LAS VEGAS — In the beginning it didn’t sound a single alarm bell from Freddie Roach’s Wild Card Gym in West Hollywood all the way east to the fourth incarnation of Gleason’s Gym on the Brooklyn waterfront.
There was this amateur champion from Kazakhstan, who fought as a pro in Germany and was looking for a gym in the United States.
And there was this shrewd trainer of boxers, Abel Sanchez, who mothballed his equipment, left the business and wound up building homes on a California mountaintop. It didn’t take long for the great mortgage balloon to explode and drive him back to boxing. He reconfigured his garage and turned it into a gym.
Golovkin already had more than 300 amateur fights without making a ripple in the professional boxing world. His promoter, also another unknown phantom of boxing, named Tom Loeffler, brought him to California. They saw Roach. They saw Robert Garcia, another highly successful trainer. They saw Abel Sanchez.
The mountains and the snow reminded him of Kazakhstan. The gym was almost empty. He liked that, too. He did not say anything much to Sanchez.
He just went home.
Three months later, they called Sanchez and told him to drive to the airport in L.A. and pick him up. He had one little bag. Sanchez asked where the rest of his luggage was. ”I come here to train,” Golovkin said, “not to party.”
“I studied his face on the drive back,” Sanchez will tell you. “I thought I came to pick up fighter and they sent me a kid with face of a choirboy. I thought he couldn’t hurt a fly.
“Boy, was I wrong. It wasn’t his work on the heavy bag or the speed bag, or even the sparring. I knew he was a fighter as soon as we worked with the mitts. I felt the power and I thought, ‘We really have something here.'”
And together they have been something.
