Atlas

by Teddy Atlas

  “What are you gonna do? You gonna hit me? You can’t fight Holyfield but you’ll stand up to me? Go ahead. Do something.” I shoved him.

  “Don’t fucking touch me.”

  “Why? What are you gonna do? You don’t wanna have camp no more, then just say so. But don’t stand here and threaten me and tell me that you ain’t gonna run because then you’re tellin’ me that I don’t know how to be a trainer. You’re tellin’ me that what I do don’t mean nothin’, that you don’t care about what we’re here for. And I’m tellin’ you it’s not gonna go down that way. I’d rather freakin’ get it over with now than to leave any questions. So if you wanna fight me, let’s go. But don’t tell me that you’re gonna abuse me in another way by makin’ me less than a trainer.”

  We stood there, inches between us, staring at each other. He put out his chest and said, “I’m warnin’ you once more. You leave or we’re gonna come to blows. Something’s gonna happen.”

  “Do what you gotta do,” I said. I braced myself. I really thought he was gonna get physical.

  All of a sudden, he bent over, grabbed his sneakers, and rushed past me, swearing, “Motherfucker.” He stopped outside the door, put the sneakers on—he didn’t even bother to lace them up—and ran down the steps.

  John Davimos was out in the parking lot. He saw Michael leave the building and take off running. He knew what was going on because Michael had called him, too, although when he realized I was inside with Michael, instead of coming in and getting involved, he’d stayed outside. We both knew Michael’s threat not to run was really just a cry for help, that otherwise he wouldn’t have called John and me to tell us. It was another in an ongoing series of tests. Would I stand up to him? How could he stand up to Holyfield if the guy who was telling him that it was going to be okay didn’t stand up to him, if the guy leading him was afraid of the lion? He had to make sure that I was willing to face the lions, too.

  “What the fuck happened?” Davimos said as I came down the stairs and out the door.

  “I don’t know. I guess he’s doin’ his freakin’ roadwork.”

  It was tough keeping up with Michael’s moods. A few days later, apropos of nothing, he said to me, “You never eat with me.”

  “Eat with you? You’re lucky I train with you.”

  “You don’t like to be around me?”

  “I didn’t think it was a big secret. I mean, it’s not like you just discovered Capone’s vault or anything.”

  “Why don’t you come to dinner with me tonight?”

  “All right, fine. You payin’?”

  So we went out to dinner. Me, Davimos, Michael, and his guys. We sat there and ate and talked about the next day’s training session. At one point our waitress didn’t hear Michael call out to her. He decided she was purposely ignoring him. It made him so mad he stormed out of the restaurant. Flem went after him, but I just kept eating. After a while, life with Michael was like being in a combat zone, and you just learned to shrug things off. Bombs blowing up, bullets whistling by? No problem. Keep going about your business.

  Davimos looked at me and said, “You’re still eating?”

  “Yeah. He’ll be there in the morning.”

  Flem came back a while later. “I couldn’t find him,” he said. “He took off.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Finish your meal.”

  When we got back to the hotel, Michael was back in his room. It was close to ten o’clock. He told Flem that after he left the restaurant he started walking back to the hotel. At a quarter to ten he realized he was still a mile away. He didn’t want to break his curfew, so he ran the rest of the way. When I found out about that, I was floored. I mean, think about that. This wacko ran back to his room so he wouldn’t miss his curfew. That’s heavy. It showed me that, despite all of the posturing and acting out, he wanted to win the fight. He didn’t want to break the discipline of the curfew, because he thought there was some magic to it. The other thing it showed me was that he was looking for somebody, a parent, somebody, to take him and say, “It’s gonna be all right, son.”

  Some days the responsibility of that was a heavy burden. I couldn’t let this guy be weak, and that meant I couldn’t indulge my own weaknesses. Every day it was a battle, every day it was another test, another challenge, to see if I was going to be there and stand up for something and tell him to stand up, or if I was going to flinch and run away and give in. It got to be very wearing, the physical confrontations, the near fistfights.

