Shooting for the top dog

WHEN Edgar Berlanga Snr walked out of the prison gates a free man he expected to find his son hurting people. The Puerto Rican’s incarceration had left his family fraught with worry for what might happen to Edgar Jnr, a whirling dervish of a teenager floundering in the deprivation of New York’s Lower East Side. Berlanga Snr reached out to his friend and local boxing coach, Benny Roman, in a bid to give his son some direction.

“He started looking after me in the gym,” Top Rank’s super-middleweight prospect Edgar Berlanga Jnr tells Boxing News.

“He was doing a favour for my dad. My dad asked him, ‘Please, I’m going away. Please keep Edgar in the gym.’ Benny kept that promise. He picked me up every day and just kept me there. And it was working … to a certain extent.”