by Teddy Atlas
“Twenty fights?”
“Between ten and fifteen.”
“Older?”
“Seventeen.”
Cus whistled. “And Tyson never stopped moving?”
“Perpetual motion.”
“Like a heavyweight Henry Armstrong?”
“Yeah.” Cus always said if you could get a heavyweight that could fight like Henry Armstrong, throwing punches nonstop, never giving his opponent a chance to breathe, you’d have a champion. Jimmy Jacobs had these old fight films of Armstrong, and the two of us had watched them with Tyson many times, analyzing Armstrong’s style and discussing it. “Imagine,” Cus said. “A guy that could move that quick, that could fight with that ferocity and passion. That would be a fighter. Because he’d be exciting, too.” Cus never overlooked that. A champion was one thing, but combine that with excitement and you would really have something special.
When I tried to bring up how some of the other kids had done, when I said, “Greg won, too,” he said, “The punch, the final punch, what was it, a left hand?”
“Yes.”
“After the double left hook?”
“After that.”
“When he saw he had him hurt he finished him, huh?”
“Yes.”
That still wasn’t enough for him. The next day, he couldn’t wait to see Shanager. It was kind of like a guy wanting to hear good things about himself. All these years, he was out of the mainstream, out of the limelight, and now it was right there again, that excitement of being at the beginning of something big.
It actually kind of got to me, watching Cus with Shanager. You know how when you’re a kid and you do something and you want to hear the person tell you everything good about it? Like if your parents came to your high school football game. “Did you see my touchdown run? The way I cut around that guy?” You had done it, they weren’t telling you anything you didn’t know, but you wanted to hear them describe it anyway. “Yeah, I saw the way you faked him out of his shoes. That was beautiful…. And the way you leaped over that guy at the end….”
It was just human nature. “The mouthpiece landed six rows back?” “The sweat hit and you thought it was somebody slamming their hand on the wall?”
There was a purity to it, and there aren’t many things in life that are pure once you get beyond childhood. So I was happy for Cus. At that point the joy and excitement over Tyson was untainted. It hadn’t gone to where it was going to go. I was happy that I was training his guy and contributing. It felt good to be a part of it. That’s why I would feel so betrayed later. I thought Cus appreciated my being a part of that good feeling, and that we were partners.
As far as Tyson, he understood that he had something, a quality and a talent, that made him special. He knew he was going somewhere. At the same time, he was scared, because he felt like maybe his boxing talent was all he had, and what if it wasn’t enough?
Our relationship to that point was based on need more than any kind of real feeling. I was his trainer. I was important to him, maybe more important than anyone else, because Cus was too old and couldn’t do what I was doing. He couldn’t be in the gym every day, or go to the Bronx. I was the guy Tyson needed to prop him up when he was otherwise alone and scared. But he also had that street understanding of who had the power—so there was no real loyalty possible. Later on, he would realize that he was the one with the power. When he was older and more experienced, with a certain level of confidence, he would start playing both ends against the middle. But in the beginning, he was softer and weaker, and he needed me.
One of the toughest problems when you have a kid like Tyson, who can destroy other kids in the ring, is finding people to fight him. You have to get him that experience, but word gets around and nobody wants to put their kid in against him. Cus and I started paying Nelson fifty bucks, which he in turn used to get other trainers at the Bronx club to put their fighters in against Tyson. Fifty bucks—which was actually a lot of money for us—to sacrifice a kid. Here were these trainers, who otherwise wouldn’t put their kid in with Tyson, and now, for fifty bucks (or some portion of that amount), they would. It was screwed up, because the kid wasn’t getting the money, the trainers were, but that was the reality. We had to get fights.
We probably got twenty fights that way, which, under the circumstances, once Tyson was out of the bag, was a lot. Eventually, though, there came a night when we couldn’t get anybody. To sway this one trainer who was on the fence, I said, “Make it an exhibition.” I knew that an exhibition automatically put it on a different level, made it more palatable, removed some of the fear. The trainer said, “Okay. We’ll put big gloves on, sixteen-ounce gloves instead of the ten-ounce, and we’ll use headgear.”
