By Keith Idec

Teddy Atlas acknowledges that he won’t know for sure if Timothy Bradley can implement all he has taught him during their first training camp together until Bradley boxes Brandon Rios on Saturday night.

Regardless, Atlas doesn’t adhere to the old boxing axiom that states one training camp isn’t enough time for a trainer to make permanent improvements in a fighter who has been doing things differently his entire career. The ESPN analyst, who’s training a fighter for the first time in four years, is more than pleased with the progress Bradley has made during the two months they’ve spent working together at the WBO welterweight champion’s gym in Indio, California.

“I’m not gonna to put no medal on myself,” Atlas told BoxingScene.com, “and make it any more or less than it is and make believe, ‘Wow! You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. And wow! It’s been hard.’ I’m not gonna do that. But I’m not gonna fool myself, either. My answer is it’s been as easy as it can be because I have a very intelligent fighter in front of me. That’s part of saying yes [to training a new fighter] and part of the assessment that you should make as a trainer before you say yes. And it’s part the assessment that I did make. He’s very intelligent. And he’s also very eager.

“When you put those two things together, if you’re half as good as you think you are as a teacher or as you should be, all that other stuff I don’t believe in. I understand it, and still the test is in the tasting of the pudding. I get that. At the end of the day, it’s still gonna come down to him doing it on November 7th, under pressure, with a fighter coming at him, with small gloves on, in a real arena – not just in the gym. I get it. But I’ve been in this business a long time and I know what I know. And I know what I see. Because of his intelligence, because of his eagerness, because of his ability to put his ego off on the side and say, ‘Yes, I do need to change some things. Yes, I do need to listen to these things,’ he has really been picking it up fast.”

Bradley (32-1-1, 12 KOs, 1 NC) parted ways with longtime trainer Joel Diaz late in the summer and reached out to Atlas shortly thereafter. Following a three-day trip to Bradley’s home – where Atlas broke down film with Bradley and got to know the two-division champion, his wife/manager, Monica, and their five kids – Atlas agreed to train Bradley.

While pleased with Bradley’s development, Atlas remains cautiously optimistic because he knows the rugged Rios (33-2-1, 24 KOs) will try to force Bradley back into some of his old habits during their HBO “World Championship Boxing” main event at UNLV’s Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas.

“I’m not gonna fool myself,” Atlas said. “That doesn’t mean that he’s got it down enough that, under constant pressure, he’s gonna do it right every second. But it does mean that he is picking it up. He spent two weeks on the floor before I let him box. I wanted him to be away from the pressure of boxing and get these things into a habit form as much as you can before he had to start doing them under the pressure of boxing. And now that he’s been boxing, he’s been implementing the things enough where I’m convinced that he’s gonna do those things. Will he do it to the level where I want him to do it? Time’s gonna tell that. But he’s gonna do a lot of it. And he is doing a lot of it.”

Keith Idec covers boxing for The Record and Herald News, of Woodland Park, N.J., and BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.