  There were days when he wouldn’t throw punches and I would physically get in the ring with him and say, “Throw fuckin’ punches. Throw punches!” I had nightmares that he would get in the ring with Holyfield and not throw punches and the referee would stop the fight.

  Desperation and inventiveness often go hand in hand, so here’s what I did. We’d have a hundred or more people watching his sparring sessions—there were seats set up for them in the tent—and I went around one day, right before his last round, telling them that when they heard me say “jab,” I wanted them to say it, too. I knew that the jab was going to be a big part of the fight.

  So in the last round, the whole place was taking my lead and going, “Jab!” The whole crowd was going, “Jab, jab, jab, jab!” How could he not respond? He had to jab. He had to. Michael’s guys, Flem and Wick and the rest of them, loved it. “You’re scary,” Wick said to me. “You’re startin’ to scare me.”

  Two weeks before the fight, an amazing thing happened: Michael became perfect. After all of our confrontations and problems, he suddenly became the most perfect student you’ve ever seen in your life. We were hitting the bag during a training session one day, and this guy, who had been refusing to box, refusing to train some days, said, “Tell me to be strong.” As soon as he said it, I knew I couldn’t stumble.

  “You are strong,” I said.

  “Tell me what’s gonna happen on the twenty-second.”

  “You’re gonna be the next heavyweight champ of the world.”

  “Tell me how I’m gonna do it.”

  “You’re gonna do it with the jab. You’re gonna do it with a consistent jab. You’re gonna do it with a hook…and you’re gonna do it with determination. That’s how you’re gonna do it!”

  He was tearing up the bag. Bam, bam, bam, bam. Faster and faster and faster. It turned out to be the best workout we ever had. The strange thing was, it made me really nervous. I walked back to my room afterward and took a shower. Then I went outside and got in the Jacuzzi and let the jets wash over me. He’d bought into what I was teaching him, he’d stopped fighting me, he’d gotten with the program. In a weird way he’d managed to flip things around. I remembered something that Cus used to say: “Nature is very smart and intuitive and it finds a way.” Michael had figured out how to get out of the eye of the storm. He’d turned things around and now all the pressure was on me. It was as if he had said, “All right. I’m gonna do everything the right way now. I’m gonna do everything you say. No more excuses. No more finding reasons to lose. No more setting myself up. No more refusing to face what’s coming. I’m gonna do everything right. Now it’s on you, Teddy. It’s on you.”

  He was right. If he hadn’t turned the tables, I’d have been able to say, “The son of a bitch didn’t listen. He didn’t want to win.” It would have given me a way out. But if he wanted to win, if he gave his all and he didn’t win, then what would that mean? That I had lied to him? It wasn’t something I wanted to think about too much.

  From that day on, Michael never gave me a problem. If I told him to box six rounds, at the end of six rounds he’d say, “Do you wanna go another?”

  Davimos came up to me a couple of days later and said, “Did you see the spaceship?”

  “What?”

  “The spaceship,” Davimos said. “The one that came in and abducted him a few days ago and replaced him with this alien.”

  “He is like an alien, isn’t he?” I said.

  “I didn’t say
anything the first day because I figured the next day he’d come back to earth. Then the next day, I figured, ‘Okay, the real Michael will reappear today.’ Now it’s three days, and he’s definitely not himself. He’s definitely an alien.”

  “The thing is,” I said, “you’re not giving him enough credit. He’s a smart bastard. He’s not gonna give me one more problem for the rest of camp.”

  “Nah, he could blow up tomorrow,” Davimos said.

  “No, I’m telling you, John. I know what he did. He reversed it. He found a way to transfer the responsibility. He’s very smart.”

  Davimos thought about what I was saying and then looked at me. “That is what he’s doing, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “Now you’re the one who’s afraid.” He understood instantly what it meant.

  “Yeah, now I’m the one who’s afraid…,” I said. “The only thing is he’s not gonna freakin’ lose.”