For me, all that mattered was that Tyson get more experience, that he get in the ring and deal with his imagination and the fear of fighting someone. As far as I was concerned, “exhibition” was just a word; other than the gloves being different, the intent was going to be the same.
Then Tyson went out there, big gloves, headgear and all, and knocked this Spanish kid out cold. It almost caused a big problem. The trainer and some other guys rushed the ring and they were angry. “Hey, he wasn’t supposed to hit him!” Meanwhile, their fighter was still stretched out. Another guy vaulted into the ring and started moving toward Tyson. I jumped between them. “Where are you going?”
“This was supposed to be an exhibition.”
Tyson was standing right behind me. I didn’t want him to get involved, but he spoke up anyway.
“I didn’t do nothing to him that he wasn’t trying to do to me.”
It was true. Everyone knew it was true, and it sort of stopped them. I said, “Listen, back down.” And they did. They backed down.
Not too long after that there was another fight, a good fight, in which Tyson’s opponent got in trouble and was hung up on the ropes much the way the kid with the Afro had gotten stuck on the ropes in that first fight. The referee tried to intervene but didn’t get there in time, and pow, Tyson hit the kid with another shot and knocked him out.
Again, people were upset. A number of them stormed the ring and started going after Tyson. I jumped in and screamed, “I’m telling you right now, you go near him, we got a problem.”
That didn’t stop them. Three of them were going after Tyson, trying to get around me. I pushed one of them, and he fell down. It started to turn into a melee. It was bad. I pushed this guy because I knew what type of guys they were, and I knew that once a few of them showed some courage and got into it, I wouldn’t have any control, it would get completely out of hand.
Luckily, Nelson did some quick thinking. I had grabbed one of the other guys by the shirt collar and he had me by the shirt, too. We had our fists cocked and were about to start throwing punches, and Nelson jumped in the ring and grabbed the microphone. He said, “This fight is a draw. It’s a draw!”
It was the perfect move. In the streets everything is instinct and flashes of brilliance like that. Calling the fight a draw calmed everyone down. A draw meant that no money would change hands, and that lowered the temperature considerably. The guy I was holding let go of my shirt; I let go of his. Tyson and I knew who had won the fight, which was all that mattered to us. Tyson got another win, got some more confidence, and the crowd was placated.
Not long after that fight, we took Tyson out of town, up to Scranton, Pennsylvania, to fight the first white guy he fought. It turned out to be an interesting night. When you’re developing a young fighter (a couple of years had gone by and Tyson was fourteen or fifteen at this point), no matter how good or talented he is, the one part of him that requires the most work, the trickiest and ultimately the most important factor in determining his future, is his psyche and his will. Whatever else he’s got going for him, his mind and his will are the real ingredients of his ultimate success or failure.
Against this white kid in Scranton, I knew immediately we were in for a test. The kid was big, not very
skilled, but tough. Tyson jumped all over him in the first round, coming out strong as he always did, and knocking the kid down a couple of times. Instead of staying down, though, the kid kept getting up. Tyson had never had that happen to him before; when he hit ’em they usually stayed hit. This was new. He got discouraged and started feeling tired. I could see it happening.
Tyson came back to the corner at the end of the first round and flopped down on his stool like it was the last round of a brutal fight. He had dropped the guy two times already. The guy was half out of it, almost drunk from punches, and Tyson had barely been touched. But he was exhausted. “I think my hand is broke,” he said.
I knew right then that there was nothing wrong with his hand, but I had to make sure. I grabbed his glove—he was looking into space—and I squeezed real hard. He didn’t react.
