I retired it was over,” he says. “If his kids weren’t fighting, he had nothing to live for. He lived through us, and I was the last one.”

Freddie spoke to his father one more time, calling from Vegas some months later.

“Who’s this?”

“Freddie.”

“I don’t know who you are.”

“Your son ... the fighter.”

Alzheimer’s had already taken the father’s memory. Paul Roach — 29-5 as a pro whose career ended with a 10th-round knockout loss in Hollywood in 1953 — was 54. He had just months to live.

By then, Pepper was in jail, and Freddie was in Vegas. He remembered all the guys who told him there’d be a job waiting for him when he retired. Valet. Bellman. Greeter.

Now all the big shots said the same thing: “We’re slow right now. Not hiring.”

Freddie was drinking heavily. Then one day, he had an argument with his girlfriend. “Are you saying ‘No’?” she asked. “Or are you just shaking again?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You shake all the time,” she said.

It was the beginning of Parkinson’s. It was another boxing story. At that point, the odds against Freddie Roach were a lot worse than 3-to-1.

Which makes his 50th both a monumental upset and the happiest boxing story I know. It was last Friday night at The Palm in West Hollywood. The guy who couldn’t get a job as a busboy picked up the tab for about 80. There was steak and salmon and platters of big, plump shrimp, and as much wine as you could drink.

Pepper Roach sat comfortably with a proper shirt covering his prison tats. “Oh those?” he likes to say. “Don’t mean nothing. I got a Jewish wife.”

And there she was at Palm, beaming, as her loving husband introduced her.

Barbara Roach, now a psychiatric nurse, sat with Freddie at the center of a big table.

“Usually when the Roachs get together, there’s a fight,” he said. “I mean, at two of my sisters' weddings, we had brawls.”

No brawls that night. Just smiles and toasts.

I noticed that Freddie wore a Rolex. Then he opened a present from his ICM agents: brass knuckles.
He held them up for his guests to laugh. Brass knuckles and a Rolex — just what you need to make it in America.

Freddie never threw a party for himself before. Then again, as he says “I never thought I’d make it to 50.”

I asked if he thought of his father that night.

“Yes,” says Freddie Roach. “And I think he would’ve been happy for me.”