by Geoffrey Ciani – This week’s edition of On the Ropes Boxing Radio featured an exclusive interviews with trainers Ronnie Shields and Roger Bloodworth, both of whom have worked with Tomasz Adamek during preparations for his April 24 bout against Christ Arreola. Adamek was previously trained by Andrew Gmitruk who is no longer working with Adamek due to health reasons. For Shields and Bloodworth, this is not the first time the two have worked together when preparing a fighter for battle. Here are some excerpts from the Ronnie Shields interview:
On Tomasz Adamek’s preparations for his bout with Chris Arreola:
“Oh his preparations have been going great. Tomasz is a really, really good dedicated fighter and in one more week everybody is going to see how good of shape he’s going to be in and he’s going to be victorious next Saturday night.”
On what he says in Adamek as a heavyweight:
“He’s a very fast fighter. He’s a guy that his foot speed is really, really great—he has a great foot speed and his hand speed is really phenomenal and he comes with a punch. He gives you a little bit of everything..”
Regarding what he believes Adamek needs to do to be successful against Arreola:
“I think he has to use a really good jab. He has to make Arreola respect his jab and he has to make him respect his punching power. I think very early you’re going to see that. You’re going to see that Arreola is a really strong fighter, so the thing is not to just stand right in front of him and just let him trade punches with you. The thing about Tomasz, like I said earlier, he’s very fast and he’s going to use his combinations and I think Arreola is going to be surprised by the speed of Tomasz Adamek.”
On his working relationship with Roger Bloodworth in co-training Adamek:
“I trained with Roger when we both worked for Main Events back in the Lou Duva days and Roger and I were together for probably eight years. His style is similar to mine. He knows exactly what I want a guy to do and vice versa, I know he knows what I expect from a guy so it wasn’t a hard transition for us because like I said, we knew each other so well. The training camp has been going good. Roger came in, he’s been here for about two weeks and I had Tomasz by myself for like six weeks when Roger was over in New Zealand with David Tua for his fight. When he came back, he came here a couple of weeks ago and just joined right in and it’s like he was always there because he knows me so well and I know him so well that everything just blended in and worked out well.”
On how the transition from Andrew Gmitruk to Ronnie and Roger has worked for Adamek:
“It’s been really great. The thing about it is, it doesn’t take long when you know what you’re doing. It doesn’t take long for a fighter to realize that I can understand what he’s telling me. He knows I have his best interest at heart right away.”
On whether he thinks Adamek can stand up to Arreola’s best shots::
“I think without a doubt. I think the best way you prove that you can take a punch is not to get hit at all. That’s the best way and that’s one thing I’ve been working with him on a lot is moving his head. I even got him bobbing and weaving some at some point. At some point you’re going to see him doing a lot of different things, but the most important thing is that Tomasz has to realize that he’s a boxer. He’s not a one punch knockout kind of guy and once I got that across to him he realized that I’m right, that that’s the best thing for him to do is to sit on the outside and box. I did watch the Jason Estrada fight and he got hit with punches he should have never gotten hit with. Can he stand up to those punches with Arreola? Hey, if you don’t get hit with them then you don’t have to worry about them.”
His views on Evander Holyfield continuing on with his career at age 47:
“As you know I was with Holyfield until he fought (Sultan) Ibragimov. I quit after that fight because I just felt it was time for him to call it a career. He decided he wanted to continue on but I just couldn’t do it because I felt at the time that he was too old for me to continue with and maybe he should retire, but Evander is his own man. I saw the fight with (Francois) Botha and in the beginning he didn’t look good at all, but he picked it up when it really counted and he won—but that was against an out of shape Frans Botha. With him trying to fight a guy like the Klitschko brothers, I think that would be deadly for him, and I just feel that Evander should call it a career and just enjoy the fruits of life.”
His views on the upcoming mega fight between Floyd Mayweather and Shane Mosley:
“Well you know what, I’m so happy that the fight is finally going to happen. I really think it’s going to be a good exciting twelve round fight and I believe it’s going to go the distance, but I just see Floyd Mayweather being just a little bit too slick for Shane Mosley. Shane is a really good fighter. People try to compare what he did with Antonio Margarito who was a slow fighter and doesn’t have a lot of speed but comes right to you and is going to stand right there with you, but if you know Floyd Mayweather he’s not going to do that. Floyd has great defense and he has even better offense so I think he’s going to put Shane in a position he hasn’t been in since Vernon Forrest. He’s going to hit him and he’s going to hurt him and he’s going to hit him over and over and over and I just don’t think Shane has the capabilities right now, being 38 years old, of being able to keep up with a younger Floyd Mayweather.”
On his experiences working with Vernon Forrest:
“Well Vernon was a very dedicated fighter. He wanted to be the best. He refused to be second best, he wanted to be the best and that’s the way he trained. He trained that way and he expected you as his trainer to be on your job 24 hours a day 7 days a week when you were in training camp, and being with him that’s what I did because I wanted the best for him. Vernon Forrest was a guy that thought he could beat anybody, it didn’t make a difference who it was. All you had to do was say okay you’re fighting this guy, and there was no questions asked. He chased Shane Mosley for a very long time before Shane finally decided to fight him and when he did he beat him back-to-back times. With Vernon Forrest, the sky was the limit for Vernon. As long as he put his mind to doing something, he did it.”
