by Teddy Atlas
There were always mixed emotions for the kids. They wanted the glory but they were also afraid. Here they were in this madhouse with two hundred or so people jammed into the place. On some level it had the feeling of a meat market. They were just waiting for their call, waiting to be tapped on the shoulder and hear the words, “You’ve got a bout,” because they wanted to be fighters and they dreamed of being Sugar Ray Leonard and having the chance to be on TV. At the same time they were hoping maybe they’d get the other kind of tap, the one where they would hear, “Sorry. Couldn’t get you an opponent,” and the knot of fear would unloosen in their stomach, and they’d be able to mutter regretfully, “Ah, too bad.”
For five years, from 1977 to 1982, I did this every Saturday, leaving Catskill with them in the afternoon and getting home at three or four in the morning, knowing that if I matched them wrong, if they got beat up, I could lose them. It was a tremendous responsibility. As big as raising your own children.
There were different ways to ensure a good match. I might know the coach, or I might have seen the kid fight before. That was the best way. But there were so many new kids and coaches showing up there each week that it got tricky. You might have to go by someone else’s word, and you didn’t know if you could trust them. Even if their intentions were good, their judgment might not be. So you had to know who you were getting your information from. Always, in the end, I’d want to take a look at the kid if I hadn’t gotten a line on him I was satisfied with. If he was a tall, skinny kid, I wouldn’t take him. Most tall, skinny kids have a lot of leverage. They can almost always punch like bastards. So I’d turn them down. Then I’d watch later in the night as they knocked some guy dead, and know that I’d been right.
When it came down to it, if I still wasn’t sure, I’d pull out my trump card. I’d go up to the trainer and I’d say, “Look, I have a feeling that your kid has more fights than you’re saying. My kid’s green. As soon as that bell rings, I’m going to know if you’ve been straight with me. If your kid’s a ringer, two things will happen. One, my kid will have a problem, but I won’t let him get hurt. I’ll stop the fight. Two, if that happens, then you’re going to have a problem, because I’ll be on my way over to you. So think about it. We’ve got another half hour before this match.” Twenty minutes later, Nelson would come over and say, “Teddy, Jose said he don’t want to make that match.” I’d say, “Tell Jose, thank you.”
I was very careful with all my kids, but especially with Mane. He was so fragile. He’d come such a long way, but I still couldn’t rely on him in the ring. I searched and searched for the right guy, and I finally got him, Raul Rivera, who was the same type of sensitive kid as Mane, had the same kind of confidence problems, and was similar in experience and ability. We put them in with each other, and all they did for the three rounds was grab at each other and look at the referee to break them up. Nelson had no patience. He said, “Ahhh, they’re terrible, they’re girls.” He didn’t understand where Mane had come from to get to that point. For him to just get in that ring, to last three rounds, was huge. I said to myself, “He’s got to keep doing it. I’ve got to keep him fighting every week. And I can’t take a chance with anyone except Raul.”
I went to Nelson the next week and said, “Mane’s going to fight again. He’s going to fight with Raul again.”
Nelson looked at me like I was nuts. “Again? You serious, Teddy? I’m going to throw up.”
“Again,” I said.
And right after they fought a second time, I went to Nelson and said, “They’re fighting again next week.”
“Teddy, you’re killing me,” Nelson said. “Nobody wants to watch this.”
I said, “I do.” I wound up having Mane and Raul fight six straight weeks. People couldn’t believe it. Nelson thought I was insane. But I wasn’t. It was working. Each time, Mane and Raul got a little bit better, and there was a little less holding, less pleading to the referee. By the sixth time, they were actually throwing punches. It was a pretty good fight. After that, I began letting Mane fight other guys, and he started becoming a fighter. Raul, too. (He actually later went on to win the New York Golden Gloves and turn professional. Nelson thought he might have found his champion—this kid he had initially wanted to give up on—but then Raul got involved in drugs. He was 10–0 as a pro, but he got involved with drugs and the street and didn’t achieve what he should have. It broke Nelson’s heart.)
