Atlas

by Teddy Atlas

  I had dated a fair number of girls before her. There had been girls who liked me. One girl I even took back to Staten Island, during the holidays, to meet my mother. She was a gorgeous blonde girl but a little naive; she’d never really been outside of Catskill. I remember we took a ferry boat over to Manhattan to go Christmas shopping in the city, and there was a shoeshine guy on the boat, walking around, saying, “Shine, shine.” Well, this girl started looking around, on the floor, under the benches. I said, “What are you doing?,” and she said, “I’m looking for that man’s dog, Shine.” You can imagine what my mother thought when she heard that. She went, “Shine, huh?”

  With Elaine it was different. She was quick. She kept me on my toes. Her instincts about people and situations were sharp. The first time I took her to the gym could have been awkward. There was this girl fighter I’d been training, Nadia, who liked me a bit. What had happened was that she had come to me because she was going to take the state police test, and in those days the trooper test required sparring for one round whether you were a man or a woman. Nadia asked me if I would train her and also help her lose weight at the same time—she was overweight. In a matter of months, she lost fifty pounds. I guess between that and watching me work with the kids, she started to like me a little.

  It was flattering, but I didn’t feel the same way about her; I did my best to keep things professional. At the same time I didn’t want to hurt her feelings—I had spent a lot of time trying to build her up. One day, I got to the gym—this was after I’d started seeing Elaine—and one of my kids, Kevin Young, was waiting downstairs. He said, “I wanted to get you before you go in the gym. Nadia got here early today and she said that enough is enough. If the mountain don’t come to Mohammad, Mohammad is gonna come to the mountain. She’s gonna ask you out on a date tonight.”

  I went up to the gym. I had a couple of boxes of new gloves with me, and I put them down and started opening them up. Nadia made a beeline for me. “Hey, Boss,” she said. She always called me Boss.

  “Hey, Nadia.”

  “How you doin’?”

  “Okay.” I knew what was coming. To spare her feelings as much as possible, because I could see she was geared up to ask me out, I said, “Nadia, I may need you to help me out tonight. I have to get finished early. I have to go somewhere….”

  “Oh…,” she said, and I could see her sag a little. “Sure….” She’d been ready to ask me out afterward and now she couldn’t. If she had caught me off guard and asked me, it might have been awkward. So it was due to my kids that it didn’t happen that way. They were good kids and they thought about stuff like that and looked out for people’s feelings.

  The next week, or the week after that, I brought Elaine to the gym. Everyone was doing their thing, getting ready for their workouts. This was before Velcro wraps, and all my fighters learned to tie their own wraps using their teeth. Elaine saw Nadia tying her hand wraps with her teeth, and she didn’t know that it was actually a point of pride for Nadia. She just saw this woman struggling to tie these wraps with her teeth, and she went, “Oh, here, lemme help you,” and Nadia growled at her. She actually went, “Grrrr!”

  A lot of women would have been thrown, but Elaine didn’t get flustered. She handled it well. Instinctively, she understood what was going on, but she didn’t react the way another woman might have. She wasn’t jealous or insecure. She didn’t put her arm around me, and throw it in Nadia’s face. She had compassion and handled herself with dignity. It was one more thing I admired about her.

  Things got serious with us pretty quickly. I brought her to the house to meet Camille and Cus. She brought me home to meet her family. Her parents were Albanians who had escaped to Italy from Pristine, Yugoslavia, right after Elaine was born. When she was six, her mother and father had come to America, living first in the Bronx, then later on moving to Catskill, where they had relatives. Like most Albanians, they were a very tight-knit clan, patriarchal, observant of the old-world customs and traditions. Arranged marriages were still the norm in their culture, and after a girl got married, she would move into her husband’s family’s house and become basically a slave. Elaine was headstrong and independent, a bit of a rebel. I was the first man she had ever brought home to meet her parents, and I wasn’t Albanian. It might have been a problem, except her father adored her and made allowances.

