STARS AND STRIPES
Elliot Worsell talks to Steve Collins, Amir Khan, Scott Quigg and Andy Lee to find out why training in the USA is preferable to staying at home
Investigating the lure of America for world class British and Irish stars
MARVIN HAGLER WAS JUST ANOTHER GUY AT THE GYM. HE’D HIT THE BAGS AND PADS JUST LIKE ANYONE ELSE”
ORDINARILY Steve Collins would never let another man take his towel and use it to wipe the sweat from their brow. But this was different. Anything but ordinary. He was in Brockton, Massachusetts, a stranger in a foreign land, and the perpetrator in question, the man whose sweat was now on his towel, was Marvelous Marvin Hagler, also known as the middleweight champion of the world. Consequently, a tongue was bitten and an exception was made. Collins listened to the apology, then answered, “Don’t worry about it. I won’t ever wash that towel now.” It was, I suspect, the response we would all muster in the same situation. “I went to Brockton with one thing in mind – meet Marvin Hagler,” Collins explains today. “He was the sole reason I decided to start my professional career Stateside. I loved everything about him; his style, his attitude, his success. His was a style I wanted to learn, so where better to learn it than in the same gym as him?”
Collins was bedazzled. He was also, like many boxers from Britain and Ireland, of the belief that the United States represented the promised land. Meaning, if you wanted to meet the likes of Hagler, you had to leave; and if you wanted to be like Hagler, you had to leave for good. No Haglers, he felt, were popping off the production line back home. The mentality was different. The training was different. The gyms were different. So Collins, then an amateur, boxed in New York and chose to stay on in America while everyone else flew home. He made his way across Boston, got an apartment, a job and a car and eventually rocked up in Brockton, home of the Marvelous One. Soon he found himself stood before the Petronelli brothers, Goody and Pat, telling them who he was, what he wanted to do and who he wanted to be.
“They were great with me,” he recalls. “Over in America they love a dreamer. If you walked into a gym in Britain or Ireland with no pro fights under your belt and said you were going to be the middleweight champion of the world, you’d be greeted with all manner of scowls. They’d think you were insane. But over there they love that sort of thing. And then, once they had tried to get me bashed up in sparring and realised they couldn’t, the penny dropped. They knew I wasn’t just a dreamer. I actually had something about me.”
Collins dreamed of one thing, mind. He dreamed of being just like Marvin Hagler. It was why he watched him the way a child watches a magician perform a card trick. Not once but every single day. He wanted to learn the trick.
“Believe it or not, Hagler, at the time, was just another guy in the gym,” Collins says. “I’d watch him on the bags and pads and he’d hit them the same as anyone else. But, of course, I knew how great he was and I knew what being around him meant. So while he acted like he was just another guy in the gym, I looked up to him. It was the end of his career and the beginning of mine and we spent a 12-month period where both of us were in the gym together quite a bit. He even came to watch a few of my fights, which was nice. I remember he watched me beat Sammy Storey for the Irish title at the Boston Garden.”
Featherweight Scott Quigg is the latest boxer from these shores to pursue the American Dream and attempt to reinvent himself Stateside, only his voyage isn’t one sparked by the magnetic pull of a particular fighter. Rather, in leaving Joe Gallagher and Manchester and venturing to Freddie Roach and the Wild Card gym in Los Angeles, he seems to be warding off potential staleness and adding another flavour to the pot; something he has done throughout his career; indeed, something Gallagher, his former coach, often encouraged. “If one of Freddie’s fighters came over and Joe took him on the pads, it would be the same – it would improve them,” Quigg told me last year. “It’s a different voice and it sticks with you. If you’re getting advice from someone who has won ‘Trainer of the Year’ many times, it enhances your game. “Freddie has taken to me. I’ve spent more time on the pads with him than some of his actual fighters. When I was in New York to watch Miguel Cotto fight Sergio Martinez he found out I’d gone over and got Marvin, his assistant, to ask me if I’d do some sparring with Zou Shiming. He then invited me to the (media) workout at the Everlast gym. I said I couldn’t, he had enough on his plate – Cotto, (Ruslan) Provodnikov and so on – but he said, ‘No, if you don’t come, I’ll fall out with you.’ He even once took me and my mum to BOA, the posh steak place. He said if I go to America and didn’t go with him, he wouldn’t be my mate.”
This year Quigg has decided to go to America. Not only go there but stay there. He will soon call Los Angeles his home and will box out of the Wild Card gym, a gym he first visited when just a young prospect. He was there for two weeks that first time, staying in a motel two miles from the gym with only cockroaches for company. But it was all deemed worthwhile. “That trip made me as a fighter,” he says. What he means is it gave him a taste of sacrifice and hardship. Better yet, it brought him closer to Roach. “He’s no-nonsense and straight up,” Quigg says of his new coach. “I like the way he teaches and explains things. He was taught by Eddie Futch. I like those old-school methods. That’s how you teach. As time’s moved on, he’s moved on, but he’s kept the foundations and the fundamentals from Eddie Futch, who was a great trainer.”
