Shane McGuigan has warned George Groves about the demands of being a professional trainer on the eve of their sharing a promotion for the first time with Groves in his new role.
On Saturday at London’s Wembley Arena, on the undercard of the fight between McGuigan’s promising junior welterweight Adam Azim and Sergey Lipinets, Groves will lead his cruiserweight Lucas Roehrig for the second time, against the little-known Milosav Savic.
The retired Groves, having had his most successful run as the WBA super-middleweight champion under McGuigan – following previous periods being trained by the respected Adam Booth and Paddy Fitzpatrick – first asked McGuigan if he would be willing to train Roehrig.
Groves’ determination to be the 21-year-old cruiserweight’s manager meant him instead also becoming his trainer, and asked about the development, McGuigan – who on Saturday guided Ellie Scotney to victory over Mea Motu – told BoxingScene: “I said to him, ‘Get prepared for it’. I’m still friendly with George – me and him still get on.
“It’s a different mindset than a fighter’s mindset. You have to be – the kid he’s got is a good kid and he really holds George in high regard. It’s when you’re working with someone that doesn’t care about you being George Groves; that doesn’t care about your time and that you’ve got kids and a wife at home… They just think, ‘This is my moment – it’s my eight years and my window that’s most important to me; you’re just a by-product of that’. That’s what a lot of fighters’ mentality is. When you’ve got guys like that, that’s a testament to a trainer.
“I haven’t really discussed it with George that much, to be honest. He asked me to actually work with Lucas – he wanted to manage him, and I don’t really wanna work with a kid being managed elsewhere – so I said, ‘Look, George…’, and he went, ‘I might just do it’, and I said, ‘Look, go and do it’, so it was an ad-hoc decision, but that might also be a good thing, because it’s pushed him in another direction. He’s still got a lot of love for the game, and when you’ve got a lot of love for the game and you still want to be in it, it’s a great position to be in.
“I don’t know if he’ll do it for a long time, and it depends how much he wants to dedicate himself. I think he’ll probably work with two [fighters], max. What I do – every day, it’s in the gym, Monday to Friday. When they have a fight, I’m back in the gym; I’m going through Christmas; I’m going January, February, March, April… That’s the difference. That’s a decision you have to make if you’re going to go that far into coaching. If you just want to have one or two, then that’s fine.
“If you look at SugarHill [Steward], he’s not in the gym Monday to Friday, every week. He’s just, ‘Okay, you’ve got a camp – eight weeks’. Different type of mentality as a trainer. I’ve built up fighters for 14 years, from scratch – from their debut. Chris Billam-Smith, debut. Josh Taylor, debut. Carl Frampton, even though he says it’s not from his debut, it pretty much was. This is years and years and years of work. It’s not just, ‘Okay, come in’. If you’ve got the mindset that you want to get the most out of somebody, you’ve got to be in there a lot – in the gym all the time.”
It was in December when Roehrig, an amateur from London’s Dale Youth Amateur Boxing Club – once the home of, among others, Groves and James DeGale – made his professional debut and fought under Groves for the first time, when impressively stopping the former English champion Joel McIntyre. Saturday’s opponent Savic, 30 years old and from Serbia, has lost his past three fights.
McGuigan, separately, is rumoured to have been considered a potential new trainer for Ben Whittaker – Whittaker, incidentally, has previously worked with SugarHill Steward – but asked about those rumours he responded: “I don’t know about that. At the moment, no.
“Of course [it appeals] – he’s a brilliant talent. He sparred [my fellow light heavyweight Craig Richards] a few times – four times, five times. It was good work. He has the experience. Ben has that amateur speed; stuff like that. It’s good to be in there with guys that are quicker and good for Ben to be in there with guys that can go into the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth [rounds].”
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