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The story behind the Margarito video making fun of Freddie Roach
By Zach Arnold | November 11, 2010
A discussion amongst the Yahoo Sports MMA/boxing writers.
STEVE COFIELD: “If anyone should be sensitive to Freddie Roach and this awful thing that’s happened to him with Parkinson’s, you know we don’t know for sure that the fight game, boxing does it to you but there’s pretty good evidence, if anyone should be sensitive to that it should be boxers and people around boxing and there was a video [Tuesday] night that got out on Fanhouse where (Antonio) Margarito and one of his training partner’s, Brandon Rios, are doing Freddie Roach Parkinson impressions, shaking, contorted faces, stuttering… Just stupid. Childish!”
KEVIN IOLE: “It was horrible. I mean, it was beyond stupid. I mean, and you know, I know Dave is outraged over Margarito even having the fight but this would make somebody even way over the top on that. I mean, and then they had, it was worse because of the lame excuse he had at the press conference when he said, well I wasn’t making fun of him, I didn’t even know he had this disease.”
STEVE COFIELD: “Yeah.”
KEVIN IOLE: “This is Roberto Garcia talking. He said I didn’t know he had this disease and I was just talking, he goes, I thought he maybe had something from his boxing career. Well, yes! That’s what he has. And Freddie’s Parkinson is actually trauma-induced Parkinson’s and it’s a Parkinson’s that came from, you know, from too many years in the ring and being hit too often so it’s really a sad thing that they did and it showed just a complete lack of class on the part of all three men.”
STEVE COFIELD: “Am I going too far saying, you know, it says a lot about Margarito I think.”
KEVIN IOLE: “I think it does, too. I mean, I was critical, highly critical of him in my column this morning on Yahoo Sports after watching it and I just don’t see how, you know, how Margarito, you know, thinks he can just explain this away because he cannot.”
STEVE COFIELD: “The other part of it is when you watch the video, and they pulled it down, although I was able to screen cap some shots of them doing their Freddie Roach Parkinson’s impression so they’re up on the boxing blog up on Yahoo… the beginning of the video is another disturbing trend, you know, as if it’s not bad enough to sit there and mock on a guy with this awful disease, they continue to make light of the incident that got them in hot water in the first place and that is the plaster substance on his hands, you know, in the 24/7 they’re putting Cinderblocks on this hands. This video starts out with some kind of like hammer thing, some steel thing like, GUYS, IT’S NOT FUNNY. I don’t like, just you’re not letting it go now!”
KEVIN IOLE: “Yeah, I agree, I mean, I just don’t understand. Like, just forget about it, conduct yourself as a professional with class and dignity and eventually you will restore your reputation. But I mean this joking around he’s doing about it, I mean he’s making a fool out of himself and people are laughing at him, not with him.”
STEVE COFIELD: “From a media philosophy standpoint on that video that had Margarito and one of his training partners mocking on Freddie Roach for having Parkinson’s, um… if you were in charge of a web site and the video was up there, would you pull the video?”
KEVIN IOLE: “No.”
STEVE COFIELD: “Because I just want to tell people, Fanhouse had it up, my guess is Fanhouse put pressure on the blogger and they may have gotten calls from Camp Margarito and promoters to pull that video down.”
KEVIN IOLE: “I can tell you what happened because it was taken, it was taken down by Lem Satterfield who is their boxing editor and he took it down at about 4 in the morning. He had just gotten up to get ready to fly to the airport. He lives in suburban Baltimore to fly to the airport to come to Dallas today. I talked to Lem at length at the press conference and he yanked it, he said he saw it and it disgusted him and he just thought to take it down because of that. So that’s why he took it down. I think he regrets having taken it down now just because you realize there was significant news value to it. My only objection to it was that the ‘reporter’ and I use that in quotes because he certainly is not a real reporter that did the interview, prodded them into it and you know that’s not the role of a journalist to be doing something like that and he was like doing the ‘ol, hey, he said this about you and he said this about you and he was really prodding them into it. It doesn’t excuse them for saying it but the reporter in that case was unprofessional and got them to say that by the way he was interviewing them. If I was in charge and I saw that video, of course I would put that video up and it would stay there. I would have been angry only from the standpoint that my ‘reporter’ would have behaved so abominably the way this ‘reporter’ who did that interview did.”
STEVE COFIELD: “It is a news item, you’re right, and it was out there so I think it’s kind of silly and naive to think that no one saw it and it’s just going to go away. It was reposted, it got reposted, it was edited because I think there was a more offensive impression later in the video, that was up for a couple of hours and then as you said in quotes the ‘journalist’ then I think pulled the, hey, that’s my video because someone else posted it, that’s my video copyright you know whatever infringement, rights deal and pull it down, so it got pulled down a second time.”
KEVIN IOLE: “Yeah, it’s just too bad, I mean it’s really bad and I think people need to see that to what idiots these guys are and how they conduct themselves.”
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