  SO THINGS KEPT MOVING FORWARD. IT WAS DIFFERENT. SHE was the first girl to be allowed to eat at the house with Cus and Camille and the kids and me. I had certain privileges and standing by then, and it was clear that things with me and Elaine were serious.

  It was interesting, though. Cus tried to scare her off. He was threatened. She put demands on my time, and he was worried that I would lose my focus, or spend less time at the gym. He said to Elaine, “He’s got a bad temper, you know. There’s a lot of things you don’t know about him. He’s a dangerous guy.” He could have blown things—I mean, he couldn’t have, really, but he thought he could have, that was his intent. I actually think it had the opposite effect. I think Elaine saw through him in a way, and understood that if somebody was going to all that effort to scare her off, there must be something worth coveting there. Anyway, it didn’t work. She didn’t stop seeing me.

  A few months after we began dating, my career as a professional trainer got a boost. Cus lined up a fight for Kevin Rooney with Alexis Arguello, the lightweight champion of the world, who was looking to move up to the junior welterweight division. Rooney was a welterweight, so he’d need to bring his weight down from 147 to 140. But it was an opportunity to put himself on the map. Me, too.

  As I started to study tape of Arguello’s fights, I began to believe that even though we were a big underdog, we could beat him. In his bout against Vilomar Fernandez, I saw that a skilled boxer could give Arguello trouble. Arguello had many strengths as a fighter. He had power in both hands, and his punches were extremely accurate. But he also had weaknesses. He stood up very straight; he needed to be set to punch; and he had trouble with movement. I formulated a plan to keep him off balance that I thought could work, although it would take tremendous execution on Rooney’s part. My belief that we could pull it off was so strong that it had an effect on Rooney. Of course, most of Rooney’s confidence was inspired by what Cus, the real master, thought. When Cus thought he could win, that really had a big impact on Rooney, and on me, too.

  Early on in training, Cus came to the gym to watch. When he saw what Rooney and I were working on, he said, “That’s why you’re the Young Master. You have a workable plan to win this fight.” It made me feel good to hear him say that. Really the only thing that worried me was the weight. Rooney had never fought below 145 pounds. The positive, as Cus kept reminding me, was that Arguello was going to be fighting at a higher weight than he’d ever fought at before. So each side had something to overcome.

  Training went well. If anything, Rooney came down in weight too easily. When I asked him about it, he attributed it to an improved diet. Then during a sparring session one morning, with the fight only a week away, it became obvious something was wrong with him. He was slow and weak. His face was drained of color. I stopped the workout, put cool wet towels on him, and made him drink water. It was hot in the gym, so I thought maybe that was the reason. I started asking him questions, pushing him to tell me anything he’d been doing that might have been the cause. At first he was reluctant to say anything, but then he told me that every night after training he had been going to Brian Hamill’s place in Rhinebeck, New York, and sitting in Hamill’s sauna. That’s how he’d dropped the weight so easily.

  I immediately called my father. He told me to bring Rooney to see him. We drove in to Staten Island that night. My father examined Rooney, gave him this stuff called Ensure that replaced all the nutrients and electrolytes he had lost, and also gave him a shot of B 12. Then he took me aside and said, “He needs to rest. His body needs to recover. It’ll take time. Can you postpone the fight?”

  “It’s
not that simple.”

  “You shouldn’t let him fight, Teddy. You’re his trainer, and it’s your responsibility. You shouldn’t let him fight.”

  We drove back to Catskill. I explained the situation to Cus. “We have to postpone the fight,” I said.

  “Impossible.”

  “Then we need to pull him out.”

  Cus went crazy. “We’re not pulling out! Don’t you dare even think about it.”

  We got into a big argument. I knew Rooney wasn’t himself. This was a fight where there was no margin for error. We’d have to fight a perfect fight to win. Instead, we were going in knowing ahead of time that something was wrong. I had always deferred to Cus on big decisions. He was like the pope. More and more, though, I was beginning to find myself uncomfortable with some of the choices he was making.

