Sherer Takes Hearns Back to School : Boxing: Trainer works his veteran fighter on the sport’s fundamentals in preparation for tonight’s bout with Barkley.

In 1991, when he won everyone’s trainer-of-the-year award, Alex Sherer demonstrated that boxing, for all its glitzy, heavily promoted, multimillion-dollar shows, still doesn’t have much of a foundation.

There aren’t many good boxing trainers out there: good boxing trainers--solid, back-to-basics, boxing trainers. More often than not, we see so-called championship fights in which the contestants show a lack of mastery of some of boxing’s basic skills--an effective left jab, cutting the ring off on a mobile opponent.

In the most recent example, 1988 Olympic heavyweight champion, Ray Mercer, unbeaten as a pro, showed he essentially was still an amateur when 42-year-old Larry Holmes took him to school and beat him.

Dennis Milton, the New York middleweight, was talking about the sport’s trainers--or lack of same--while watching old friend Iran Barkley preparing for Thomas Hearns in tonight’s fight at Caesars Palace.

“There’s too many guys who go to gyms, hang a towel over their shoulder and call themselves a trainer when the truth is, they don’t know much about boxing at all,” he said.

Randy Neumann, the 1970s ranked heavyweight who is now a New Jersey referee, wrote about this in a piece for the New York Times recently.

“Many of their younger opponents don’t know how to fight,” he wrote on the success of retreads such as Holmes and George Foreman.

Sherer, 34, seemed to leap to the top of the class last June 3, when, in a masterful demonstration of textbook boxing, Hearns, a 3-1 underdog, out-countered, out-boxed and decisively defeated unbeaten light-heavyweight champion Virgil Hill.

Hearns, known in the peak years of his career as a power hitter, went back to basics against Hill, thoroughly confused the champion and lifted his title.

Sherer got most of the credit, yet still deflects it to Hearns.

“What happened that night was that a very dedicated athlete with a lot of pride worked very hard at making himself a complete boxer,” Sherer said. “People have long thought of Tommy as a knockout puncher, but the fact is, he’s the classic stand-up boxer of his era.

“Look at films of him as an amateur and his early pro fights and you’ll see that. Manny (Steward, Hearns’ former manager-trainer at Detroit’s Kronk Gym) built up the knockout stuff with his publicity machine.”

Hearns, 33, is again expected to be boxing and not slugging when he fights Barkley in a rematch of a 1988 bout in which Barkley stopped Hearns, who was then in his slugging period.

Tonight, Hearns vows, is “the big pay-back.”

Sherer expects Barkley to be in hot pursuit of the new Hearns.

“I’m sure Iran will try to jump all over Tommy at the opening bell,” Sherer said. “He’ll try to wage war. So a lot of our preparation has been spent on staying cool, on basic boxing.”

That Hearns in 1992 would be defending a world title--the World Boxing Assn.’s light-heavyweight crown--against anyone is remarkable. After he was flattened by Barkley, Hearns heard whispers that he was finished as a big-time fighter.

“I never thought Tommy was finished, not even after the Barkley fight,” Sherer said. “All great fighters who have long careers reach a point where they must go back to basics. . . . They all tend to drift away from what they do best.

“Tommy has always been a great pure boxer. He needed to go there again. When he asked me to train him, I told him I wouldn’t do it unless we went back to . . . basic boxing and started all over again. He agreed with me, that he needed to do that.”

Sherer, who has a communications degree from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, was by his own description an ordinary amateur boxer. But he became a student of the sport, reading about boxing and watching films of former champions and learning how they trained.

He was a public information officer in Sacramento for the California Department of Social Services. There, he also worked as a boxing coach with the Sacramento Police Athletic League. In 1983, Steward hired him as a coach for his amateur program in Detroit.

“I never had any dealings with Tommy when we were both at Kronk, and in fact I was one of the few Kronk guys who wasn’t all over Tommy all the time, and I think he appreciated that,” Sherer said.

“I enjoyed my time at Kronk, but I didn’t like the salary. So I quit a couple of years ago and was applying to law schools when I learned Tommy had left Manny. I called him to wish him luck, then he called me back a few days later and asked me to train him.”

And so, where have the trainers gone? A few decades ago, nearly every YMCA in America had a boxing instructor.

“It’s a tough way to make a living,” Sherer said. “Boxing is not easy to learn, and it takes time. . . .

“And even if you’re a great trainer, you may be unlucky. You may never get that talented fighter who can take you to the top. Guys tend to get discouraged, to drift away.”

Sherer was asked to name the trainers he admires most today.

“I have a lot of respect for Bill Miller of Detroit,” he said. “He’s an older guy and a very solid boxing man. He’s working with James Toney now. I watch and learn from Eddie Futch, too. I think Virgil Hill was a much better fighter when he was with Futch.

“And I like Julio Cesar Chavez’s trainer, Faustino Barrios. Watch Chavez between rounds. He almost never takes a deep breath. I don’t know how Barrios conditions his fighters, but I’d like to know.”