Quigg, of course, isn’t the first fighter to flee Lancashire and seek solace in the open arms of Roach and Los Angeles. ➤
Amir Khan also made the same pilgrimage back in 2008, a move triggered by a shocking first-round knockout defeat at the hands of Breidis Prescott.
“It was a massive sacrifice,” Khan says. “I left everything at home, including my family, and went off to train on my own. I was meeting new people and very few of them had heard of me. Nobody was looking to do me any favours or make it easy.
“I love England. England will always be home for me. But I have had to get used to America. I’ve spent so much time over here now. Sometimes you miss your family and don’t really enjoy it, but most of the time I try to make it good.”
Khan had his Hagler moment not long after being introduced to the varied cast of the Wild Card. He met Manny Pacquiao. He watched him. He befriended him. Then, once on good terms, he was asked to step inside the ring and punch him. They sparred. Roach, offering parental guidance from the corner, called what transpired a “cockfight”. All Khan knew was it was a world away from what he experienced back home.
“We’d have British and Commonwealth champions, often junior-middleweights or middleweights, coming to the gym and I’d just take them apart,” he says. “They would then not turn up the next day, or, if they did, it would just be to take a photograph with me. They had too much respect.”
Though he has since left Roach, Khan has stayed true to his Stateside vision and now resides in Oakland with Virgil Hunter [inset]. He misses all the same things he missed while in LA but it still works for him. For Andy Lee, meanwhile, formative years spent in Detroit with Kronk legend Emanuel Steward not only cultivated a Kronk gym style – stand tall, punch long, set traps – but also helped mould a man. Seven years spent in Steward’s home – his actual home – will do that. “Due to my upbringing there was no sense of being sheltered or protected,” Lee recalls. “I didn’t mind travelling around and trying new places. When Emanuel and Detroit came about, I didn’t think twice. A lot of the things the guys in Detroit faced I’d also faced within communities in which I’d been raised. I’d experienced prejudice and isolation, so I had some kind of common ground with a lot of the black guys there. Ultimately, though, I think they appreciated me because I’d made such a sacrifice to be there. Most of the guys didn’t know what Ireland was and certainly couldn’t have pointed it out on a map. They’d ask me, ‘What state is that?’ They respected the fact I went all that way to train with them all.” The first time Lee met Steward he was on a speaking tour in Belfast with Thomas “Hitman” Hearns and about to officially open a Kronk gym in the city. “I didn’t say much, but I studied him,” Lee says. “He was always a talker and he talked a lot that day. But everything he said I agreed with. He wasn’t someone who just talked for the sake of it. He talked because he was passionate.” By March 2006, the month in which Lee made his professional debut, Steward was cornering the Irishman and allowing him to live in his house rent-
WE’D HAVE BRITISH CHAMPIONS COMING INTO THE GYM AND I’D JUST TAKE THEM APART” AS TIME HAS MOVED ON HE’S MOVED ON, BUT HE’S KEPT THE FOUNDATIONS. I LIKE THE WAY HE TEACHES”
free. Together they discussed boxing. Together they dreamed of world titles. Together they fell just short. But then, in December 2014, two years after Steward passed away, Lee finally struck gold and landed the WBO world middleweight title. He did so in Kronk colours. He did so with a new man in his corner. He had returned home, you see, relocated to England after Steward’s death, hooked up with Adam Booth, a coach he admired, and put it all together – something old, something new – to deliver the very thing his old master always assured him was within reach.
Collins, a master of pastiche, would approve. He says the Petronellis, with whom he spent five years, taught him how to box, and that linking up with Floyd Patterson in New York reawakened his punch power. “Floyd simplified everything,” adds Collins, “and said, ‘You’ve got so much power and strength, but you’re trying too hard.’ He had me adjust myself ever-so-slightly and then bang! I was punching like never before. It was only a subtle change but it made a world of difference.” After that Collins trained with Oscar Checa, the Panamanian who told him all he needed to know about lateral movement and inside fighting and momentarily had him feeling like Roberto Duran, and then he was shown how to cut off the ring by Freddie King, before finally turning up at the door of another Freddie, one working out of Mickey Rourke’s gym on Hollywood Boulevard.
“People often ask what makes Freddie Roach a great trainer and I always say the same thing: he listens and works with what you’ve got,” says Collins. “He’s not one of these trainers who will change you to suit his style of training. Instead, he will adapt his own methods to train you the way you need to be trained. Freddie will not give you a style. He will look at what you’ve got, eye up improvements and make you the best possible version of yourself you can be.
“So, by the time I hooked up with him, I had all this other stuff in my head – some coaches taught me how to box, others taught me how to fight – and he basically worked out what did and didn’t work for me. He acted as a kind of filter and cleaned everything up. Blurred lines were no longer blurred. Freddie had a lot to teach me and I had a lot to give to him, too. He was hungry and determined and wanted to become the best trainer possible. Together we had a broad canvas. We could fight, we could box, we could counterpunch, we could slug. Choosing opponents was a thrill because we knew I had something to use against every style out there.”
And it all stemmed from an open mind, a blank canvas and a clean towel.