His baby face leaves you a distinct first impression. This kid can’t be a fast-rising professional boxer, you think. He looks more like an altar boy, that angelic face has fooled more than a few of Freddie Roach’s opponents.
“He does look like a choir boy,” veteran matchmaker Teddy Brenner says of the once-beaten junior featherweight from the Boston suburb of Dedham. “But Roach, in the ring, looks like a real fighter. We (Top Rank) signed him for our ‘Tomorrow’s Champions” package because he belongs in that group. There is a skill, a class, about him.”
“When you’re punching, he punches with you,” Brenner adds. “He won’t tie you up. I love him. He may look like a 15-year-old kid who is entering the sub-novice division of the Golden Gloves but he fights like an old pro. When he has to fight, he fights like a pit bull.”
But Roach, who comes from a fighting family which includes a father who has managed and trained him, a mother who is a licensed judge of pro bouts in Massachusetts and four brothers who have all done some boxing, is just one of boxing’s oddest couples. His professor of pugilism is 69-year-old Eddie Futch, the soft-spoken but firm trainer who has been in the corner of such world champions as Joe Frazier, Ken Norton and Don Jordan.
They may seem to be an odd combination, the young Irish-American prospect and the old black trainer, but they have had nothing but success since their first chance meeting in a Las Vegas gymnasium. It is Futch–who was once a Detroit Golden Gloves teammate of heavyweight named Joe Louis–who put Roach through finishing school, who has taken off the rough edges and developed him into a contender in the 122-pound division.
Futch laughed when he recalled how Roach’s soft features and unbent nose had faked out a Mexican boxer named Jose Resendez. “This is really an asset,” Futch claims. “A lot of opponents have looked at Freddie and thought, “I’ll whip this little kid easily.” And, for the Resendez fight, Freddie came in at 119 1/2. The other guy was 127 but I made him get down to weight.”
“Freddie was there as this guy kept going to the scales trying to make the weight. Finally, he made it. And he said, “Where is the guy I’m fighting?’ I pointed to Freddie and he said, ‘That little kid! I’ll let him last a couple of rounds.”
Resendez, who had gone the 10-round limit with such experienced and talented fighters as Albert Davila and Javier Flores, had a rude awakening that evening in Las Vegas.
“Freddie has fought a lot of rough, tough guys,” Futch says, “But this Resendez was as cute as they come and tough. Freddie wobbled him and had him going straight up and back.” Roach won that fight on an eight-round decision and then decisioned Resendez in 10 rounds four months later for the NABF 122-pound championship.
One observer who hasn’t been fooled by Roach’s appearance is Mel (Red) Greb. Greb is a veteran matchmaker in Las Vegas, and after watching Roach fight often, he was thoroughly convinced. “I have seen him seven times,” the Caesars Palace pit boss says. “And I am highly impressed. He needs a little defense but he is a thrill fighter. There are no doubts about his coming to fight. He has no qualms about mixing it up. That first fight with Resendez was a real war.”
Roach and his father, Paul, made the decision that the boxer should leave the New England area, where fights were few and far between, and head for the gaudy Vegas Strip where the Silver Slipper Casino ran weekly club bouts. Like anyone in any trade, Roach needed a place to learn his business. He had progressed as much as he could around Boston.
