Atlas

by Teddy Atlas

  However you looked at it, it was obviously an untenable situation. Cus and Rooney were working with Tyson in the morning, and I was working with the other kids later on. Something had to give. Or someone. You’d think there would have been some other way to resolve things. You wouldn’t think it all had to blow up. But that’s what happened. And Tyson was at the center of it.

  After a couple of weeks of living with this tension, I came home one night, and Elaine and her sisters were sitting in the kitchen, crying. Elaine said, “Don’t say nothing to Teddy.” Of course, I heard her. There was no way they were going to keep it from me after that.

  “Don’t say nothing about what?”

  Elaine was more than six months pregnant. She didn’t want to see me get upset. She was worried about the baby.

  “Say nothing about what?” I looked from her to her sisters.

  Nobody would say anything at first, but then one of Elaine’s sisters reluctantly revealed that Tyson had done something to their eleven-year-old sister, Susie. I didn’t go crazy right away, which for someone who knew me might have been scarier than if I had. Very calmly, I pushed for details. Tyson had grabbed Susie. Put his hands on her. Told her what he wanted to do to her.

  I knew it wasn’t a random thing. Tyson with his street instincts knew exactly what he was doing and what would happen. It was a game and he was playing it hard and mean. He understood power and weakness as only someone who had spent part of his childhood hiding between walls could. I had been the only one at the gym demanding that he abide by the rules of society. Now he was throwing that back in my face, saying, “Fuck you, we’ll see who wins that battle.”

  I looked around the kitchen at Elaine and her sisters. They were all crying, except for Elaine, who was furious. The idea that one of my kids had done this was nearly unfathomable. Without saying anything, I headed for the door. Elaine ran after me. “Teddy, don’t.” I shrugged her off and kept going.

  This was what had come of Cus taking Tyson’s side. This was the ultimate move on Tyson’s part to show that he had no respect for boundaries, authority, anything. He was finishing it off because of where Cus had let him go. At that moment, I hated Cus every bit as much as I hated Tyson. I had trusted Cus. We were partners. I felt very emotional, but in an ice-cold way. I knew that if I allowed this, next time Tyson would take it further. He would rape her. Or someone else.

  I drove into town, to a place called Asti’s, a disco owned by a friend of mine named Bobby Cargioli. He had an apartment upstairs, where I knew he kept a gun. I parked in the lot and went up the wooden stairs by the side of the building. Bobby was standing in the door of the club. He saw me. He walked a few steps closer. “Teddy? What’s going on?”

  “I came to get your gun. Are you giving it to me or am I taking it?”

  “Whoa, whoa, slow down. What are you talking about?”

  I ignored him and kept going. The door to his apartment was open. I went straight for the bedroom. That’s where he kept the gun, under his mattress. It was a .38 revolver. I flipped the chamber open, saw it was loaded, flipped it back, and stuck the barrel in my pants. Bobby appeared in the doorway.

  “I don’t want nothing to happen, you understand….”

  “It’s too late for that.”

  “Where are you going to go with that?”

  “Nothing’s gonna come back to you,” I said. “If that’s what you’re worried about.” I walked past him and out the door.

  I drove to the gym, but Tyson wasn’t there. The kids were starting to loosen up, skipping rope, shadowboxing, working the bags. I went up to Kevin Young.

  “You seen Tyson?”

  “He’s probably home.” Kevin picked up on the edge in my voice. “There a problem?”

  “No.”

  “You want me to call and ask him to come out? He’s always looking to get out. I’ll call and ask him.” Kevin was a tough kid, as loyal as they come. He was like Joe the Blade that way.

  “No, Kev,” I said. “You just stay here and loosen up and run things for me tonight.”

  I walked down the stairs and outside and saw a cab pulling up. I stepped back into the shadow of the building. It was Tyson. I crouched down and waited. He walked up to the door of the building. I sprang out of the darkness and grabbed him by the neck of his shirt. I put the gun to his head.

