Atlas

by Teddy Atlas

  “You got a family,” I said. But he learned, he started getting blueprints, he became a pro and grew a little business.

  One day he got a lump in his throat. He let it go. I hadn’t seen him for a while, and he came over and he had this big bulge on the side of his throat.

  “Jesus,” I said. “How long have you had that?”

  “Nine months.”

  Everyone had been telling him to have it checked, but he kept putting it off. That was Chris. He finally went in, and found out it was cancer. It was too late. He’d waited too long. If they’d caught it earlier, he might have had a chance.

  He survived a bone-marrow transplant operation, but it took too much out of him; four days later he died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight. His heart—his big, loyal heart—just gave out.

  At the wake, little Philip, my godson, came up and said to his mother, “Did you ask him?”

  “No. Not yet, but I will.”

  “Ask me what?” I said.

  “Philip wants to know that you’ll train him when he turns twelve,” she said. “His father was supposed to train him, and he said if he couldn’t, then you would.”

  I promised that I would. As I write this now, Philip is ten years old. Two years to go.

  More immediately, I put together a tribute on my show on ESPN, cutting together film clips of Chris’s old fights, the bagpipes in the ring, him knocking guys silly, crooked, everything, and then we faded to black, with his name up there and the dates of his birth and death. I didn’t do as good a job talking about him as I wanted. I just got too emotional. I thought I would be able to go right through it. But I got too choked up.

  THE MURDER IN

  MY HEART

  DURING THE TIME I WAS TRAINING CHRIS IN THE mid-1980s, Donnie LaLonde called me up. He was a Canadian fighter, who was managing himself and promoting his own fights with the help of Top Rank. He could punch a little with the right hand, but he wasn’t much of a fighter. He had tried to turn himself into the next “Golden Boy” by bleaching his hair blond; in fact, he even called himself “the Golden Boy,” but other than that he didn’t have a lot to recommend him.

  He called me one day and said, “I’m Donnie LaLonde, would you train me?”

  I said, “I’m Teddy Atlas and, no, I won’t.”

  He called me again a few days later. He said, “I’m here in New York. I flew here at my own expense. Would you at least see me?”

  I was at Gleason’s. It was about five-thirty in the afternoon. I was getting ready to leave. It was the end of a long day and I was tired. I said, “If you can be here in half an hour, I’ll see you.”

  He must have taken a cab. He showed up fifteen minutes later. I was still of the mind-set to say no because I didn’t think he was serious or for real. But it meant something that he was coming to me—that he had flown to New York. I decided to suspend judgment until I heard what he had to say. We went downstairs to the basement of Gleason’s, where I had an office, so we could talk privately.

  LaLonde was slight of build. He had that bottle-blond hair, which went along with what I knew about him, that he was a bit of a con man and a self-promoter, and that he was more proficient at that than he was at fighting. Lou Duva, among others, had told me he’d never amount to much. But I always trusted my own instincts and wanted to see for myself.

  “I want a chance to be a real fighter, and I know that you’re a teacher,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot of things about you, that you’re a pro and you do things right, and you force people to face things and accomplish things, and I’ve never had that.”

  I kept listening. He was saying the right things to keep me listening.

  “I don’t want to be a sideshow, a circus, anymore. I want to be the real thing, and I’m willing to put myself in your hands and let myself be taken where you tell me to go. You can manage me, you can do everything, and I’m willing to risk finding out that I’m not good enough, but if that’s the case at least I’ll know that.”

  He had a bad left arm from a hockey injury when he was a kid. He had a pin in the shoulder. The handicap was mostly psychological at this point, but favoring the left for years meant there was physical and technical ground to make up, as well. I decided to take him on anyway.

  At first, he wanted me to manage him, too, but I said, “No, I don’t think that’ll work. I’ll get you a guy. I need to concentrate on training you. I’ll get you a guy who’s the right guy for you, who’ll be able to market your personality, and who’s a good fit.” I was thinking of Dave Wolfe, who managed Boom Boom Mancini. I knew him from training another one of his fighters, Donnie Poole, a tough little Canadian welterweight. When I approached Wolfe about LaLonde, he said, “This guy’s nothin’, what are you wasting your time for?”