  A FEW DAYS LATER, WE FLEW INTO VEGAS. THE FIGHT WAS A week away. Caesars Palace had a limo waiting for us at the airport. When we got to the hotel, there were all these half-naked Cleopatras and Roman gladiators lined up at the front entrance to welcome us. It was definitely a little bit different from the smokers in the Bronx, where it would be one wino lifting his bottle of Thunderbird in salute as I was walking my fighters into some bombed-out building.

  All through training camp and even before, there’d been these omens that made me feel something out of the ordinary was going on—the fight in the parking lot in Mississippi, Michael coming back to me because of it, my father dying. When we got to Vegas we trained at this gym, Johnny Taco’s, and when Michael got in the ring, I noticed a poster up on the wall behind him of Mike Tyson. It was strange because it was a poster I had never seen before. It had Tyson’s record listed on it, which at the time of the poster was 35–0. Michael Moorer’s record was 34–0. If he won the championship it would be the same as Tyson’s at the time of that poster. It was an eerie moment for me: I was looking up at Michael in the ring, and there was Tyson’s ghost floating over his head, this thing that was supposed to have happened for me but didn’t.

  I guess the suspense of not knowing what was going to happen, the anxiety, had started to get to me by then. All these omens I’d seen and it still wasn’t enough. I said to myself, “Gee, I wish there was an even more direct sign that would tell me that everything’s gonna be okay.” That’s how much pressure I was under. I just had to win the fight. As I walked through the casino, I decided to ask the spirits in a very Vegas way: I stopped at a roulette table. I didn’t even know the rules. But I stopped at the table, handed the croupier a hundred-dollar bill, and received four green twenty-five-dollar chips. I said, “How does it work?”

  “Whatever you want to do,” the croupier said. “You can play red or black, or different columns—”

  “No, I don’t want to do any of that. I just want to put it on a number.”

  “What number?”

  “Thirty-five.” I handed him the chips, and he placed them on 35. There were other players at the table. They were playing much smaller, a dollar at a time. I didn’t even know to look at the ball going around the wheel. I wasn’t even looking or aware when the spin was over. Suddenly, they pushed me thirty-five hundred dollars in chips. The ball had landed on 35! I turned to the lady next to me and said, “I won?”

  “You sure did.”

  “We’re gonna win!” I shouted.

  “You already won, honey.”

  “No, no, you don’t understand…holy shit!” I didn’t know what to do. A part of me wanted to cry. A part of me wanted to explain it all, to tell them, “This means we’re going to win the world championship!” But I didn’t. I just picked up the money and left the table. I went to the cage and cashed out. I thought it meant something, I really did. It was like, Everything is coming our way. So I took that money plus fifteen hundred more and put it on Michael, who was a two-to-one underdog, to win the fight.

  LAS VEGAS, IN THE DAYS LEADING UP TO A BIG FIGHT, DEVELOPS this supercharged atmosphere. You can feel the buzz in the air. But even with that charge, or maybe because of it, I was very concerned that Michael not lose his edge. I brought Bigfoot Martin along with us, which was an unusual thing. Usually when you break camp for a prizefight, you send the sparring partners home. But I made Bigfoot come with us because I wanted Michael to spar one more day. Nothing too hard; I didn’t want him to be overtrained. Just three easy rounds five days before the fight to keep him sharp and focused. There were a million distractions to contend with: all the media people, the interviews, the TV spots, the fans wanting to say hello or get an autograph.

  I tried to control as many things as I could. I had Michael staying in a room under an assumed name because I didn’t want any strangers or enemies calling him up in the middle of the night and waking him. You actually worry about stuff like that. The other thing I did was have his guys Flem and Wick set up a security station down the hall from Michael’s suite. They were there twenty-four hours a day. They did eight-hour shifts. Anybody who wanted to get into Michael’s room had to get past them.