I said, “There’s nothing broken. The only thing broken is you.” I got up in his face. “You want to be a fighter? Stop the bullshit! The only thing this guy’s doing is being dumb enough to get back up. Every time you hit him, you hurt him.”
Tyson was looking at me. I could see a flicker of anger, which was good. “You’re going to let it get to you because he keeps getting back up?” I said. I pushed him out of the corner as the bell sounded.
Tyson dropped the guy two more times in the next three minutes, but the guy kept getting up. By the end of the round, Tyson barely made it back to the corner. “I can’t go on,” he said.
“You can’t go on?” I said. “I thought you wanted to be a fighter. I thought you had this dream of being heavyweight champion. Let me tell you something, this is your heavyweight title fight.”
It’s amazing when you think about it. You see all these big fights on HBO, but you never see these backwater bouts when a guy is on his way up, and there are these crossroads moments where if he hadn’t overcome something, he’d have never made it to HBO. I said, “You bullshit artist. You’ve been with us all this time, saying you want to be champ, and everything’s fine when you’re knocking guys out. But now, for the first time, a guy doesn’t want to be knocked out, a guy has the balls to get up, and you want to quit? You know what I’d be doing if I was in that other guy’s corner? I’d be stopping the fight. That’s how beat up this guy is, and you want to quit! Now get up, goddamn it!” I picked him up off his stool and stood him up.
He staggered out into the ring, and the two of them grabbed each other. He hit the guy again, the guy hit him. To Tyson it must have been like Sugar Ray Robinson versus Jake LaMotta, but in reality it was two big palookas. They were pawing at each other, hugging and slow-dancing, and with about twenty seconds left in the round, the guy got Tyson into the corner. I could see in Tyson’s eyes what was about to happen. He was going to quit. He was going to go down. If I didn’t do anything, he was going down.
I took a risk. If you go up on the ring apron, they can disqualify your fighter. I knew that. I also knew that we had amateur refs, and it was a crazy crowd, so I took a chance. I got up there. They were in the corner right by me, and I screamed, practically in Tyson’s ear, “Don’t you do it. Don’t you fucking do it!” He hung on those last few seconds. Then the bell rang.
When we were out in the corridor afterward, on our way to the locker room, he leaned close to me and said, “Thanks.” That was it. Nothing else really needed to be said.
“Listen,” I said, “I’m not going to make a big thing about this. I’m only going to talk about it once. You almost did it. You almost let it happen. But you didn’t. You have to learn. That’s part of being a fighter. The important thing is that you didn’t let it happen. If you had, it would have ruined everything. Instead of us standing here, you humbly telling me ‘thank you,’ you’d be crying somewhere, and you’d never be a fighter. You would have looked back and said, ‘Oh, my God, I didn’t have to do that.’ But you would have done it. It would have been done. So you need to learn from this experience, and make sure that you never let yourself get that close to that place again.”
It was a watershed moment for him, a real defining moment, because if he had quit then he might never have become Mike Tyson.
Cus was at the fight that night. It was the first time he’d seen Tyson. Obviously, he was very disappointed. He saw the power, he saw that Tyson could knock down this bigger, more mature guy who was stubborn as a boulder. But he also recognized that Tyson was still weak, that he wasn’t strong mentally, and that we would have to help him get stronger.
At a certain point, if he’s going to get to the top of the boxing profession, a fighter has to learn the difference between the truth and a lie. The lie is thinking that submission is an acceptable option. The truth is that if you give up, afterward you’ll realize that any of those punches that you thought you couldn’t deal with, or those rough moments you didn’t think you could make it through, were just moments. Enduring them is not nearly as tough as having to deal with the next day and the next month and the next year, knowing that you quit, that you failed, that you submitted. It’s a trainer’s job to make a fighter understand that difference, that the parts of a fight that are urgent last only seconds; seconds during which you have to stave off the convenient excuse—“I’m too tired” or “I hurt too much” or “I can’t do this” or even simply “I’m not going to deal with this.” Sometimes it just comes down to not floating—just being there and understanding that if you give in, you’ll hurt more tomorrow. Maybe there is no more important lesson to learn from boxing than that.
