Was Angelo Dundee a great trainer?

It's not been fully established whether Ali had "Parkinson's Disease" or whether he suffered from "Parkinsonism syndrome".
I'm not a medical scientist enough to explain or understand the difference entirely, but getting hit in the head is thought to be a common cause of the latter.

Brain damage can do a zillion and one weird and horrible things to a person, that much should be obvious.

We will never know whether Ali would have ended up the same anyway had he not been a boxer. But we have enough reason to believe that boxing can cause cause such a condition.

 

How do you know ? Did you ever train under him ?

 

Yeah it gets a bit monotonous seeing so much speculation when the actual experts in the field still don't know that much in reality. Boxing can't be a healthy pastime but it's speculation wondering this and that. If the top dogs didn't know the difference between the two what hope have we got.

 

All those blows to the head certainly didn't do him any good. I believe his chin and his heart were too strong for his own good. He took shots in his career that would have left many other great fighters sparked out.

 

I agree.
But perhaps the perception that Ali's condition was definitely caused by boxing (despite it being far from a proven fact) serves as a useful reminder to boxers to get out of the game when they are still on top !

 

Good points ... I think Ali was more influenced by Herbert and Co. in terms of his career; he kept fighting because they never told him not to. If he wasn't going to listen to Ferdie, I doubt he would have listened to Dundee.

For his part, I think Angelo's perspective was Ali wanted to keep fighting; if he stepped aside, more than likely someone who didn't care about the man would have taken his place. If someone else was in the corner during the Holmes debacle (Bundini was bad enough), Ali might have suffered an even worse beating. Dundee was like Futch with Frazier in Manila that night and protected his fighter when nobody else would.

spt

 

Very true.

 

I think, as previously pointed out, Dundee was good in between rounds and a good ring ****yst. I don't think he was a good conditioner.

 

Something has never sat right with me about dundee. He would have carried on cornering Ali till 1984 if he had been given half a chance.he watched and saw it all and did nothing.his legacy is severely tarnished imo. He was no duva,futch or arcel as a trainer or as a,man ino

 

I knew him and knew enough about him. Nacho Beristian, is considered a great trainer, I was with him 2+yrs. I was with Lou Duva for many yrs. I learned one thing from all of them, always have a great trainer as your asst. All of them were great cornermen, they were not the primary or head trainers. Beristian, Duva, Dundee had one thing in common they had too many guys to train. Angelo had a Cuban guy, Duva had Benton, Shields, Bloodworth, Nacho had a bunch of guys, one in particular Fernando Castrejon.
Being a great cornerman is not a dig, motivating guys in the corner is a great talent to have and not everybody has it.

 

Regarding Ali going on too long, Dundee had no influence whatsoever on what Ali did.
What he did state and has been said above was that if Ali wanted to go on, then it might as well be him in the corner who'd always looked after him, rather than someone new who they didn't really know.

 

I remember reading an interview with someone years ago & they remarked how Dundee didn't develop fighters from scratch. It mentioned Emanuel Steward would develop a fighter right out of the amateurs & work with them daily. In contrast, Dundee often would come into camp near the end & was mostly a great corner presence. Sorry this is so vague this was from a boxing magazine from the early 90's.