Freddie Roach: 'Boxing gets in your blood and you just can't quit'

"I hope I can do this until the day I die," Freddie Roach says calmly as NFL Jerseys wholesale he explains the depth of his addiction to a dangerous business. Boxing has consumed his life with a blurring combination of pride, fame and Parkinson's disease. Words now tumble from him in a softly spoken slur which is a reminder of the damage done to such a warm and open man. Before he became the best trainer in the ring today, working with the greatest fighter on the planet in Manny Pacquiao, Roach used to be a boxer.

"Yeah," Roach says wryly, "I had five fights too many. I lost four of 'em. I had the finest trainer there's ever been, Eddie Futch, and he knew I'd had enough. But I was 26 years old and still hard-headed so I couldn't see it. This is how it is. Boxing gets in your blood and you just can't quit."

Boxing, amid the squalor and heartbreak, is a drug. But it is difficult to think of Roach as one of its victims in a week when he goes to work again with the extraordinary Pacquiao – who faces Shane Mosley in Las Vegas on Saturday. The only boxer to have won world titles in eight different divisions, moving up from flyweight to light middleweight, which are separated by 42 pounds, Pacquiao is without peer. In his last fight, having weighed in at 10st 4?lb, he was considerably lighter than Antonio Margarito, a tough and uncompromising Mexican who had bulked Denver Broncos Jerseys up in the 24 hours after they had stepped off the scales.

A 17lb advantage still could not save Margarito. Pacquiao unleashed a dazzling and brutal performance which saw the little Filipino almost begging the referee to save his opponent from further punishment. It was an extended form of torture – unlike the chilling second-round knockout Pacquiao administered to Ricky Hatton exactly two years ago.

Roach's serene training of Pacquiao has been complicated by the Filipino's astronomical fame both in the US and his home country. His popularity is such that Pacquiao is now a congressman in the Philippines. Before he fought Margarito, Pacquiao lamented in training that he missed congress. "It's like when you get a new girlfriend and it's all fresh and exciting and you've got lots to talk about," Roach says. "But being a congressman is less of a challenge now to Manny. In this camp, congress and politics has not come up once. It's been less crazy than usual."

Yet last week Pacquiao added another dimension to his preparations for the Mosley fight by releasing his first record – an unashamedly schmaltzy cover of the already saccharine Sometimes When We Touch. It's all part of New England Patriots Jerseys the Pacquiao phenomenon, which outdoes Hollywood in the way his story moves from poverty in the Philippines – which he left at 14 to start boxing in the hope he might earn enough money to help his mother and five siblings – to global fame.

Pacquiao now earns many millions of dollars every year but he seems intent on giving most of his money away to his entourage and to strangers who affect him with their tales of deprivation.

"That's my biggest fear with Manny," Roach says while starting another day in his Wild Card gym, a seething hothouse in a rundown part of Los Angeles. "We talk about it all the time but I can't get it across to Manny. He's 32 and he can make his own decisions. But I keep telling him, and hoping, that he'll put away something for him and his family."

In Roach's small office a sign makes a surreal promise: Everyone Here Seems Normal Until You Get To Know Them. The madness is contagious and offers an appropriate backdrop for Roach to remember how boxing almost ruined and then saved him. He once wanted to be either a tree surgeon, like his father, or a world champion. Instead, having become a damaged fighter nicknamed The Choir Boy, Roach found redemption as a cornerman. "I worked with my dad and my major was in forestry. So I once knew a lot about trees. But my last job as a tree-man made me $300. It was enough Buffalo Bills Jerseys to buy a ticket to Vegas and turn pro."

Roach had a decent record, winning 40 of his 53 bouts. But he took too many punches for too little money. His biggest purse was $7,500 and, after boxing, he did some bum jobs. "I was a busboy at the Golden Nugget, cleaning tables at the restaurant. I wasn't too good with people and so they made me a dishwasher. But I was worse in telesales – selling ballpoint pens with a company name on them. Life's turned out sweeter since then."

In keeping with the Hollywood theme the former fighter was approached by Mickey Rourke – a famous actor with a chaotic dream of becoming a professional boxer. In exchange for training Rourke, Roach was given the money for his gym: "I opened up this place and then, a couple of years later, Manny Pacquiao walked through that door. That changed my life forever."

On that unforgettable afternoon in 2001, when the scrawny Filipino slipped into the Wild Card, Roach was already enough of an expert to have trained numerous world champions. "I'd caught the punches of a lot of good fighters – but Manny showed something else. Some guys are heavy-handed. Some guys are fast. But Manny has them both and that's why his punches are so explosive. That day he was setting off firecrackers in my mitts. There was so much explosiveness there, so much snap and fizz."

Considering how his own life has been blighted by blows to the head, Roach strives to protect his fighters. He points out that, even though Pacquiao doled out a fearful beating to Margarito six months ago, he absorbed some heavy punches. "The art of boxing is to hit and not get hit – but it's hard when you've got guys who like to exchange. But I didn't like the way Margarito's corner hermes birkin bags allowed the fight to go on. At some point you've got to take care of your fighter."

Roach is relatively wary of the once outstanding but now faded Mosley. "Shane loves guys who come at him. Manny will come at him and Shane is a great counterpuncher with knockout power. That's why Manny respects him and has been working his ass off. Mosley has never been knocked out but I would like to make a statement in this fight. It's a difficult task but the key to knocking out Mosley is going to the body early. If we do that then I think we'll stop him in eight or nine rounds."

Pacquiao's desire makes Roach believe he could have another three or four marquee contests – but the tremors in his own body also provide the 51-year-old trainer with salutary warnings. "I'd like Manny to have one more fight after Mosley against Floyd Mayweather [the brilliant and volatile American who has avoided Pacquiao so far]. But Floyd's so unpredictable it doesn't seem any closer."