  “I already told him I’d take him on,” I said. “I’m training him.”

  “If you’re training him, you must see something,” he said.

  “Michael Spinks is about to give up the light heavyweight title, and that’s gonna open up three titles. It’s gonna be a free-for-all, and after I train this kid for a while, I think he can figure in the picture. He can punch and he can be marketed, and if he’s managed the right way he can be moved into one of those spots because it won’t be a great guy in there.”

  Put that way, Wolfe saw the possibilities. He was a guy who could maneuver and market fighters, like he had done with Mancini. He knew how to put a guy in the right spot to make the most of his talent. He said, “Okay, I’ll manage him.”

  I set up a meeting for the three of us, and an arrangement was made and we shook on it. Not long after that, a manager who I won’t identify, except to say that he was supposedly Meyer Lansky’s first cousin, tried to lure LaLonde away from Wolfe. This manager was around a lot of wiseguys, including Sonny Francese, and when he saw me training LaLonde at Gleason’s, he approached him. No matter what’s said now, LaLonde was going to sign with him. The guy made a bunch of promises and LaLonde was swayed.

  When I found out, I was furious. “You son of a bitch,” I said to LaLonde.

  “Well, it’s not like I’ve signed a contract with Wolfe yet or anything.”

  “Has he been putting you up in his apartment? Has he been buying you meals, taking care of you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why do you think he was doing that, because he likes you? Because it’s adopt-a-Canadian week? You have an agreement. I don’t give a fuck if you didn’t sign the paper. You have an agreement. Now you sign a fuckin’ agreement with him tomorrow or you get another fuckin’ trainer and get the fuck out of my life.”

  He signed an agreement the next day. It was ironic because I never signed a contract myself, and two years later, Wolfe, the guy I’d stood up for, fucked me. But before that happened, and all the subsequent things I’m going to tell about, I spent two years working with Wolfe, building up LaLonde’s confidence. I did a lot of technical stuff with him, hours and hours a day working on his left hand, teaching him not to pull straight back to get away from punches, turning him into a more complete fighter. We brought him along slowly, taking him to small arenas in nothing places and getting him the right kinds of fights.

  We got him a fight in Enid, Oklahoma, right after Thanksgiving one year. I wasn’t making a dime on the fight but I went into the gym on Thanksgiving Day to train LaLonde. This was one of the things, later on, when I thought about sacrifices that I had made for these two guys, that bothered me the most. My son, Teddy Atlas III, was three years old then, the cutest little kid in the world. He had never been to the Thanksgiving Day Parade, and I had promised him that we’d go.

  Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, I got my father, as old as he was, to come into the city with me and little Teddy. I didn’t have the money to drive in, because I couldn’t afford to park the car. I didn’t tell my father that. I just told him that we’d take the subway because I did it all the time and it was easier. We went in to the city, up to Gleason’s. Then I said good-bye and
sent them off to the parade while I stayed to open up the gym.

  I still remember the way my son looked, with his little green wool cap and his cheeks red and shiny from the cold. My father was in his shabby white raincoat, an old man who was a good man to be tromping around the city on a cold day. I should have said, “Fuck Donnie LaLonde,” and gone to the parade with them, but I was being a pro the same way my father had been a pro. I opened up the gym, which was freezing—the heat was off because of the holiday—and I waited for LaLonde to show up. I trained him until they came back.

  Two days later LaLonde and I went to Enid, Oklahoma, and he knocked out this Mexican fighter who came up to about his belly button. I felt so sorry for the poor guy—because I knew what he had gotten paid—that I went back to the locker room after Wolfe and LaLonde packed up and we were leaving, and I gave him twenty dollars. I never told them what I was doing because they would have looked at it as weakness. I think I just said, “I forgot something,” and I went back to the locker room, and the guy was sitting there, still bleeding from a cut over his eye. I handed him a twenty-dollar bill. He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. But I knew why the guy was taking the fight. He had kids at home. I saw the kids at the weigh-in. He’d even had to borrow another guy’s cup. It was sad. Twenty dollars wasn’t much, but it was all I had.

