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 A Chip off the Old Brock
By Steve Kim (May 13, 2004)
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If you flip through some old editions of 'The Ring' magazine in the late 80's and early 90's, you'll see advertisements for instructional boxing videos featuring trainer Kenny Weldon.
Weldon is based in Houston, Texas, but in a roundabout way he became the first trainer for heavyweight prospect Calvin Brock of Charlotte, North Carolina, who faces Terry Smith as the featured performer on NBC this Saturday afternoon at the De Paul Athletic Center in Chicago, Illinois.
"Basically, I knew nothing about boxing at the time he wanted to get involved and he was only 12 years old," admits his father, Calvance Brock. "The main gym in town was Lou Kemp's Gym, and he was an older guy, 80 years old at the time. And he wasn't teaching very much because he was old, listless, elderly; he would come in the gym and have the guys work out and all he wanted to do is keep time."
And the neglect showed early on.
"I lost my first four boxing matches with him and he wasn't putting anything into me," said the 20-0 heavyweight. "It was like I was going to my boxing matches never having trained a day in my life, and although I was in the gym six days a week, I didn't know what I was doing.
"My dad being a good father, has always been very supportive, and he would sit in the boxing gym and just watch me work out, and he saw that I wasn't getting trained."
That's when the senior Brock took matters into his own hands.
"I was advised by somebody else, 'Hey, check these tapes out. He gives you good insight on how to get started.' I ordered the tapes," explained the father, who had no previous training experience. "I studied them and I bought some books, checked out some books from the library and I began to study the real basics of how to throw a punch, how to move and how to stand, this type of thing.
"I started working with Calvin at home so that he could have somebody working with him. It went on for about six months and he was going to the gym six days
a week, training, hitting the bag, and he wouldn't miss a day."
But, the progress was still slow, says his dad.
"Finally, the opportunity came up for him to fight," he recalls, laughing at the memory. "So he began to spar two weeks before, for the very first time before
his very first fight, after he'd been training for six months, he had never been in the ring. And believe me, it was the worst fight I've ever seen in my life."
So were the videos effective in helping to get his career off the ground?
"Yeah," says Brock, who during his run as an amateur won a U.S. National Championship, a National Golden Glove title, was a three-time PAL champion and won the under-19 U.S. title before finally representing the his country in the 2000 Olympics, "They give you a good, solid foundation for basic punches. It was very interesting and very good for somebody starting out."
The Brocks have now enlisted the help of Tom Yankello, best known for his work with former IBF lightweight champion Paul Spadafora. Yankello, who is
no longer with the Pittsburgh southpaw, co-trains Brock with the father. While Brock will begin his training camp in Charlotte with his dad, he will then move up north to Pittsburgh to be with Yankello.
"It's been a pleasure," Yankello says of working with the Brocks. "He's a very hard worker, a talented kid, with a lot of determination and a lot of focus on his goals. He wants to be heavyweight champion of the world and every day is a learning process; he's there to learn. We're working hard together, we want to be at the top and everyday we're working towards that goal."
The father and Yankello have, so far, been a harmonious unit.
"Me and Mr. Brock are a great team the night of the fight and on the phone during camp," Yankello says. "Calvin spends about four or five weeks up with me, his father has his own business, so his dad is not a full-time boxing trainer. So it's a little different. Some of these guys it's been their livelihood, that's what they've done their whole career. With Mr. Brock, that's not the case. He respects my expertise and we work together on things."
"Tom's the very best and I don't think Calvin will ever leave him," adds the father. "He gives him total 100-percent attention in the gym when he's there. When
Tom's in the gym with Calvin, his attention is not anywhere else and he sits down with him, he tapes the sparring sessions, they look where the mistakes are, they study tapes of other fighters. He's a very good coach when it comes to fundamentals, and he's really adept at developing a fighter, he really is."
The fighter is also sold on his new trainer. "This is the first time ever I've been professionally trained the way it should be done with Tom. The guy's an expert."
For both Yankello and his heavyweight, it's a chance at redemption. Yankello, despite helping 'Spaddy' to a world title, was scarred by the breakup that was
precipitated by the presence of co-trainer Jesse Reid.
"Oh, absolutely," agreed Yankello. "There's been a lot of untrue things, things that are really false out there in the news and the media about some of the things that went down, and why I'm not with Paul anymore. Without elaborating on it, I feel me and Cal both - he got a little bit of a bad rap coming out of the Olympics, that he was one of the least likely Olympians to succeed - me and him are both working for vindication. I feel that I didn't get a lot of my just due training a world champion and he didn't get a lot of just due being an Olympian. So we're both looking to be vindicated in our careers, so we kinda belong together."
For Brock, the slight came in the form of a USA Today article where Teddy Atlas labeled him as the least likely of the U.S. Olympians to succeed. This off the heels of his first round loss in Sydney in which he also came out of the Games with a reputation for not working hard.