My only real problem that first year at the Apollo was that my guys weren’t getting the decisions they deserved. There was a lot of corruption. The judges were guys right out of the audience. They were all related, and they were drinking and betting and they had a stake in the outcomes. As a consequence, we were getting robbed all the time. I would tell my kids, “You’re getting good experience, you’re learning, you’re going through the process. Even though they’re robbing you, the most important thing is that you’re improving. They won’t be able to rob you after a while.”
One thing I did to even the playing field a little was that afterward I would write up accounts of the smokers in the Catskill Daily Mail.
I’d write these really colorful stories about the fights, and if I thought a kid really won, I’d put down that he won. The kids loved it; they loved reading about themselves. It made a difference.
At a certain point, though, I knew I had to do more than just talk or “write” the wrongs. Mane, in particular, needed to have his confidence lifted up to the next level. I went into Nelson’s office one day. He was dressed in one of the colorful three-piece suits he always wore. I could see the outlines of the gun that he kept tucked in his waistband. Nelson and I had a very interesting relationship by that point. We were linked by Cus and our mutual love of boxing. He was developing his kids, and I was developing my kids, but in some ways, even though we were helping each other, we were adversaries. I said, “Nelson, tonight my guys are winning.”
“I’m sure they will,” he said. “They always fight good.”
“No, no, you don’t understand,” I said. “Tonight they’re winning.”
“I know, Teddy. They’re winners, they’re good kids.”
“No, you’re not understanding, Nelson. I’m telling you they’re gonna get their fuckin’ hands raised tonight. They need it, they deserve it, and I ain’t gonna let you rob them tonight. Maybe it sounds to you like I’m trying to fix it, but my kids are gonna win anyway, and I just want to make sure you’re going to acknowledge it.”
“Sure, Teddy. I see what you’re saying.”
“Good, and there’s another thing….”
“Yeah?”
I opened my bag and took out a big trophy. It was at least three feet tall, with a gold figure of a boxer on top of it.
“Wow, that’s beautiful,” he said.
“Starting tonight,” I said, “there’s gonna be a trophy like this for the fighter of the night.”
“That’s great. That’s a good idea, Teddy. But I can’t afford a trophy like that every week.”
“I’ll pay for them,” I said. “I’ll bring one down every week and you’ll give it to the fighter of the night. Tonight, it’s gonna be Mane Moore.”
“But the fights haven’t even taken place yet.”
“Tonight, Mane Moore is the fighter of the night.”
“Okay, Teddy.” Nelson was shaking his head.
However browbeaten he might have felt, Nelson didn’t show it. Got to give him credit. After the last fight, he climbed into the ring, and took the microphone with his usual élan. “Ladies and gentlemen…tonight, the Apollo Boxing Club is proud to begin a new tradition. Fighter of the night….”
At that point, someone handed him the trophy. I was looking at my kids. I always had them sit in one area, quiet and still, like little soldiers. When that trophy came out, you would have thought it was—forget it—a brand-new go-kart or minibike they were going to win. They were slapping each other, saying, “Holy shit, it’s bigger than me!” And looking around,
trying to figure out the winner. When Nelson announced, “…And the fighter of the night is…Mane Moore!,” I was looking right at Mane. He couldn’t even take it in. Couldn’t process it.
All my kids started hitting him, whacking him on the head and on the back. Then the Spanish kids came over. At first they’d been mad they didn’t get it, but within seconds they understood that something special was taking place. They joined in, whistling and cheering. Mane had fought a hell of a fight that night, so it wasn’t like charity; it was real. All these kids were patting him on the back, congratulating him, and he just looked confused. One of them said, “Mane, it’s you!”
He said, “What?” He looked up and he saw Nelson in the ring, holding the trophy, waiting for him. He couldn’t understand it. He looked at me, and I nodded.