  We fought a bunch of fights like that, bringing LaLonde along slowly against guys who we used to build up his confidence. He was so full of doubts and insecurities. I took him to doctors to confirm that what I was trying to tell him about using his shoulder was true, that he wouldn’t hurt it. I also spent a lot of time in the ground-floor apartment at 50 Barrow Street in the West Village that Dave Wolfe was lending him, trying to convince LaLonde that leaving Canada and coming here was going to pay off. He’d call me in the middle of the night sometimes, and I’d have to talk him off the ledge. It wasn’t just working with this guy in a gym. It was a round-the-clock job. He constantly wanted reassurance from me that this was going to work out. So I’d talk to him about being a pro. I’d tell him all the reasons I thought he was going to make it.

  The defining moment in his development came one day while he was sparring with Johnnie Walker Banks, and Banks hit him in the balls. I’d been working with LaLonde for months and months by then. Although he’d come quite a ways, I wasn’t sure if we would get further, or if we’d ever get him to where he needed to go. Johnnie Walker Banks was a great gym fighter and a regular sparring partner for Marvin Hagler. He was a monster when he had the safety of headgear and big gloves, but he fell apart in an arena under the lights. I put LaLonde in with him as a test. I knew Banks was tough, but I thought we had an edge because LaLonde was a light heavyweight and Banks was only a middleweight.

  Sure enough, LaLonde was using his strength to his advantage, leaning on Banks and clubbing him with right hands. Banks, old gym rat that he was, knew exactly what he was doing when he hit LaLonde in the balls. It was no accident. LaLonde started to slow down, though he didn’t stop entirely.

  Now, the old Gleason’s was quite a place. There were two rings and a balcony up above, paint peeling off the walls. The floors were seasoned with spit and blood and sweat. It was a gym with atmosphere and character to spare. Characters, too: all these old-timers hanging around, ready to share their stories and knowledge. On this day, the whole place was watching LaLonde and Banks in the main ring, including Freddie Brown, a great cut man and one of Roberto Duran’s trainers, who was about eighty years old. (He used to tell me, “Don’t let the managers and fighters fuck you—’cause they will. They’re all pimps and whores.”)

  When Banks hit LaLonde with a second low blow, LaLonde stopped fighting entirely. I got right up on the ring apron and climbed through the ropes.

  “What are ya doin’?”

  “I’m in pain.”

  “You’re in pain? Come here!”

  “That’s why I stopped.”

  “Come here!” He walked toward me, everyone watching. “This is it,” I said. “You listen to me right now, or you go across the street to Penn Station and get the fuck back to Canada and let me forget all the time you’ve wasted in my life.”

  He looked at me and he started to talk. I cut him off. “You turn around, and you go hit him in the balls right now,” I said. “You go over there and you hit him in the fuckin’ balls and become a fighter or you get on the next train and you get the fuck out of my life!”

  The whole gym stopped cold. All the old-timers, all the kids, Freddie Brown, everyone. It was one of those moments, those moments of frozen time, where you actually see someone having to make a decision about what kind of man they want to be. The next time I would be part of a moment like that came in the Moorer-Holyfield fight. This moment was almost like a prelude to that one. I had no hesitation making my demand of LaLonde. I had given up my Thanksgiving for him. I had disappointed my son for him.

  He took in my words, then turned around, walked back toward Banks, and hit him square in the balls. Freddie Brown let out a little “Whoa.” It shocked everyone. LaLonde and Banks continued fighting through two more rounds, LaLonde punching the shit out of Banks the whole time. There was no more hitting in the balls—Banks never threw a low punch again. That was the day LaLonde became a fighter.

  Of course, you don’t really know about someone until they’ve been tested. Cus had drilled the concept into me over and over—and I believed it even though Cus himself had come up short when he was tested. In the case of LaLonde and Wolfe, their relationship and loyalty to me was tested by a situation that involved Wolfe and another one of his fighters, Donnie Poole, who was taking Wolfe to court to break his contract.