  “You piece of fucking shit!” I pulled him into an alcove between the gym and the next building. “You think you’re gonna do that to my family? After the way I’ve treated you? I will fucking kill you! That’s my family! My family! You understand, you fucking piece of shit?” I was looking at him, staring straight into his eyes. If he didn’t show me that he knew how serious I was, then I was going to kill him. “Make no mistake. If you ever put your hands on my family again, you’ll be dead. There’ll be no talking. No warning. You’ll never know. You’ll just be dead.”

  I was looking for a sign of understanding and I wasn’t getting it. There was still a smugness about him. I stuck the gun in his ear and cocked the trigger. I said, “Are we clear? Do you see the reality of this?” He gave me a nod. Jerking the gun barrel up in the air at the last moment, I pulled the trigger. He fell to the ground, holding his ear. “Are we absolutely clear now? I will not let you do this to my family. I will not live this way, and I will not let you do this.” He got to his feet. When I looked in his eyes this time, the understanding was there. I watched him stagger away. “You better not forget,” I said.

  FROM WHAT I HEARD LATER, TYSON VOWED HE WAS GOING to kill me after that, but Cus hustled him out of Catskill for a few weeks, up to Bobby Stewart’s in Johnstown, and either he was talked out of his vow or he lost his nerve.

  The way things had been going, even before this happened, it’s quite possible that Cus had been plotting his next move regarding me for a while. A couple of days after the incident, the doorbell rang. It was Don Shanager.

  “What do you want?” I said. I suppose on some level I was still hoping that Cus would be the person I wanted him to be, that he pretended to be. I held out some vain hope that when push came to shove he would actually be the stand-up guy a lot of people thought he was.

  “Can you come out and talk?” Shanager said.

  Elaine was standing behind me. She was nervous. The baby was due soon. She wanted to be sure the baby’s father would still be around. “He wants me to go out and talk,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me. But I’m going out.”

  She stood there, by the door, while I went outside. A chill November wind was blowing fallen leaves across the yard.

  “Cus told me to give you an offer,” Shanager said.

  The confusion must have shown on my face.

  “To leave,” he said.

  It hadn’t even occurred to me. They were going to pay me off the way they paid everyone else off.

  “Cus said he’ll give you five percent for life of all Tyson’s future earnings if you just go away.”

  “He authorized you to do this.”

  “Yes. He realizes that Tyson was wrong. He knows all the hard work you put in and that you brought him to this point, and he’s sorry that things worked out this way. So he’s willing to give you five percent for life.”

  “Five percent? That’s very generous. It really is. You know what you can tell him? To go fuck himself. Tell him I don’t want his money.” I went back inside and slammed the door.

  Elaine, if she heard any of it, never said a thing about my saying fuck you to an offer of money. I realized afterward what was really behind the offer. When I put a gun to Tyson’s head, that was serious enough; when I pulled the trigger, forget about it. If word got out, the state authorities would come down to investigate, and the whole thing would spin out of control. “Why did Teddy put a gun to his head? Something must have happened.” They would have found out everything and that would have been the end of the dream. Cus would have lost him. He was scared to death of tha
t.

  The interesting thing is, I didn’t leave. At least not right away. I had seven kids that were in the finals of the Adirondack Golden Gloves in Schenectady, New York, and when everything fell apart they were still a week away from the finals. They had fought for two months to get there, besides the four or five years they’d been in training. This was important to them. But obviously it was a strange situation. I thought long and hard about what to do. In the end, I went to the gym and trained them.

  It was a little nuts. Anyone could have walked through the door those next few days. Tyson could have walked in. That was the reality. I knew that, just like I knew I had a commitment to those kids I couldn’t ignore. I was always telling them not to walk away, not to quit. It would have undermined everything I had taught them if I left. So I stayed for that week, and took them to Albany, and that was a very long week.