When he got up and stepped into the ring to accept the trophy, the whole place erupted. They gave him a standing ovation. Mane finally came out of his daze and grinned that toothy smile of his. It was worth a million trophies to see that smile. It really was.
A DEATH IN
THE FAMILY
CUS HAD A THING ABOUT THE PHONE. HE DIDN’T LIKE anyone else answering it. I don’t know what he was like when he was younger, but by the time I encountered him he was an old man with a number of eccentric habits and preoccupations. There were certain areas in his domain that he needed to control. The phone was one. Food was another. When the groceries came in each week, they had to be left on the kitchen counter so that Cus could supervise their transfer to the pantry and make sure that everything was in order. If Camille hadn’t bought at least fifteen cans of tuna fish, an argument would ensue.
“You only got ten cans? What if we get unexpected guests?” Cus was nothing if not a creature of habit, and it was his habit to eat tuna fish for lunch every day. What that meant was that we had to have several extra jars of mayo on hand, because if we had tuna but we didn’t have mayo, we might as well not bother.
This was all serious business to him. I remember putting stuff away one day, when suddenly he started yelling at me. “Not in there! Don’t put it there! I’ll never find it.” Like if he had to look in another cabinet for something the world might come to an end.
When we actually did sit down to eat, he’d start discussing the next day’s meal before we’d even finished the one we were eating. Camille was incredibly tolerant of him, although she did occasionally lose her patience. “Cus, I’m still digesting. Please. I don’t want to think about what I’m going to eat tomorrow.”
“But you have to think about it,” he’d say. “Otherwise you might not take the meat out of the freezer in time, and then we’ll be stuck with something that isn’t properly defrosted.”
Camille gave up after a while. You couldn’t argue with Cus.
The phone was another one of his big obsessions. He had this favorite chair that he would fall asleep in. It was an old wooden chair with a high, regal back, and a brown cushion tied down to the seat. Even when Cus wasn’t sitting in it, it retained his aura, and a sense that he would be back soon. The telephone sat near it, on a little table. As soon as the phone rang, Cus would pick up the receiver. He’d be dead asleep in that chair, but the phone would ring and his hand would shoot out in the middle of some dream, and snag it off the hook. His reflexes, when it came to the phone, were almost superhuman. It was rare that anyone would beat him to a call.
New kids arriving at the house were immediately made aware that his room, which was on the second floor, right across from Camille’s room, was strictly off limits. No one ever saw the inside of his room. Ever. If you happened to be walking past when he was coming out, he’d open the door just enough so that he could squeeze out, and then he’d quickly shut it behind him. Of course, everyone was curious as to what the hell was in there. But that was the next thing he made everyone aware of: He had rifles in the room, and he knew how to use them.
This one time, I was downstairs and I heard the phone ring, and Cus answered. I could always tell when he was talking to my parents. His tone, especially with my father, would become uncharacteristically deferential. On this call, I knew it was my mother, and I could also tell that something was wrong. Cus handed me the receiver, looking apprehensive.
“Teddy, Gaga died,” my mother told me.
Gaga was my grandmother, Helen Riley, my mother’s mother, a tough old Irishwoman with an iron constitution, who’d hardly been sick a day in her life. She was eighty-eight years old, but the news of her death still came as a shock. I’d gotten closer to her as I’d grown older. She called me regularly in Catskill and sent me cards, always with a tenor twenty-dollar bill enclosed. When I went back to Staten Island, I visited with her, and often took her to bingo.
The way my mother described it, she had been taking Gaga a cup of tea that morning on one of those occasions when my grandmother had stayed over at the house (at eighty-eight, she still lived by herself), but when my mother tried to wake her, she couldn’t. “It was awful, Teddy. She was so still. I kept trying to wake her up. I just thought she was asleep.”