  In the end, he found a way to appease me. He was a brilliant manipulator. He turned the situation around so I could feel as if I were the one making the decision. He said, “Look, we’ll let him spar in a couple of days. If you don’t think he’s right, then he won’t fight.” Rooney got back in the ring after resting a couple of days, and he definitely looked better. Not a hundred percent, but better. Still, I saw he wasn’t strong. “If he’s not strong, it’ll be like letting him walk into the propeller of a plane,” I said.

  “He doesn’t need to be strong,” Cus countered. “That’s not how this fight will be won. You’ve given him a plan that doesn’t require strength.”

  That was true to a point, and it enabled me to rationalize. Still, I shouldn’t have given in. Three days later, in Atlantic City, Arguello knocked out Rooney in two rounds. In the training room afterward, I watched my father examine Rooney. It felt like I had beaten him up myself. I knew I could have done something more. I’m not going to tell you that Rooney would have won if he’d been physically fit, but he would have done a lot better.

  It was unfortunate that a loss like that was also the occasion of my first real payday as a trainer. My father was even more surprised than I was when I got the check for four thousand dollars. He never thought I’d make a dime. He’d been paying for me to stay at Cus’s all these years, but I’m not sure he realized I was actually building a career for myself. From his point of view, the main compensation was that I was staying out of trouble. The money made him so happy that he said, “Give me the four thousand and I’ll put it in the stock market and match it for you.”

  After I gave him the four thousand, he immediately gave me back two thousand so Elaine and I could go spend a few days in his condo in Florida. It was the first vacation I’d had in years, but I’ll never forget it. Elaine had been feeling strange for a couple of days. Her clothes were tight on her and she was light-headed. She didn’t tell me, but she went out and got one of those home pregnancy tests. The day she told me the results had been positive, we’d just finished breakfast. I was sitting at the table, reading the newspaper.

  She said, “Teddy, I think I’m pregnant.”

  I looked up, not sure I had heard her right.

  “I don’t expect you to do anything about it,” she said. “That’s not why I’m telling you.”

  “No, no. I’m just—what do you want to do?” I knew that was a stupid thing to say, but I was still processing the whole concept, trying to take it in.

  “Look, Teddy, whether you stand by me or not, I’m going to have this baby. I—”

  “No, Elaine, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m glad you feel that way,” I said. “That’s what I wanted to hear you say. I mean, that baby is a part of us and…and I want you to marry me. Elaine, will you marry me?”

  Now she was the one who looked shocked. “Are you just asking me because of the baby?”

  “You mean, would I have asked you today? Probably not today—if I had to be completely honest about it. On the other hand, I was going to ask you at some point.” I looked in her eyes. “Don’t you know that?”

  She laughed and said, “Are you sure, Teddy?”

  “More than sure.”

  I was, too. It’s not hard making a decision to do a thing you want to do. Sometimes fate just lends a helping hand and gets you a little faster to a place you were going all along.

  When I think back now about all the things that were happening in this period, it amazes me. I was already responsible to Rooney and Tyson and all the kids. Now I was getting married and had a child on the way.

  Apparently, that wasn’t enough. I needed more on my plate. When we returned from Florida, I heard about a nineteen-year-old Catskill kid named Jeff Amen who had driven his car off a cliff into a ravine one night and had been paralyzed from the waist down.

  In a small town like Catskill, news of something like that spreads fast and hits people hard. I didn’t know Jeff, but his brother J. B. had trained in the gym, and the story really affected me. Apart from the personal connection to his brother, I had all those years of watching my father take care of people. I decided to go visit him.

  The morning I walked into Jeff’s room at the Albany Medical Center, I found him propped up in a hospital bed, wearing a halo. I had never seen a halo before and hadn’t realized that the screws actually go into the person’s skull. I introduced myself. Jeff and I had never met, but he knew who I was. He had curly brown hair, a round face, and glasses, and he talked in a voice so soft I could barely hear him. From the waist down, he couldn’t move.