COMPLETE AND
INCOMPLETE
ONE NIGHT, AFTER A SESSION AT THE GYM, I TOOK A bunch of the kids to the Jamesway Shopping Center in Catskill. It was one of those strip malls with a dry cleaner, a video rental place, and a pizzeria. I often took the kids out and did things away from boxing. We’d go to movies, have picnics, play touch football, or just hang out and talk. As I’ve said, I was more than just a trainer for these kids; most of them came from families where the father was dead or absent, and so for many of them I was filling that void.
When we walked into the pizzeria, I made the boys sit down in a couple of booths that were side-by-side while I went up to the counter to order. The girl behind the counter was in her early twenties and pretty. I had seen her around town a couple of times but we had never talked. She had dark hair, playful brown eyes, and a nice figure.
“So these all your kids?” she asked.
“Yeah, they’re all mine,” I said.
“Impressive,” she said. There was a spark there right away. It wasn’t like I knew I was going to marry her, but I was definitely interested.
She had sort of a provocative flirtatiousness. She was very confident, and I liked that. Even though she was working behind the counter, I could tell she wasn’t going to let anyone push her around or take an attitude with her.
I ordered a couple of pies, because I didn’t have money for any more, and went back and sat down with the boys. A while later, she came over with a tray full of Cokes.
“I hope you boys are taking good care of your father,” she said.
“He ain’t our father,” Mane Moore said, giggling.
She looked at me with a little smile. “He isn’t? He told me he was.”
“Naw!”
When the pizzas came out of the oven ten minutes later, I went up to the counter to get them. Hot steam was rising off the cheese. She saw me looking a little perplexed.
“What’s the problem?”
“I only ordered two pizzas.”
“Oh yeah? I thought you ordered three. I’ll tell you what, why don’t you take the extra one and I won’t charge you for it.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Yeah, I know. But those boys look pretty hungry.”
“You sure?”
She nodded.
“I’m Teddy.”
“Elaine.”
She helped me carry the pizza back to the table.
“Thanks…Elaine.”
“My pleas
ure.” She went back to the counter.
I sat down and the boys were all staring at me, grinning.
“What?”
“You like her, don’t you?”
“What are ya talking about?”
They all started laughing and giggling. I looked around the table, leveling them with a stern gaze.
“Shut up and eat your pizza, all of ya.”
A few days later, I went back to the pizzeria, without the kids this time. Elaine was behind the counter again.
“Hi. Elaine, right?”
“Right.”
“Listen, I wanted to ask you something….”
“Yeah?” She looked amused.
“I been thinking of opening a restaurant….”
“You want to open a restaurant?”
“Well, like a sports bar.”
“A sports bar.”
“Well, like a sports bar and restaurant.”
She stared at me.
“I thought maybe you could give me some advice.”
“You want advice from me.”
“Yeah, you know, like how to get started.”
“Maybe you should be more direct.”
“What do you mean?”
“When you want to ask a girl out.”
“Oh.” It threw me a little that I was so transparent. “You think that’s what I’m doing?”
“Actually, I thought you’d come back here sooner,” she said.
I laughed. She was so cocky that there was nothing else to do. Anyway, that was how it began. I followed her advice and asked her out. One night, early on, I took her to an amateur fight show near Catskill that Tyson and the other kids were fighting in. I had never taken any other girl I’d dated to a fight—I was like my father in that way and considered it a little unprofessional—but I guess subconsciously I wanted her to know what I did. I wanted to impress her.
While she sat in the audience, I took care of the kids. I wrapped their hands and did my thing. Every once in a while I’d look over at her in the crowd. She didn’t seem to mind being by herself. She understood that I was working. I could tell that she was enjoying herself, watching the fights, watching me with the kids.