After I hung up, Cus looked at me. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
He and my grandmother had gotten along well, and he knew how she felt about me and how I felt about her. Whenever she called me, the two of them always talked. “That Cuff is a nice fella,” she’d say to me when I got on. “Gaga, it’s Cus.” “Yeah, I like that Cuff,” she’d say. “I hope he’s taking good care of you. Did you get my card? Did you get the ten dollars I sent?” “Yeah, Gaga, I got it.” “Make sure you spend it on some warm underwear.” She was the typical grandmother that way. Always sending me money to buy warm underwear. Like Catskill was in Siberia or someplace.
“So you’re going back for the funeral?” Cus said, even though he knew the answer.
“This afternoon.”
“Don’t stay too long.”
“A couple of days.”
Cus always got uneasy when I went home. It was a combination of things. When I was away, things at the gym ground to a halt. That was one problem. Also, he fretted that I might regress, that Staten Island would reclaim me, and I’d get sucked back into the things I had been doing.
“Hurry back,” he said.
I drove down in the station wagon. There were several cars parked outside my parents’ house. I had a front door key and I let myself in. Everyone was in the kitchen: my mother and my sister by the counter, laying out a plate of cookies and cake, and my father and my brother Terryl at the kitchen table. I hugged my mother, and she started to cry.
“Where’s Tommy?” I asked.
“He’s in his room,” she said.
My uncle Frank, my mother’s brother, arrived shortly. We embraced, and he said, “She didn’t suffer. She just got tired finally and went to sleep.”
At that point, there was certainly no reason to think otherwise. After my mother came upon Gaga’s lifeless body that day, my father had rushed over from his office, joined later by a couple of guys from the funeral parlor. He wrote up the death certificate as a cerebral hemorrhage, noting that there was a trickle of blood coming from Gaga’s ear, which was consistent with his diagnosis.
My uncle and I sat down at the kitchen table with my father and brother. My father turned to me. “Teddy, my car got a flat tire this morning. It’s over in Concord. Would you do me a favor?”
“You want me to go fix it and bring it back?”
“Yes.”
“Sure, Dad.”
My father and I were getting along better than we had in a long time. He was happy that I was doing something productive, and that I was off the streets. He had no way of knowing that in the future I would train champions and get paid for it. He just knew that I wasn’t in Rikers. I wasn’t robbing and beating people up. That was a big improvement.
I was putting on my coat to go out when my brother Tommy came downstairs. He looked drawn and thin, and, to be honest, a bit scary. He had this way of looking at you with these hol
low eyes—nothing really in them, or if there was, it wasn’t good. I was used to it by then, but it was still unnerving. When we were younger (he and I were only fifteen months apart, and some people thought we were twins), Tommy had been normal (at least within the fucked-up parameters of our family), a bright and talented kid. Then, like me, he reached his teens, and he started getting into trouble. When he was sixteen, he got arrested for stealing a car and was sent off to Rikers.
I’m not sure exactly what happened to him while he was in Rikers, although I can imagine, but when he got out, he wasn’t the same. He was still facing trial. There was a chance he’d go back to prison. He and I both moved in a world where it was necessary to put up a façade of macho toughness. It was like, “Yeah, you go to jail, so what?” But underneath, I could tell he was scared, just like a fighter before a fight is scared. That’s why I never say “So what” to a fighter’s fear. I learned how dangerous it can be.
For Tommy, what had occurred inside Rikers coupled with his fear of going back there proved to be too much for him. With the specter of his trial looming, he just snapped one day. Maybe it would have happened anyway; there was something inside his mind, and if it hadn’t been one thing triggering it, it would have been another. But maybe it never would have happened at all. I don’t know. I just know that we were sitting in the living room one day, watching TV, and he went away. The Tommy I knew went away. I said something to him, and he didn’t answer me. I yelled at him, but it was as if he didn’t hear me. He was just staring straight ahead at the screen, expressionless. At first I thought it was an act. I thought he was kidding around. Everyone did—“C’mon, Tommy, cut it out”—that’s how hard it was to understand something like that.