FIGHT GAME

He is the figure in the background as the fighter jogs down lonely mountain roads, the man absorbing the fighter’s punches in training camp with hand pads, the fighter’s vocal defender at news conferences and rallies, and a fountain of wisdom and a source of motivation in the corner.

And when the fight is over, it is in his arms the fighter is paraded around in triumph or comforted in defeat.

He is the trainer. He is also cook, conditioner, therapist and philosopher. To the fighter, he is indispensable.

Until payday.

When a fight ends, the trainer sometimes has to wage a fight of his own to get paid. That happy scene in the ring can sometimes turn into bitter disappointment for the trainer in the dressing room.

“There are four major players in a fight,” trainer Joe Goossen said. “There is the fighter, of course, the promoter, the manager and the trainer. Three of the four get paid the night of the fight. But usually not the trainer, the guy closest to the fighter.”

It is the promoter who establishes the purse after making sure his own profit is assured. The athletic commissions hold the check for the fighter. The managers usually get their cut right off the top, as stipulated in their contract.

“The managers have contracts, the promoters have contracts, the fighters have contracts,” trainer Emanuel Steward said. “But we are just hired guns, at the mercy of the fighters.”

It is up to the fighter to pay his trainer. Most trainers operate without a contract, depending on the integrity of their fighter to honor a verbal agreement and a handshake for the standard 10% of their fighter’s purse. But that payment is often delayed, altered or even ignored by the fighter, leaving the trainer with nothing to show for perhaps months of work.

“A handshake should be good enough,” trainer Freddie Roach said. “It’s good enough for me, but it’s not always good enough for the fighter.”

Roach and others have accumulated all sorts of horror stories over the years. Roach said he once agreed to train a former heavyweight champion for $40,000. The fighter paid him only $10,000, saying, “That’s all I got,” according to Roach.

Goossen agreed to train a fighter he didn’t want to identify for $10,000. The fighter lost, then skipped town without paying.

“There have been instances I was supposed to get 10% off the top,” Goossen recalled, “and they will say I have this expense and that expense. I end up getting 5% when all is said and done.”

Having become one of boxing’s best-known trainers hasn’t freed Steward from difficulties encountered by his lesser-known peers.

“Even if you’re famous, it doesn’t mean anything,” Steward said. “Fighters get amnesia when it comes to paying you. Sometimes they feel it is their last big paycheck. Sometimes they may jerk you around for two to three weeks. Some fighters stall because they want to collect the interest on the money. They tell you next week or they say they haven’t gotten their pay-per-view money. How do you collect?”

Promoter Bob Arum says it isn’t his job to see that trainers get paid.

“Then what?” Arum said. “Do we next have to guarantee payment for the physical therapists, the lawyers, the publicists, the timekeepers? Ultimately for the trainers, it’s their problem. You can’t protect everybody. They have to depend on the good faith of the fighters. Promoters have more than enough to worry about. You can’t put more on us.”

Waiting for a paycheck can be especially draining on the trainer because he has already invested as much as two months or longer in training camp without receiving a penny in salary. Training expenses pay the trainer’s food and lodging along with that of the fighter, sparring partners and the rest of the entourage.

“A fighter may take six weeks to pay you when they know you are dying on the vine after eight weeks of training,” Goossen said. “Sometimes, that’s just when they get around to it.”

And when the fighter loses, he sometimes never gets around to it.

“The trainer always gets blamed when the fighter loses,” Roach said. “They’ve got to blame somebody. And it’s part of our job to take the blame to take the pressure off the fighter. But sometimes the fighter believes your story that the loss was your fault, and so he turns around and fires you.

“When I trained [former light heavyweight and cruiserweight champion] Virgil Hill in a fight against Thomas Hearns and Virgil lost, I took the blame for his sake. I said maybe I overlooked this or that. I explained he was injured and maybe I should have pulled him out of the fight. The next week, I read in the paper that I had been fired.”

Sometimes, the trainer’s fee is an issue even before a handshake.

