This thread brings only one trainer to mind...I'm hopelessly prejudiced. I climbed the 13 steps to Stillman’s Gym on a frigid afternoon in '47 to learn how to box and emulate local idols, Rocky Graziano and Jake LaMotta. The gatekeeper at the head of the stairs, collecting quarters for entrance, was manager Jack Curley, under the gimlet eye of Lou Stillman seated on a raised chair next to ring # 1. I paid and asked Jack Curley if he could set me up with a trainer. After appraising me like a pawnbroker, he crooked a finger at a character the image of the Penguin in a Batman comic book. “Izzy, see what the kid’s got.” He must have been mid-40s, about 5-7 – bulging wall-eyes, the drained pallor of a lifetime in airless gyms, and dark, kinky-curly hair threatening to uncoil but bulldogged down and parted in the middle like a ‘20s bootlegger. His nose was much too long for his face and pointy as a dart. He had no chin, no neck, was shaped like a pear and his stomach hiked up his trousers to his chest. He wore what must have been a white T-shirt at one time and an unbuttoned cardigan sweater with a towel thrown over his shoulder. Rocking back on his heels, he shuffled over, chest out, straight up and flatfooted; his shoes pointing outward like a Garment Center salesman. The only thing missing was the Penguin's umbrella. He was my coach for the years I trained at Stillman’s. His name was Izzy Blank, and he looked after me like a son. Though Izzy never gained the notoriety of a Charley Goldman, Ray Arcel, Whitey Bimstein, and the like, he was respected and embraced by the fraternity and was spared, for the most part, from Stillman’s wrath As good or bad as I ever got, Izzy never allowed me to forget what he thought unpardonable: As a teenager, I did what all the other kids did, I carried a condom in my wallet-- not that I had chance to use it-- but it was expected. One day while changing, the rubber fell out of my wallet onto the floor and Izzy saw it. If I did anything after that that didn't live up to his expectation, he shrugged: "Sure! How can he fight? He's in the saddle!" I had to do three times what anybody else did. If I so much as took a deep breathe: "The kid's in the saddle!" Izzy Blank died a few years ago…still unsung -- a funny, dear man that was my professor at the University of Eighth Ave.
Oh, yeah, fogot about Joe atsch He's my favorite, too! Well, Joe's the guy I like the most as a person, in terms of whom I think is the best coach (although we have no way of knowing how good a coach is, really) I think it's Freddy The Great Coach Roach. He's smart, he seems to think about it a lot, he studies tapes, he gives good advice in the corner.
dan birmingham, home town bias. Only thing I would disagree with is that he should have threw in the towel in the calzaghe fight