It was bound to happen eventually.
For Joe Goossen, it’s been 44 years since he opened the Ten Goose Boxing gym in Van Nuys, California; 38 years since the first time one of his fighters became a world champion; and 21 years since he uttered boxing’s most iconic trainer-to-fighter F-bomb while coaching Diego Corrales to victory in quite possibly the greatest fight ever.
Goossen is 72 years old and a 2023 inductee of the International Boxing Hall of Fame. He’s a genuine boxing lifer.
So you had to figure it was only a matter of time.
At some point, somebody somewhere in this crazy sport was bound to find a negative word to say about him.
That moment arrived last month, at the official press conference in Los Angeles for the Mario Barrios-Ryan Garcia fight, when Garcia took aim at his former trainer – who is now Barrios’ chief second.
By all accounts, it was Garcia who terminated his professional relationship with Goossen, and not the other way around. Nevertheless, “KingRy” had T-shirts printed up for the presser labeling Goossen a “traitor” for accepting a job with Barrios and insisted, “You broke my heart, Joe.”
It was awkward. It was uncomfortable. And it was alarming because – well, it’s hard to remember a time before this when anyone talked crap to Goossen or attempted to portray him as the bad guy.
That’s not to say Goossen is a perfect person (he, of course, is not) or that he has never wronged anyone (assuredly he has).
But, after a lifetime working in a sport themed around combativeness and aggression, a sport where there are hardly any rules of decorum, a sport where capitalism prevails and most people will say or do anything to make an extra buck, Joe Goossen still has about as close to a 100% approval rating as anyone.
And he was as caught off guard by Garcia’s stated disdain for him as the rest of us.
“Look, I mean, the split with Ryan was very amicable,” Goossen insisted when we spoke on Friday night, as he rode back to his Vegas Strip hotel from a post-training-session dinner. “Ryan wanted to go in another direction, and there were no harsh words. Since then we’ve engaged many, many times on very friendly terms.
“Ryan did a couple of his internet spots with his buddies at my gym just a few months ago before this, before I got hired by Mario, so it wasn’t like we had any adversarial terms. I took him and some of his buddies out to dinner that night when he filmed in my…
2026-02-17 12:00:00
Mario Barrios trainer Joe Goossen: ‘I don’t have any enemies in this game’