"They were talking about how I don't like to train and crap because Tom Mustin said that," said a still bitter Brock of the 2000 Olympic head coach. "Which doesn't make sense because nobody can become the best at anything in the world without putting in a lot of hard work and a lot of time into it. Obviously I trained hard, being a national champion and to make the Olympic team. I carried the same characteristics over to the pros and I'm training even harder and that's why I've been looking great in all 20 of my boxing matches."
Brock was part of an American Olympic team that failed to capture a gold medal, the first in decades to have that distinction. Like many others on that team, they were dissatisfied with the leadership of Mustin. Brock is the most candid of the detractors.
"Oh, man, he 100-percent, definitely was not the right guy for the job," states Brock. "You see that nobody hired him as a professional coach and he wanted to be a professional coach. He's about the first head coach I ever known that didn't become a professional coach since, I think, Pat Nappi."
From past Olympic teams, trainers like Kenny Adams, Pat Burns and Al Mitchell have all gone onto prominence in the professional ranks.
"All of them became professional coaches," said Brock. "But not Tom Mustin, because the whole 12-man team knew he couldn't coach worth a crap. He didn't know anything about what he was talking about."
Brock saw problems in the months leading up to the Olympics.
"I knew there was a big problem and I was praying to God that a miracle could happen that I would go and do well in the Olympics because going into the Olympics, I didn't go in confident that I could even win the thing because I wasn't properly prepared," said Brock. Some other boxers and their personal coaches have stated privately some of the same complaints as Brock, who doesn't hold back.
"It was like we were indentured servants, man, it was worse than the military. It was like we didn't have any rights at all. Tom Mustin was just a very selfish
person and everything was about himself and he didn't care anything about what the boxers thought and he didn't respect the boxers' accomplishments, and knowledge in how to train themselves and prepare for competition. He just totally disrespected the whole team. That's why I think we didn't come out with a gold medal."
Another common complaint of boxers that earn Olympic berths is that once they make the team, they are then basically separated from their personal coaches, some who have been with them their whole careers.
"That's total bull-crap," Brock says of that issue. "It's total nonsense and ignorance, because why are you going to change something that's been working? You've got something that's been working and all of sudden you're just going to take it and change it up all the way and expect to get some positive results? I mean you're talking about a 12-man team from 12 different coaches and you're going to train us all the same and expect to get some positive results?"
Brock points out that the cookie-cutter approach has not been very successful for the U.S. lately.
"It's only been happening for one - it happened for De La Hoya in '92, he won unquestionably. But in '96, David Reid, he just landed a miracle overhand right. It happened, but c'mon."
But now, Brock is on the verge of some big things if he can get past Terry Smith, a late replacement for Duncan Dokiwari, who was a substitute for Sergei Lyakhovich.
"Hopefully, it puts him in a position where he's viewed as maybe the next best young heavyweight," said Carl Moretti, matchmaker for Main Events, which now promotes Brock, after his stint at America Presents. "I know that that torch has been thrown around over the last couple of years to everybody. So I just hope it puts him in the game, as they say, and he's someone to be taken seriously."
It's been a circuitous route for Brock, but with a win, he's a player.
"I thought I would've been on television sooner than this," he says. "But everything's in God's timing and I can see this is God's timing because there can't be a better time I could be on television and be seen, than now. So when people see me, I think I'm going to be the hottest thing in the heavyweight division once I win this fight."
THE SOUTHERN DISASTER RELIEF
What about the last 'best' young heavyweight, Dominick Guinn, that recently got beat handily by Monte Barrett?
"Most likely, he's gonna fight in July on the undercard of an HBO show, off television, just to get a win," said Moretti. "And the next time we can get on HBO or in a meaningful fight, we're looking to put him right back in."
PROSPECTS
So what's next for Rocky Juarez?
"We're in discussion with HBO about fighting one of the top contenders in the world, if not a world champion," Moretti points out. In-Jin Chi, the current WBC belt holder, is someone who has been deemed a bit too stringent right now for Juarez. Other names being thrown around are Manuel Medina and Zahir Raheem.
And with Francisco Bojado's recent win over Andre Eason, it looks like he's on his way to a July 24th face-off with Jesse James Leija.
"In all likelihood, the Leija thing's gonna materialize for July underneath Gatti-Dorin," says Moretti.
FINAL FLURRIES
WBO strawweight king Ivan Calderon could be making an appearance on Top Rank's July 31st pay-per-view card featuring Erik Morales-Carlos Hernandez and Johnny Tapia-Bobby Boy Velardez.....A rematch between Juan Manuel Marquez and Manny Pacquiao is being discussed for the fall..... I've recommended that the Miami Hurricanes enlist the services of Judd Burstein to protest the 2003 Fiesta Bowl loss to Ohio State because of the controversial defensive holding penalty that was called on them in the first overtime....Burstein will then put out a press release listing five points as to why UM should be rewarded it's sixth national title... Why not? It can't be anymore ridiculous than what he put out on behalf of Wladimir Klitschko..... Hell, for that matter, maybe the 1985 St. Louis Cardinals should launch an investigation into Don Denkinger's missed call in Game Six of their World Series against the Kansas City Royals.
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