  Six out of the seven kids won the Gloves. The day after the tournament was over, I went to the gym to say good-bye. They stood there quietly. Nobody cried or said anything. I had been their teacher for five years and they knew that I was doing what I had to do. They knew everything without my having told them. They knew what had happened with Tyson, they knew about the gun, they knew about my sister-in-law, they knew everything. Nobody could lie to those kids, nobody could bullshit them, they knew everything.

  A few of them said, “We’ll come with you.” They wanted me to open another gym in Catskill. I said, “No, you can’t do that.” I thought I was leaving Catskill, to be honest, so I told them no and I said good-bye to them. Suddenly, they handed me a plaque. I don’t know when they had it made up. It said, “To Teddy Atlas, our trainer and guide, who has treated us like men. And one who has been like a father to us. We will miss you.”

  We all walked out of the gym together. I’d had these kids since they were eleven, twelve years old. It was funny—sometimes you didn’t realize how much time had passed in your life until something marked it for you.

  I’d said my good-byes to them and was walking back to my apartment when a pickup truck pulled up and someone yelled, “Teddy, you want a ride?” It was my kids. They were driving this truck. I hadn’t even realized they were old enough to drive. I hadn’t been paying attention. I said to myself, “Shit, it really has been a long time.” For a moment, just a moment, I allowed myself to reflect that in a way I had done my job, that they were driving this truck, and that they were men, and they didn’t need me anymore.

  ELAINE AND I DECIDED TO STAY IN CATSKILL UNTIL WE HAD the baby. We had already started paying the hospital a little bit of money, and it seemed to make sense. Since I wasn’t going to the gym and training fighters, I started taking Jeff Amen to therapy every day. His parents couldn’t take him. They were both working. I volunteered to do it. They had bought him a van that was equipped for the wheelchair, and every day I would load him in and take him to the Catskill rehabilitation facility. In a way it was like he was my new fighter; I was training him.

  In the beginning, there was a physical therapist from the rehab facility involved, but I wound up doing so much of the work with Jeff myself that after a few days the therapist just threw up her hands and left us alone.

  We used the different kinds of equipment, the weights and pulleys and straps, and he continued to improve. I learned that swimming was probably the best kind of therapy for someone like him, particularly since it turned out that he had been a very good swimmer. I found out about this indoor pool over in Hudson, New York, across the bridge. I arranged to bring him there, though I never actually told them that he was in a wheelchair. I didn’t lie outright; I told them that he had been in an accident, but I didn’t use the word “paraplegic” because I felt they might not let us use the pool if they knew.

  The first night we went there, I wheeled Jeff in, and the pool was full of old people. It was like in that movie Cocoon, all these geriatrics in bathing caps, treading around this overchlorinated pool water, and this young, very pretty blonde lifeguard sitting in a high chair watching over them. The blonde lifeguard came over and said, “Are you Teddy Atlas?”

  I said I was.

  “They didn’t tell me he was in a wheelchair.”

  “Well, we don’t use it all the time. It’s not like he actually needs it.” Which was true in a way: Jeff occasionally used crutches and could sometimes walk a few steps without them, but it wasn’t often and definitely not around the wet tiles by a swimming pool.

  Jeff watched me to see what I would say next. He was always saying to his mother, “You never know with Teddy what’s going to come out of his mouth.”

  The lifeguard seemed satisfied by my answer and went back to her perch. Jeff said, “So what are we going to do?”

  “You used to be a good swimmer, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you’re going to swim.”

  “But how am I going to get in? Are you going to carry me?”

  “If I carry you the lifeguard might get nervous and say you shouldn’t go in.”

  “So what, then?”

  “You’re going to have to get in a different way.”

  “How? How am I going to get in?”

  Our voices, which started out as whispers, were getting louder. The lifeguard was looking down at us. I flashed a smile, like everything was okay, and she smiled back at me, buying it, at least for the moment. “You just gotta get in,” I hissed at Jeff.

  “How am I gonna do that? I can’t do that.”

  “Sure you can.” All the old people had stopped splashing around. They had noticed the tense energy emanating from our direction. “C’mon,” I said. “They’re all looking at us.”

