Was Emmanuel Stewart a weasel?

Isn't that fairly self explanatory!

 

Emmanuel Steward was a very great trainer, he taught his fighters detail, the fundamentals, and good defense. Look at the job he did with Lennox Lewis, who used to get caught with right hands from people like Hassim Rahman and Oliver McCall. His fighters were always in good condition, an all time great trainer.

 

Dennis Andries was beaten by Manny trained Thomas Hearns. The experience made Dennis decide to get trained by Steward.

I attended a dinner where Manny was the guest speaker. Among the hours that he talked and answered questions he did explain that Lennox was a guy he always wanted to train since Lewis was an amateur. He had always wanted a tall heavyweight with a strong amateur pedigree.

He said Lewis was the one heavyweight who came out of the Olympics that he had always wanted to train or manage. Steward had been involved with Tony Tucker early on but that turned sour due to all kinds of problems not to do with boxing. So He had been desperate to sign Lewis up but was disappointed he had been turned down.

I’m sure there are other sources that can be found where Steward says this. Anyway, he said that having tried to become Lewis’s trainer and failed several times, for whatever reason, manny said he knew that the one thing left that he could do that would finally convince Lewis to take him as his head coach would be for him to offer his services to Lewis after getting him beat the way he did when he coached McCall to beat Lewis.

 

I think it’s more bizarre that McCall is older than tyson and he’s still fighting

 

But why wouldn’t they embrace him?

 

When did Floyd’s father offer to train Pacquiao? None of the other examples you mentioned actually seem to involve fighters refusing to work with the trainers who helped beat them.

 

Why did Lennox hire a trainer who taught someone how to beat him?

That’s like asking why some other NFL team would hire Bill Belichick if they could — you think they wouldn’t want to hire a coach who beat them regularly so they could make their team the one who wins all the time?

 

He never was Vitali's trainer he was Wladimir's. Vitali had the same German trainer who passed away. I forget his name though

 

I gather you don’t get how this works.

See, boxers hire trainers not the other way around.

It’s not considered a good practice for a boxing trainer to approach a fighter who already has a trainer and try to ‘steal’ him. In fact, if the trainer has a contract it could be tampering, which is illegal.

Now if a fighter fires a trainer and is known to be shopping, a trainer would be fine in approaching that boxer. But mostly it’s the boxer (in concert with the manager almost always, and usually the manager would be the one to handle it) who reached out to the trainer.

People also tend to think of athletes like Legos and that’s not how it works — every part doesn’t fit with another. A trainer can be a great teacher/coach with one fighter but not click with another. A fighter can absorb everything from Trainer A — who you might judge to not be as good as Trainer B — but not get or accept the teaching/training methods of Trainer B and thus they aren’t the right fit for each other.

It’s a complex relationship that involves trust and buy-in and commitment. The fighter needs to believe in the trainer and the trainer needs to believe in the fighter for it to work best, but even then some athletes process things through repetition and some through verbal methods and some through film study and some through combinations of those.

What coaching is not is writing a recipe in a book and saying ‘Follow these instructions to the letter and you’ll get the same result every time regardless of the athlete,’ and what it REALLY isn’t is puppetry. I hear/see people all the time blaming a trainer for a fighter keeping his hand too low — like Eddie Futch didn’t ever notice that, like the fighter has been doing it his whole life that way and not one coach ever tried to correct it. I’ve trained fighters and done some other coaching — and in some cases you can beg and plead and scream and yell and demonstrate and reward and punish, and the athlete under the lights is sometimes going to do things their way or revert to what is comfortable rather than have the discipline to do what is best.

 

^ Very well put, Saintpat. Boxing is a money game in many ways. Whoever has the backing and money to hire an Angelo Dundee, Emmanuel Steward, or Eddie Futch will certainly look at it as an option. The relationship might last one fight, even if they fighter wins. If successful, it might last for the remainder of a career. Sometimes bonds develop. Sometimes it's just business.

It might be interesting to do a trainer vs. trainer thread. Say, Angelo Dundee vs. Eddie Futch. I bet we'd see a lot of corner switching. And when a fighter starts going downhill, they often can't afford a premier trainer anymore. Take Pinklon Thomas as an example. Against James Tillis, Angelo Dundee was in the opposite corner. Later he was in Pinklon's corner. But after 1989 or so he didn't work for Thomas anymore, if I remember right. A) Dundee had enough prestige to only stick with winners and hot prospects, and B) Thomas could probably no longer afford him..

I've never heard anything suggesting Emmanuel Steward was a weasel. Early on he took a bunch of kids off the streets and made some of them champions. He built a name for himself. Later he had the prestige to be a trainer for hire. Nothing wrong there. It was his career arc.

 

No

 

This is it, in a nutshell, for me. I've honestly been failing to see the mystery as the thread has gone on.

I get Glass' point that a fighter might be stubborn or pig-headed but, if they take those traits out of the equation and look at it dispassionately, they would get who they believe to be the best for their team.

If a trainer has just trained a guy to beat you, a guy who you perceive to be a vastly inferior fighter, then that trainer must be a big improvement on what you've currently got training you. A sensible fighter makes the switch.