INQUIRER Sports

LAS VEGAS— Freddie Roach suffers from Parkinson’s disease.

While it isn’t exactly fatal, the degenerative disorder puts its victim through enough hell so that he sees everything in context. Sports, the battle of wins and losses, becomes a trivial pursuit when viewed alongside life. Roach surely understands context.

Yet, even as he admits in a Sports Illustrated interview that he sometimes asks “Why me?” he also looks back to eight years ago and describes an event seemingly trivial for someone battling the ravaging effects of Parkinson’s as the moment his life was saved.

Roach met a scrawny, spunky former street urchin named Manny Pacquiao.

“He saved my life eight years ago,” Roach said. “He walked into my gym and an hour later I was his new trainer. A month later, he won his first world title.”

Today, fighter and trainer are on the verge of yet another phenomenal achievement. Roach, the diligent teacher, will again stand in the corner and try to guide Pacquiao, his most famous student, to his own niche in boxing history.

Pacquiao is aiming to become the first boxer to win world titles in seven weight classes when he chases after Miguel Cotto’s WBO welterweight belt on Saturday.

The two have forged a partnership so lethal, it has become a factor to consider when trying to analyze the fight. Roach and Pacquiao are working together—it’s so natural, it’s like a dance, Roach said—and that should always count in prefight analyses.

“He’s my master,” Pacquiao said during the press conference for the fight on Wednesday. “Before, I used to call him coach. Now, I call him my master.”

Roach’s term of endearment for his favorite pupil is less formal. In Thursday’s final training, Roach walked to the corner of the ring at the IBA gym and Pacquiao met him there, stooping to give his trainer a respectful fist bump.

“Good work, son,” Roach said.

When is work ever bad when the two of them do it together?

Pacquiao has lost just once since hooking up with Roach—he was decisioned by Erik Morales in the first of a thrilling trilogy that the Pacman polished off with a pair of sensational stoppages.

Morales, Marco Antonio Barrera, Juan Manuel Marquez, Oscar De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton. All future Hall of Famers, all victims of the Pacquiao-Roach onslaught.

Now, they’re going after Cotto. And standing on the cusp of greatness, neither of them knows how they would’ve done if they didn’t do things together.

“I can’t imagine,” said Pacquiao.

“If Manny never walked into my gym that day, where would we both be?” Roach said. “I certainly wouldn’t be as popular as I am now.”

Sure, it was coincidence that, say, Roach’s gym wasn’t closed the day Pacquiao—on a vacation—decided to drop by. From that coincidence was born a bigger one, the one that led to the knockout victory on June 23, 2001 over IBF bantamweight champ Lehlo Ledwaba, a win that kicked off Pacquiao’s ascent to superstardom.

“I was vacationing, I had just finished a fight,” Pacquiao said. “I trained with Freddie and it’s just coincidence that somebody needed an opponent.”

From that point on, though, it was more the pair at work than it was luck or coincidence.

Roach, though, credits everything to Pacquiao.

“People keep asking me who will be the next Manny Pacquiao,” Roach said. “We won’t. Guys like him come only once in a lifetime.”

Roach knows so. After all, how many guys have walked up to a person battling a difficult disease and saved that person’s life?