  “You’re going to have to take me over to the shallow end and carry me.”

  We were standing by the deep end. “How good a swimmer were you?” I said. “Good.”

  “Real good?”

  “Real good.”

  “Okay.” I rolled his wheelchair quickly toward the edge of the pool, then jammed on the brakes. The chair tilted forward and flipped him in. It was sudden and shocking. He splashed into the pool and sank. I’m sure, under normal circumstances, that the lifeguard would have gone right in after him. But she didn’t budge. She must have figured that I knew what I was doing. Everybody was just looking at the pool, at the spot where he’d gone in. There were air bubbles coming up to the surface, and I was standing there, thinking, What if he doesn’t come up?

  He finally surfaced, screaming, spitting out water. “Teddy, you fuck, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “Sshh, come on,” I said, holding up my hand. “You’re floating. Look.”

  And he was. I climbed into the pool and tread water next to him. He was flapping his arms, staying afloat. I helped position him to swim, and almost immediately he was swimming. It came back to him right away. Before he tired out, he did two laps.

  The swimming became a regular part of his rehab routine. Over the next couple of months, he continued making progress. It was getting to where he could actually walk with a cane pretty well, and I’d take walks with him on the street. But then he hit a plateau, and got lazy, and I had to push him. I said, “You don’t think I noticed, but for the last two weeks you didn’t move without that cane because you’re afraid. You think you might not be good enough or strong enough, so you’re playing it safe, and that’s holding you back.” I took the cane away from him and said, “Let’s find out what happens if you don’t have this.” We were on this long country road near his home. I started walking away.

  “Hey, you bastard, don’t leave me here! I can’t walk!”

  I turned around. “Yes, you can. Today is the day you’re not going to be lazy.”

  “You son of a bitch!”

  I walked just slowly enough that his anger propelled him after me.

  “You see,” I said. “You’re doing it.”

  Man, he got mad, but it worked. It got him through the wall. He was never going to be a hundred percent, but he got to the point wher
e he was functioning. He was able to walk a little. He could drive. He had this specially outfitted van that he could drive. It wasn’t perfect, but it was night and day from where he’d been following the accident.

  The mental part was harder. Years later, after I left Catskill and was no longer involved in Jeff ’s day-to-day life, his mother called me. Jeff was feeling suicidal and she didn’t know where else to turn. Jeff and I still talked, but not every day. It was a bad time for me because Michael Moorer and I were leaving for Germany to fight for the IBF heavyweight title against Axel Schulz.

  Jeff ’s mother was crying. “Teddy, you’re the only one who can help. He won’t come out of the basement. I don’t know what he’s going to do. He said good-bye to everyone, gave away his things. He said he’s failed because he’ll never be normal.”

  I called him up. I said, “Jeff, listen, I’m leaving for Germany tomorrow. I can’t come up there. But I want to say something—” I had never talked this way to him before and he knew that. I said, “You owe me something. You owe me a little something, wouldn’t you say that?”

  He acknowledged that he did.

  “So I’m going to demand that you don’t do anything while I’m gone.” He knew exactly what I was talking about, even if I didn’t come out and say it. “You better give me your fucking word that you won’t do nothing until I get home and we can figure this out.”

  “Teddy, I’m tired,” he said. “It’s not your fault.”

  “Jeff, remember the pool? Remember they said you were never gonna walk again?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Were they right? I put in too much fuckin’ time for you to talk like this.”

  I wound up staying on the phone with him for a couple of hours before I felt comfortable enough to hang up. When Moorer and I got to Germany, we found a place that embroidered Jeff’s name on Michael’s trunks. Michael was a good guy and he went along with it. ABC broadcast the fight, and they told the story on the air. “That ‘Jeff ’ on the trunks is the name of a friend of Michael’s and Teddy’s. He wasn’t doing too well. He was having a bit of a hard time, and they thought it might pick him up a little. So hopefully, Jeff, this picks you up.”