“After Evander Holyfield won a championship with me as his trainer,” Steward said, “he told me, ‘I got the title. I’ll give you what I want.’ I told him, ‘Keep your money.’ ”

Roach accepts that the standard trainer’s cut is not always going to be applied.

“If the purse is $8 million, you are not going to get 10% of that,” he said. “So you negotiate a flat fee.”

And sometimes, even then, the trainer gets zilch. When Mike Tyson got a tattoo on his face just before his 2003 fight against Clifford Etienne, putting the fight in jeopardy, many were amused by Tyson’s bizarre new look. Roach, then his trainer, was anything but amused.

“I had put in eight weeks of training with him,” Roach said, “and, because I didn’t have a guarantee, it looked like I had wasted eight weeks of my life. If the fight doesn’t happen, the fighter doesn’t get paid. And if the fighter doesn’t get paid, I don’t paid. That’s the risk we take as trainers.”

That story had a happy ending for the trainer. Tyson fought and Roach got paid.

Sometimes there is even risk for a trainer with an undefeated fighter. In the 1980s, Goossen trained Michael Nunn as he rose from club fighter to the title contender, with fame and fortune seemingly sure to follow, for Goossen as well as Nunn.

But Nunn suddenly dropped Goossen and his brother, Dan, a promoter, to go with new handlers. Nunn’s career was never the same, but that is of little consolation to Joe Goossen.

“I missed baptisms, bar mitzvahs, graduations, birthdays, weddings and funerals to sit up at a training camp with that guy for what was probably five or six years if you add up all the time,” Goossen said. “I had no recourse when he left. Fighters can walk out on you any time they want.

“It’s like a college student getting a job at a big company, learning all the trade secrets there and then going to another company with that information, with the intellectual property. What’s to stop a fighter from stealing your intellectual property? Nothing.

“I trained one fighter for 10 fights, took him from a know-nothing puncher to a knockout puncher. They start feeling like they’ve learned enough and they are out of here. Where’s my compensation for that? The promoter puts in his money in. That’s his ante. The trainer puts in his brain and his techniques. That’s his ante. You shouldn’t be able to just walk away from somebody who antes up.”

So why don’t trainers simply demand written contracts?

“It’s probably something we should do,” Roach said. “But I think if I ask a fighter to sign a contract, he would probably feel I don’t trust him.”

Said Goossen of his fellow trainers: “Trainers are the last guys who would sit down and negotiate with a fighter. Trainers are not usually college grads, not business-minded. Most of them are ex-fighters who are easily taken advantage of like they were when they were fighters. They depend on the business people to make sure things go right for them while they are attending to the straw that stirs the drink and that’s the fighters.”

Sometimes, Roach said, he lets his feelings for the fighter override financial considerations. When Hill asked Roach to come back to his camp to prepare him for a fight 10 years after firing him, Roach not only agreed, but told Hill he would only take a fee if Hill won.

“He needed the money more than I did,” Roach said.

Hill lost.

Roach trained James Toney for years without taking any money until the last few years, when Toney’s success enabled him to afford Roach’s fee.

Kevin Rooney is one trainer who didn’t just shrug his shoulders when he thought his fighter was shortchanging him. Believing he had a verbal agreement to be former two-heavyweight champion Mike Tyson’s trainer for life, Rooney sued Tyson in federal court after he was fired and was awarded more than $4.4 million.

Tyson said at the time that he would have given Rooney the $4 million if he had just asked for it.

Is there anything boxing commissions can do to help trainers?

“I’ve been told we are not a collection agency,” said Marc Ratner, executive director of the Nevada State Athletic Commission. “I know trainers sometimes do get stiffed. I always recommend that they get everything in writing.

“I think if a trainer were to write a letter to the commission explaining their problems and ask us to bring it up at a commission meeting, this may be something that could be discussed.”

Said Goossen: “We pay commissions a licensing fee. There is no reason why they should not step up and protect us. Something has got to change. The laws are always about protecting the fighters. I love the fighters, but it’s time somebody did something for the trainers.”