Fight of biblical proportions
Arrival of Ruiz Jr’s trainer brings out brotherly love
If Kevin Barry is going to be what Cain was to Abel, then he’s first going to lure him close with a lot of brotherly love. Trainer Abel Sanchez has arrived in Auckland to oversee the final preparations of his heavyweight Andy Ruiz Jr, who fights Joseph Parker for the WBO crown at Vector Arena on Saturday.
The 61-year-old trainer, who built his own 1200sq m gym at altitude in Big Bear Lake, California, has become the darling of the boxing cognoscenti. This year he was named trainer of the year by the esteemed Boxing Writers’ Association of America, largely based on the work he has done with Kazakhstani Gennady Golovkin, known as Triple G, the undisputed middleweight boxing champion of the world.
He has a small kennel of boxers at Big Bear, including rising cruiserweight Murat Gassiev, the Russian who won the world IBF title in Moscow last weekend.
“Abel’s on a hot streak at the moment which concerns me a little bit coming into the fight on Saturday,” Barry said. “Abel is one of the elite trainers in world boxing and a man I have enormous respect for. When Andy went to train with Abel . . . he gave himself every chance he could to win this fight. It’s the smartest thing Andy could do.
“I’ve never heard a negative or bad word said about this man in all my time in boxing.”
Boxing is a game of posturing and manufactured hate but behind the curtain there lies a genuine respect between those who prepare athletes to inflict and absorb pain.
“I am on a winning streak at the moment but that’s in Russia, not in New Zealand,” said a magnanimous Sanchez.
He pointed to the advantage Barry had of being able to devote all his energies to Parker, while he had to split his among eight athletes across various weight classes.
Having said that, Sanchez is known as a systems trainer: the weight class of his fighter is irrelevant. Sanchez has a programme based around old-school values of hard work and dedication and all his fighters are expected to adhere to it. Sanchez has only a stripped-back caucus. He has no need, he reckons, for nutritionists, strength-and-conditioning coaches and other specialists. He has no need for psychologists and, he says, he’s surprised Parker does.
This was the contrived controversy section of the production*, where Sanchez was asked to explain his apparently dismissive attitude to the news Barry had Parker engage the services of a sports psychologist.
Correction: “It’s not something I would have expected Kevin to allow him to do,” clarifies Sanchez. “Tiger Woods the greatest golfer on earth has a psychologist. Every fighter is different but if they require a psychologist then maybe I’m not the right coach for them.”
As a counterpoint, Barry was asked why he found it surprising the Ruiz camp arrived just a week before the fight?
Correction: “What I actually said was if that decision was mine and I was making it on behalf of Joseph, I would bring him down two weeks before,” clarifies Barry. “Abel has been up in Big Bear for a long time training a number of world champions . . . he’s had people fight in all different continents around the world so I’m sure he knows exactly the amount of time required.”
All artificial angst aside, the two trainers know that even if they make a nice back story, it is not them that will be harvesting eyeballs on Saturday. That’s the job of the fighters and their pugilistic skills. “We have two guys who are finally going to show us what heavyweight boxing is actually about. We’ve been watching wrestling for the last 10 years,” Sanchez says.
Here, both mentors say, is a fight to get excited about between two young punchers. Trainers and spruikers alike hope it will be of biblical proportions.
* Which was held at a fast-food joint and one of the main talking points was Ruiz Jr's dramatic weight loss. Only boxing can throw up these contradictions without any irony.