  “How you feeling? You doing okay?”

  “I guess, considering I’ll never walk again.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  He looked at me. “The doctors don’t think I will.”

  A nurse was passing by, and I asked her if I could take him outside. She said yes and helped me get him into a wheelchair and wrap him up in blankets.

  I wheeled him out and the two of us talked a bit more as we went.

  “Doctors aren’t always right,” I said.

  “I guess sometimes they’re not,” he said.

  I wheeled him along the sidewalk outside the main entrance. The air was freezing, but his body’s thermostat had been affected by his injury, and he couldn’t feel cold or heat. If you held a match to his skin, he wouldn’t know the difference. I realized I couldn’t keep him outside too long.

  “Other people have overcome very tough things when most people thought they couldn’t. You’re a lot stronger than you might realize. You don’t know what you’re capable of if you put your mind to it.”

  He looked at me and I realized that his reticence was mostly self-protective. He was a small-town kid and it took him a while to get comfortable with people.

  “What makes you think I’m strong?” he said.

  “I can see it in your eyes. The fact that you survived to be here.”

  After that first visit, I started going up there regularly to visit him. Of all the people he saw, his physical therapist, the doctors and nurses, I was the only one who talked to him consistently about the idea of his walking again. He liked hearing it, but he was reluctant to tell the hospital staff that I was saying it. He thought maybe if they knew, they would say I was being irresponsible. They were all telling him that at best maybe he’d be able to use his hands and arms and be able to dress himself using sticks with hooks to grab loops on his pants.

  I went there one day and they were doing his physical therapy. With a paraplegic they can’t really do much, because the patient’s paralyzed, so the therapist just moves his limbs, putting his arms and legs through a range of motion, to keep them from getting atrophied. After physical therapy, his social worker came by to check up on Jeff and see how his spirits were. She was a sweet, red-haired woman, and I got friendly with her. She told me stuff about spinal injuries, drew up a diagram, and showed me the location of the C4 vertebra that Jeff had injured. I found out that there was a difference between a complete severing of the spinal cord and an incomplete. Jeff’s was incomplete.

  I called my father and got him to explain the difference. He said, “Well, w
ith an incomplete, there’s hope. That doesn’t mean that it’s not as damaging as a complete. It might be, but if it’s not completely severed, there’s a little hope.” He started explaining it to me, and then I said, “So it’s like a dam in the middle of a river?” and he said, “Exactly. That’s very good. It’s like a dam in a river, and you don’t know how long it’s going to be there. It might be there forever, or it might not be. That’s a very good analogy.”

  That was all I needed to hear. I got off the phone feeling like I had gone through twelve years of medical school and understood everything there was to understand about spinal injuries. It’s not severed. It’s a dam. There’s hope!

  I went to visit Jeff the next day. The physical therapist was exercising him, what she called “ranging” him. She was young and sure of herself. She picked up one of his legs, talking to him as she did, then she dropped it, boom, the leg flopping back down on the mat. It bothered me, watching that. I didn’t think it was hurting him, but still it bothered me. It was like watching a butcher throw a side of beef onto a cutting block.

  I said, “Jeff, I know you can’t exercise. I know you can’t move your legs, but how about if you tried to keep them from falling?”

  The physical therapist said, “What do you mean?”

  I looked at Jeff. He was lying on his stomach, but I could see him smiling. He was getting a kick out of me. “How about I hold up your leg and you don’t let it drop. I know you can’t actually stop it, but by trying to stop it, maybe you’ll feel something.”

  “He can’t feel anything,” the therapist said. “That would mean that there would be muscular connections.” This is what she’d learned in school and she was very certain of it.

  I didn’t know enough to argue with her. I just knew I thought what I was saying made sense to me. I knew about the dam. She was saying what she was saying, and I was thinking to myself, It’s a dam. Dam, dam, dam.