Was Angelo Dundee a great trainer?

A great trainer would have made a bigger stand then he did in the case of Ali. He had to see what was happening, those last five fights Ali had, even a blind man could see the damage being inflicted in those fights. A great trainer above all else protects his fighter.
Look at two fighters trained by two great trainers, Dundee and Futch, who trained Ali and Roach, both ended up with Parkinson's. Like in the case when a fighter loses they blame the trainer, when a guy takes beating after beating from guys who are good in dishing it out, they blame the fighter cos he was in charge. Their attitude is "well he took the fight, we told him not to."
Nobody who watched those fights happen as I did, were comfortable watching them. Seems the only one who stood up was Ferdie Pacheco.

 

He trained or worked with somewhere between 15-18 world champions, including a few p4p giants. That's great enough for me.

 

I don't believe in measuring the greatness of trainers.

He was a full-time professional trainer and second, and ran a well-known gym for years, worked with hundreds or thousands of fighters of all levels, and was in the game for 70 or 80 years.
He was the real deal.

 

I believe what makes a great trainer is that he is a teacher. Dundee was a great cornerman, not a great teacher.

 

I would lean this way. I think there are some "names," that have an aura about them that perhaps is a trifle unwarranted.
Lou Duva? Eddie Futch I think you were hard on, he was a teacher /strategist and had the interests of his charge at heart as Manilla showed us.

 

I think he was

 

He was a great trainer/promoter/cornerman, not a great pure trainer as such.

 

Angie had Luis Rodriquez, Gil Clancy had Emile Griffith, and Doug Lord had Curtis Cokes. A welterweight "triangle".....though Cokes never got a shot at Griffith.

Angie also trained Jose Napoles for the Monzon fight.

 

So boxing causes Parkinson's?

 

My favorite thing about Dundee was the freedom he gave his fighters to develop their own styles that he would help them refine.

 

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'While one of the world's leading neurologists was evaluating test results to determine what was ailing Muhammad Ali, the man closest to the situation was formulating his own diagnosis.
“I've been in the boxing ring for 30 years, and I've taken a lot of punches,” Ali said then, “so there is a great possibility something could be wrong.”
Ali, 42 years old at the time in 1984 and three years into retirement from boxing, was experiencing tremors, slowness of movement, slurred speech and unexplained fatigue. Neurologist Stanley Fahn, M.D., examined him at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center and diagnosed parkinsonism, the umbrella term for movement disorders including Parkinson's disease. The public announcement unleashed a flurry of questions: Had boxing really done this to the most graceful heavyweight champion of all time?
More than two decades later, there's still no way to determine whether boxing caused his Parkinson's; Ali may have been fated to develop this disorder even if he had been a lawyer. What is unequivocally true, however, is that professional boxing often damages the brain. Brain damage is as much an occupational hazard for boxers as black lung is for coal miners.

 

Brain damage isn't Parkinson's tho. Even all this time later there is no connection between boxing and the disease.

 

The thing that made Dundee a great trainer was he was

1. He knew a fighters individual psycology and exploited that in order to get his fighters to do the things he wanted. The are stories of him watching Ali sparring and he wanted to see more uppercuts so in between rounds he would say (of the one uppercut ali threw in the entire round) that it was the most beautiful punch he had ever seen and Ali would come out and throw dozens of them.

2. He would do whatever it took to get his guy the W, including bending the rules a bit. Like slashing the glove in the Cooper fight or loosening the ropes in Ziare.

3. As somebody said already he was willing to let fighters craft their own styles around what worked for them. Ali was said to have taken many gym beating creating his iconic hands down slipping style and many trainers would absolutely discourage it but Dundee helped him along as best he could to become the legend he became.

4. He was not the strategic mastermind of an Eddie Futch or the technician that Ray Arcel or Jack Blackburn were, but you can't argue the man knew how to train a great fighter.

 

He didn't slash Ali's glove against Cooper, and he didn't loosen the ropes in Zaire,on finding them dangerously slack , he took a razor blade and cut them making them shorter, and tighter, he also packed the floor of the ring because it was not level but slanting in one direction.