Bouie Fisher talking about his craft

Here's a great article that isn't on the internet anymore. It features Bouie Fisher talking about being a trainer and where his knowledge came from.

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Old-time trainers a dying breed
By BERNARD FERNANDEZ
fernanb@phillynews.com

LONGTIME Philadelphia boxing impresario Joe Hand Sr. was an original investor in Cloverlay, which backed the early professional career of 1964 Olympic heavyweight gold medalist Joe Frazier. As such, he can attest to the Svengali-like influence Smokin' Joe's manager-trainer, Yancey "Yank" Durham, held over the future world champion and Hall of Famer.

"If Yank told Joe to go to the top of a building and jump off, I think Joe might have done it without even asking why," Hand says. "That might be overstating the case a little, but Joe put his total faith and trust in Yank. That's a big part of why they were so successful as a team.

"You don't see that sort of bond between fighters and trainers much anymore."

The memory of their relationship was stirred by the success of "Million Dollar Baby," the movie that KO'd the Oscar competition in February. Clint Eastwood played Frankie Dunn, a longtime trainer who was fading into the background when aspiring boxer Maggie Fitzgerald (Hillary Swank) walked into his gym. Slowly, their mutual trust grew, as did her stature. It worked in this contemporary form, but the phenomenon is becoming harder to find in the many gyms that make up Philadelphia's training ground.

Undisputed middleweight champion Bernard "The Executioner" Hopkins and his 77-year-old trainer, Bouie Fisher, come closest to following the blueprint laid out by Frazier-Durham and other tandems that helped establish Philadelphia as perhaps America's premier fight town. Unlike Frazier, noted contrarian Hopkins questions almost everything his trainer of 15 years tells him, but in the end he always follows the instructions of a man he loves and respects like blood kin.

"Bouie is it," Hopkins says. "He's the last link to that legacy [of great Philly trainers]. Who else is there? Name five others who have his credentials. Name two. Name one, even. You can't do it.

"It wasn't like that in the past. There were so many great trainers in Philadelphia. But [Milt] Bailey, he died. Al Fennell is not doing well, healthwise. The pool is drying up."

Fisher had planned to retire when Hopkins quits the ring, which should be next January. But now he is working with Hopkins' 24-year-old nephew, junior welterweight prospect Demetrius Hopkins, and he still goes to the gym every day hoping some young boy with a vision - and the talent and desire to fulfill it - will walk through the door. Fisher speaks of working corners until he, too, joins the list of deceased Philly legends such as Durham, Bailey, Quenzell McCall, Jack Blackburn, Joe Gramby, Sam Solomon, Jimmy Wilson, Willie O'Neill, Jimmy Coster, Joe Rose, Jimmy Arthur, Wesley Mouzon and "Slim" Jim Robinson, who in many cases worked until they dropped.

"It's my way of giving back some of what was given to me," Fisher says. "I was a young guy when I started [training], and it was like being enrolled in a university, a university of boxing. The gym was my classroom.

"I can't tell you how lucky I was to spend time around Quenzell McCall, Milt Bailey, Joe Gramby, [Clarence] 'Skinny' Davis, Dick Kain. Oh, man. It went on and on and on. You hear enough stories, something is going to stick.

"There were so many great trainers to come out of Philadelphia. And even the ones who weren't great were pretty good. A lot of times, we'd stay in the gym until 11 or 12 o'clock at night, even 1 or 2 in the morning. Just telling stories."

There are fewer local gyms now, which means fewer fighters to learn and fewer trainers to teach them. The old stories, once swapped nightly, are becoming fables, and the fear is that, at some point, the aging tellers of tales will take all that accumulated wisdom to their graves.

Bernard Hopkins, Philadelphia's only current world champion, speaks of upholding a proud legacy he hopes to pass on to his nephew or Rock Allen: young, talented fighters who will maintain the city's cherished identity with boxing. But Fisher also carries a banner so easily transferable; in recent years, he has seen many of his contemporaries pass away. Others, such as Fennell and George Benton - Hall of Fame trainer of Evander Holyfield, Meldrick Taylor and Pernell Whitaker - are in failing health and work either sporadically or not at all.

"It's like losing a brother or a member of your own family," Fisher says of each death of a respected colleague. "Another teacher is gone. It's sad.

"You hear people talk about those legendary Philadelphia gym wars. But that was where Philadelphia fighters learned to fight. They learned from the old masters, then they got into the ring and practiced what they'd learned."

