Trainer Freddie Roach to get ringside support from family
The trainer's brothers, all boxers, will be rooting for Freddie, who has been training Manny Pacquiao for the big fight against Oscar De La Hoya in Las Vegas.
Five members of the family of the late Paul Roach will be at ringside Saturday night in Las Vegas for the big fight.
Everybody else will be there to see Manny Pacquiao versus Oscar De La Hoya. The Roach family will be there to see their brother, Freddie, who will be in the trainer's spot in Pacquiao's corner.
They might be hard to spot, unless you look for the people who have their chests puffed out the most. And oh, how they have earned that pride.
Much of their lives were spent in the projects of Dedham, Mass., a Boston suburb. "Lots of hard-working, poor white people," Roach says.
And their existence was dominated by a tough Irish father who was the New England featherweight champion in 1947. There were seven children, five of them boys. All five boxed at one time or another, two through the amateur ranks and three into the pros.
"Pepper was the best amateur," Freddie says. "He won five Golden Gloves titles and lots of people thought he was going to be the next Willie Pep.
"I fought him one time. He was older, and he beat me up so bad my dad had to beat him up."
If you were to pick a Roach family logo in those days, it might have been a fist surrounded by frightened faces.
"If we did something wrong, we got a beating. My dad was a physical guy. If it wasn't one of us, my mother would get it," Freddie says.
Roach is 48, one of the more famous people in his sport, as well as one of the more honest and direct. When he says his father beat his mother, he says it with the emotionless conviction of somebody who has long ago dealt with that and tucked it away somewhere safe.
Paul Roach dominated his family, bullied them. If you weren't tough, you were out. "My oldest brother, Al, quit boxing at age 16," Freddie says. "So he got tossed out of the house for good. We found out early that life was easier when we made dad happy."
Still, there comes moments of grudging props from the family's third-oldest son. "If he were around today," Freddie Roach says, "I hope he'd say he was proud of me." Freddie Roach won the 1979 New England featherweight title. That was 32 years after his father.
He then had 53 professional fights, winning 39 of them. His best fighting weight was 122. The most he ever made for a fight was $13,000, a loss to Hector (Macho) Camacho. To train De La Hoya for his fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr. last year, Roach was paid $1.3 million and likely will make something similar for training Pacquiao against De La Hoya.