On his experience working with “Iron” Mike Tyson:
“It was a great experience for me. I only got the opportunity to train Mike for one fight and that was the fight with Lennox Lewis and I only had eight weeks because they didn’t pick a trainer until like eight weeks before the fight and that really wasn’t enough for me to get to work with him the way I really wanted to but I did the best I could with what I had. You know, it was great. I knew Mike from before, so it wasn’t like I got there and I just met him. I didn’t, I knew him from before so him and I weren’t strangers to each another. Training him was a different story. I had to go in and try to change a lot of stuff he was doing wrong. I watched a lot of tape before I went there and he was just making small mistakes that really cost him. It didn’t help with his age, he was getting older, and he cut very easily so none of that stuff helps out, but I really had a great time training Mike. He treated me with a lot of respect and we had a lot of fun together.”
His prediction for Adamek’s fight with Chris Arreola:
“I think I’m going to go with Tomasz Adamek. I think Tomasz has the ability to win a unanimous twelve round decision or he has the ability to make Arreola pull a ‘No Mas’ late in the fight.”
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Roger Bloodworth
And here are some excerpts from the Roger Bloodworth interview:
On preparations with Adamek for his fight against Chris Arreola:
“We’re just coming to fight. I don’t think it’s a great mystery. Arreola is going to be coming trying to knock Tomasz out and Tomasz is going to try to keep him from doing that.”
On what he thinks Adamek needs to do to be successful against Chris Arreola:
“Well Tomasz has got speed. He’s got pretty good range, he can move, and he can punch. We’re probably going to have to adjust to whatever Arreola brings to the fight that night. See, I don’t like to prepare for one specific thing. You can watch films and you may pick up on some tendencies that a fighter has, but every fight is different so that doesn’t mean that what you watched is what you’re going to bring so you really kind of have to prepare for everything.”
On what he sees in Adamek as a heavyweight fighter:
“What I see in him is the quality that all champions have. He was a light heavyweight champion, he was a cruiserweight champion, he knows how to win, and he won’t quit.”
Regarding his opinion on what went wrong with Andrew Golota in his two fights with Riddick Bowe:
“I don’t know. That’s something that you’d have to ask Andrew. He has a history of getting to a certain point and then making mental mistakes. I think that’s something you’d have to address to him but my opinion is he just made mental mistakes.”
On whether he thought Golota had the physical tools which should have made him champion:
“Absolutely. As a matter of fact, I saw one fight I think he dropped Johnny Ruiz twice in and I actually thought he won that fight but the judges didn’t. If he had won that fight he would have been the champ. Yeah, he had all the tools to become a champion—he was strong, he was big, he was quick, he had great lateral movement, he had quick hands—but luck just wasn’t on his side.”
His views on Evander Holyfield continuing on with his career at age 47:
“I don’t think it’s my place to tell any man to quit, but I think that Evander has to listen to the people around him and do whatever he thinks is best. There has to be a point at which he stops and this might be a good point to stop.”
His views on David Tua and his future in the heavyweight division:
“Well David’s looking really good. He has exceptional speed for a heavyweight and he still has exceptional power. He’s learning to box a little bit more now and learning to control the ring with a little more generalship and not relying on one big punch to end the fight. I was really happy with his last performance. He got to go twelve rounds and he controlled every round so I think he’s got a real good shot.”
On whether he believes Tua can deal with the Klitschko brothers:
“If David shows up, the question is whether the Klitschkos can deal with David because both of them have shown a tendency when they are hit hard, to get knocked out for one and sometimes they quit. They’re safety first fighters.”
On his experiences working with Pernell Witaker:
“I was very fortunate to get to work with Pernell. I consider Pernell one of the greatest fighters I ever met. He wasn’t a tremendous puncher, he was a tremendous boxer, but I think the greatest ability he had was he always found a way to beat you. When you stepped in that ring, you had to bring it because he was just an exceptional fighter. He knew what he was doing in there.”
On his working relationship with Ronnie Shields in co-training Adamek:
“It works out fine. Ronnie and I have trained together at Main Events we trained fighters together for seven, or eight, or nine years. So you’re right, it’s not our first experience so we get along fine. When the situation came up when I had to go down to New Zealand Ziggy and I talked and we felt that Ronnie’s style was probably the closest to mine. No two coaches are exactly alike but ours are probably very close.”
On how the transition from Andrew Gmitruk to Ronnie and Roger has worked for Adamek:
“I don’t think he’s having any trouble at all, and I have to credit Ronnie Shields for coming in while I was gone and continuing on where I left off. Gmitruk is more of a European style trainer, and Ronnie and I are both American style trainers so I think that’s going to help him a lot. He’s still in transition. I think it’s going to take two or three more fights for him to really adapt to the American style.”
His views on the upcoming mega fight between Floyd Mayweather and Shane Mosley:
“I think it’s going to be a very interesting fight because Mosley is a little bigger fighter, body wise as far as his body composition, and I think that Floyd is probably the quicker of the two although Mosley has very fast hands also. I have to give the edge to Floyd, though, because he’s a defensive type fighter and he likes to have people attacking him and I believe Mosley is going to attack him so I think I might give the edge to him but I think it’s a very close fight.”
His final prediction for Adamek’s fight against Chris Arreola:
“A win. I know people want to say, oh he’s going to knock him out or something like that. I don’t care. As long as you get the “W”, a month later nobody will care. I think he will win, though, by decision.”
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