Hall of Fame promoter J Russell Peltz, who has staged boxing cards in Philadelphia since 1969, acknowledges that the premier trainers are a dying breed. Some of that, he says, goes back to the practices of the trainers themselves.

"A lot of the old trainers were secretive," Peltz says. "They never really passed on their tricks of the trade. And a lot of the fighters who were trained by the old guys, when they got to retirement age, didn't become trainers themselves."

Fisher says that that's just not true, that this was a fraternity in which time together wasn't the only thing shared.

"What secrets were you going to keep from another guy, anyway?" he asks. "Guys who were going to fight each other trained in the same gym. The guy your man was going to fight would be just finishing up, then you'd get in the ring to work and the people who had just finished would stay and watch you.

"The funny thing is, we trainers were worried more about the other trainers than their fighters. It's true. At the end of the day, you'd say, 'I got to get ready for Quenzell McCall tomorrow.' Not for his fighter, but for the guy who trained the fighter.

"And Quenzell would be worrying the same way about another trainer. That's just how it was.

"No, we didn't keep secrets to ourselves. Everybody tried to help everybody else. We all helped each other."

Fisher says that what he didn't pick up in those late-night gabfests, he did simply from observing and making mental notes. And, thanks to the miracle of modern technology, he also has become quite handy with a remote control.

"I'm lucky to have access to videotapes now, which wasn't the case way back when," he says. "I study tape every day, 6 or 7 hours a day. I've probably got 1,500 to 2,000 tapes of different fighters from different eras with different styles. And I've seen all of them more than once.

"I've looked at the tape of Bernard's fight with [Felix] Trinidad I don't know how many times. But you know what? Every time I look at it, I see something different. I see things that the old Philadelphia trainers taught me that I learned and passed on to Bernard.

"Take the right hand that Bernard threw that put Trinidad down [in the 12th round of their September 2001 bout]. The position of his body, how he got into position to throw that right... he fooled Trinidad by throwing a jab, then a fake jab. Trinidad started in, and Bernard just dropped the right hand in.

"I've seen the sequence a thousand times, and I always think he could do it better the next time. Even when something is done well, you have to believe it can be done better."

Not everyone agrees that the training situation in the city has reached a doom-and-gloom crisis. Leon Tabbs, 73, who works with junior welterweight contender Michael "No Joke" Stewart, can list the men who can show fighters the ropes.

"There are guys who are doing a good job of keeping that Philadelphia tradition alive," he says. "They're dedicated, they're in the gym all the time, they're working hard to make their fighters as good as they can be.

"Percy Custus would be one of those. Naazim Richardson would be another. Wade and Randy Hinton, Derek 'Bozy' Ennis, they all do good jobs. And I can't forget my partner, Dwight Triplett."

Among the newcomers is two-time former heavyweight champion Tim Witherspoon, who is working with several fighters, including IBF junior middleweight champion Kassim Ouma.

Still, there's no denying the numbers are down in both camps, and not just in Philly, but from coast to coast. Teddy Atlas, a fine trainer in his own right, is better known these days as the color commentator for ESPN2's "Friday Night Fights" series. He says the absence of astute trainers is a major factor in the lack of development of superstar-level fighters.

"It's not just Philadelphia," Atlas says. "It's everywhere. In New York, Stillman's Gym was a university of boxing, like what Bouie said of some of the old gyms in Philly. It was a place to get an advanced degree in pugilism. But it's gone now, and a lot of places like that are gone. Those gyms represented a time that is over and done.

"The game has a problem, and you see it in the corner every time a so-called trainer can't think of anything to tell his fighter between rounds other than to 'Go out and kick his [butt].' I mean, there are no teachers anymore. There are towel throwers, guys who throw a towel over their shoulder and think that makes them a trainer."

A lot of truths there ;D, but people have followed the same script for years I 1st heard it 50 years ago. I think its to do with age, and the idea youve seen it all, but we havent ;D

I have to agree completely there is very few places to learn to box properly where i am from too just a lot of guys pretending to be trainers and charging £15 an hour doing so, its so wrong. boxing was a big part of british culture and it seems to be getting replaced by a culture of drinking and drugs, very sad, i once had a girl who looked obveousely drugged up in a club explaining to me how boxing is wrong and it damages your brain etc, etc. heh the sheeple are funny when they start pretending like they have a clue what they are doing/talking about ;D