  Poole claimed that Wolfe had screwed him on a few things and that’s why he wanted to get out of his contract. With the case coming up, Wolfe asked me if I would be a witness at the hearing. I thought Wolfe was a good manager, but I didn’t want to get involved in the dispute and I told him so.

  “The guy is smearing my reputation,” Wolfe said. “I just want the truth to come out.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell the truth, if that’s what you want. But don’t ask me to do anything beyond that.”

  “That’s fine,” he said. “That’s all I want.”

  The morning of the hearing, I showed up at the Boxing Commission’s office, down on lower Broadway. Wolfe was out in the hall with his lawyer, who was wearing an expensive suit and had the smooth voice of a radio deejay. Meanwhile, Poole showed up with his lawyer, who was actually a veterinarian—the guy had graduated from law school and had a law degree, but had gone on to became a vet instead. He was also one of the white-collar crew at Gleason’s, which is the way Poole had met him, and he was a bit of a nut, too, always looking to fight tough guys who would punch him around. As a result, his nose was all bent and busted up. It was like a badge of honor or something. One time he got in the ring with Roberto Duran, who was there training, and Duran didn’t give a shit that he wasn’t a real fighter and knocked him out.

  So here he was, Poole’s veterinarian/lawyer, smelling of animals from being in his vet’s office all the time, a guy I wouldn’t bring my dog to, much less try to get legal help from (and all the punches he’d taken at Gleason’s certainly weren’t improving his memory of case law). Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, there was Wolfe’s freakin’ four-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer with his salon tan and Paco Rabanne aftershave. When Wolfe saw me, he came over, foaming at the mouth, saying, “I’m gonna fuck this Canuck against the fuckin’ wall. I’m gonna tear his liver out!”

  It was crazy. He was talking like a madman, like a guy who was way too vengeful for his own or anyone else’s good. My instincts told me, just by the way he was talking, that this went way beyond anything normal or rational. I said, “Don’t try screwin’ this kid, Dave. I’m telling you. I don’t even want to be here, so don’t try anything funny. Don’t lie about him, and do not put me in a position where you’re trying to get me to support some lie.”


  We went into a hearing room that was like a mini-courtroom, with an elevated platform, a witness box, and uncomfortable wooden chairs. I got sworn in, and Wolfe’s lawyer started asking me questions, basically leading me down a road.

  “Did Dave Wolfe do a good job as manager?”

  “Yes.”

  “What constitutes doing a good job?”

  “Well, when Poole got with him, he wasn’t rated, and under Wolfe’s guidance he moved up to number five in the USBA. Wolfe got him a Canadian title shot.”

  “So did he do a good job, in your expert opinion, as a trainer?”

  “Yes.”

  Suddenly, he dumped it on me. “Okay, Teddy, let’s cut to the chase. You’ve said that Dave Wolfe’s a good manager. Why are we here today?”

  “I don’t know. Why are we here?”

  “Aren’t we here because Donnie Poole asked Dave Wolfe to do something that was impossible for Dave Wolfe to do?”

  “What are you talking about?” I knew that he was taking me to some bullshit place. I didn’t know where, but I knew it was bullshit.

  “Isn’t it true,” he said, “that the real issue here and the real problem, the reason we’re here, is that Donnie Poole asked Dave Wolfe to get him drugs and Wolfe refused?”

  This is how treacherous Wolfe was. Poole was a messed-up kid, no doubt about it. He had fractured his kneecap when he was younger—another Canadian with a scar from an ice hockey mishap—and he’d gotten addicted to Percocet, a powerful painkiller. Wolfe knew about it because the kid had been honest with him.

  Now Wolfe’s lawyer was using that information. “Didn’t Donnie Poole tell you,” he said to me, “that he asked Dave Wolfe to get him drugs and Dave Wolfe refused?”

  “No.” I wasn’t going to be a part of it. I wasn’t going to help him take this kid down in this way.