Teddy Atlas to train Gvozdyk for Stevenson bout

According to Dan Rafael of espn.com, trainer Teddy Atlas will be back in the corner to train Oleksandr Gvozdyk for November 1st title opportunity against Adonis Stevenson on November 1st.

“They’ve been waiting for an answer for a couple of weeks,” said Atlas, a longtime ESPN boxing analyst.

“I wanted to meet him and his family. So I did. I met him, spent two days with him, we watched film, had lunch and dinner on the first day, and then we spent the second day in the gym working together,” Atlas said. “I met his family. He has three young children and a wife, and I trust Egis as a person. I told him that the first prerequisite to even entertaining the thought of coming back to training is if I thought they were good people. If I didn’t think that, I wouldn’t even entertain it.

“That is the first thing — do I want to spend time with this person? And I felt that I would want to be around a person like that. And then the next thing was can I help him and is he conducive to being trained? Will he allow himself to be coached? The answer was yes from what I could see, and they’re asking for my help, so can I help him? I feel I can help him.”

“I had to ask myself, ‘Am I ready to do this again?’ Are you emotionally ready to do this again? I’ve been training fighters since I was a kid, since I was 21 years old training [Hall of Famer] Wilfred Benitez. That took me a couple of weeks to decide,” Atlas said. “It’s not something to decide on in a couple of days. And after all these years training fighters, your neck hurts, your shoulder, the back.”

“Oleksandr was looking to step up and be trained by Teddy,” Klimas told ESPN. “I know Teddy for a long time. He’s not committing just because. He thought about this very deeply. It wasn’t an easy decision for him to make. When he spent time with Oleksandr, with his family and in the gym, it looks like they clicked. Teddy said he would think about it. I spoke to him three or four times after that and he wasn’t sure, but [on Monday] when we spoke, he said he will take the opportunity and that he would try to help Oleksandr as much as he can.”

“I’m already looking at film, and I’ve already got a few pages of notes and things that have to be worked on, things that need to be corrected,” Atlas said. “You’re fighting the second-hardest puncher in boxing [behind heavyweight titlist Deontay Wilder]. You can’t make mistakes with a guy like this. You have to be technically solid, and you have to have a very definitive plan on how to go about winning this fight. We will work on that. There’s no real margin for error.

“[Gvozdyk] behaves like a fighter. He’s got good instincts. From a technical aspect, he just has to take it to the next level, but he has the right ideas. He has to expand on the ideas.”