Great trainers and their alleged disappearance from the sport

Yeah but not marketed like SRL and the amateur program exploding afterwards......Patterson only fought amateur 3yrs and had around 40 fights.....we are talking about amateur fighters with hundreds of fights coming into the pros and within a short time fighting for world titles because of the extensive pedigree vs the early days when the mindset was to make money and learn on the job, in the gyms and sparring leading to a pro having a hundred fights. My argument here is the human body has a shelf life and during a harsher era the amateur experience was not prized because it was nearly as harsh without payoff...hence the amount of fights these guys had then.

 

I'll be frank and say I can't see how the talent of trainers is externally evaluable to people who are not themselves in close contact with actual training camps (or at least were for an extended period of time in the past). Too many confounding variables. This seems like a judgment that would require extensive firsthand experience.

 

Pedroza, Camacho at super feather, Davis jr, Leonard, Pryor, Gomez,( before he fell in love with his power) Duran, Benitez, Sanchez, Prime Hagler, Napoles,Whitaker, Prime Tyson, Holyfield had excellent feet, and combo punching at Lt.Heavy, so did Qawi, Nunn. Toney, Norris, McCallum, (Prime) and that's the last 30, 40 yrs with exception of Napoles. (Your Criteria) If we go back farther, Pep, Griffith,Moore,Charles, of course Robinson and many others did exactly what Lomo, (and only Lomo) does today . He didn't invent offence flowing to defense, he didnt invent purpose combo punching, he didnt invent turning the opponent for an advantage. Some of the fighters I named were more aggressive, some more defensive minded, but if you watch them, Lomo is doing what they did. The only thing special about Lomo is the weak Competition he's faced . Unlike the fighters I listed who usually came across someone just as skilled, and had to take it too another level to be considered an ATG.

 

This. I'd also say that some of the great trainers that are still around don't give it their all anymore, since even a great trainer can't guarantee that a fighter won't take a loss, so I can see why most great trainers just go through the motions now days. Imagine if Joe Louis dumped Blackburn or Ali dumped Dundee over their first loss and didn't accept personal responsibility for losing. Guys like Kovalev, Khan, etc.. have all the talent in the world, but whenever they take a loss it has to be the coach.

 

It is also fair to say that the expectation of a title fight in short order has taken away from the trainers having years and years of development.....today the instant gratification mindset is a crossover relatively speaking. If fighters aren't knocking on the top ten in 15 fights they change trainers and mgmt. The Mexican fighters seem to be the last of the old school and even they are looking for talent that can get to a title shot in 20-30 fights.

 

Watch this space.

 

I have nothing to add to what I already said. I just don't see really how an outsider can evaluate the skills of trainers through publicly accessible evidence.

 

I think the whole "not enough great trainers now" thing comes from things some former fighters have said in the last 2 or 3 decades.
American fighters who came up in the 1960s, '70s and '80s have, at times, made such statements.
I'm not sure if it's to do with trainers who are working with the top fighters at the top level so much as the trainers who a young beginner is likely to encounter in their first year in a gym.
There's probably a lot of truth to it in that regard.

 

I remember reading in Ring magazine years ago where several of the best boxing trainers were asked a series of questions ie how to throw a jab, where your hands should be placed in a fighters stance and even what part of the fist should be used to punch and each and every one gave a wildly different answer. I'm not saying that they didn't know what they were talking about but clearly there are no hard and fast rules in boxing and what might work for a certain trainer and fighter might be a complete bust with another fighter in the mix.

Really the only way to evaluate how good a trainer is is to see how good his fighter is. But then again I recall reading how George Gainsford said that he was the best boxing trainer in the world because he trained Sugar Ray Robinson, only for someone to ask him the obvious question of why all of his fighters weren't as good as Sugar Ray then.

 

You wouldn't expect a "great" trainer to continue to build guys from scratch. The economics of it just doesn't make sense because so much of the foundation work is done for free and with no guarantees. You can put in a ton of work with a guy, then he meets a girl and you never see him again. Or he gets shot or locked up. Or he gets hit in the liver and quits. There are a million things that can derail the process.

And once you build your reputation, fighters come to you and they already know how to jab, hold their hands up, etc...And you fine tune them, they fight and you get paid. Why, then, would you want to spend your time teaching 12 year olds to jab?

A good trainer is a tremendous advantage to a fighter at every level. I've mentioned previously a guy I worked with that has sparred with virtually every top fighter from 140-160. His career as a fighter is over and he is training kids now and they are winning everything in sight; he is a gifted communicator and he has a ton of knowledge. His kids all fight in a style and they succeed because they know that he knows and they listen.

 

A lot of good grass-roots trainers aren't necessarily looking to make more money and have other interests outside of boxing.
They don't have the time or inclination to get involved in travelling all over the place away from home and families to work with fighters at the top level.
I think significant numbers of those local grass roots trainers are what people say is often missing now as compared to a few decades ago.