  We also had all the food orders that went to Michael sent up to another room on the floor under a different name, again to make sure no funny stuff was going on. All those years with Cus, some of his paranoia had definitely rubbed off on me. But like they say, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Somebody could do something as simple as putting a laxative in your fighter’s meal so he got the shits for a couple of days and was weak. Stuff like that actually happened in the old days, and I wasn’t taking any chances now. Flem, Wick, and Michael approved. They loved all the cloak-and-dagger stuff.

  My greatest worry, of course, was not outside distractions, but what was going on inside Michael’s head. The day after we got there, I went into his room and all the drapes were drawn. I couldn’t see him—literally could not see him.

  “Where the hell are you?” I said, waiting for my eyes to adjust.

  I heard this small voice. “Here.”

  I didn’t want to hear any small voices. Not when my guy was about to become heavyweight champion of the world. No small voices.

  “Where? Where are ya?”

  “Over here.” Again the small voice.

  “What the fuck are ya doin’?” I shouted. I went around the room yanking open the drapes.

  “Whoa! Shut the—Ted, don’t do that.”

  “Don’t do what? Who do you think you are, Dracula?”

  “C’mon, Ted. Stop!”

  I opened up every drape I could find. I was like Mr. Sunshine. It was the middle of the day and he was in a black room, all by himself. “You haven’t hidden one day,” I said. “Even when you tried, I didn’t let you. You did everything. Tell me how many days of sparring you missed?”

  “None.”

  “How many curfews?”

  “Never missed a curfew.”

  “That’s right. So let’s not hide now. There’s no drawn shades here. We got nothing but great stuff to look at.”

  The sun streamed in and Michael squinted but he stopped protesting.

  The main thing, leading up to the fight, was to keep him busy, keep him positive, not let him brood too much. I had him skip rope every day, shadowbox, break a sweat. I didn’t want him working too hard. The main push was already done. I just wanted him to stay loose and fresh.

  A few nights after we arrived, Mike Boorman, the PR man, a big, fat-cheeked Brooklyn guy, who had become a good friend of mine, and John Davimos and I went out to a restaurant to grab a bite, while Flem and Wick and the rest of them took Michael out to the mall. In the middle of our dinner, Flem suddenly came rushing in, out of breath.

  “What is it, Flem?” I put down my burger.

  He shook his head. “I’m embarrassed.”

  “What is it?”

  “We lost him.”

  “Lost who?” I was so past it all at that point, I couldn’t take
it seriously.

  “Would it be your fighter?” Boorman ventured.

  At that point, Davimos chimed in, saying to Flem: “You’re a security guy. How do you lose a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound fighter?”

  “Well, you see…,” Flem began, winding himself up to tell it, the way a kid would do if he were explaining how he lost his homework. “We had just come back from the mall, and we were walking into the casino, and Michael was in a good mood. But as we were walking past the bingo hall, the doors suddenly opened and all the bingo ladies came rushing out, and there was all this commotion. A couple of them bumped into him, these seventy-, eighty-year-old women. One of them yelled at him, ‘Get out of my way, you big lug. You knocked over my bingo card.’ And Michael got so mad and upset, he took off. He ran away. I tried to catch up to him, but he was moving too fast. Last I saw of him, he was running down the strip.” Flem hung his head.

  “Mike, you finished with that ketchup?” I said.

  “Yeah, Ted. You want one of my onion rings?”

  “Sure.”

  Boorman held out his plate of onion rings. I took one. He looked at Flem and said, “I wouldn’t worry too much, Flem. But I might keep that story quiet.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Boorman?”

  “You know, about the next heavyweight champ of the world losing a battle to a bunch of bingo ladies?”

  “Uh-huh.” Flem looked confused.

  “But as far as finding him, I guarantee you, wherever he went, he’ll be back by his curfew. Ask Teddy.”

  “I’d bet on it,” I said.

  And of course that’s exactly what happened. No matter what, Michael made his curfew.

  The interesting thing was, aside from that dinner and a few other occasions, once we got to Vegas, Michael wouldn’t let me out of his sight. He wanted me around all the time. Boorman was the first to pick up on it. We’d finish an interview and be on our way out of the interview area, and if I was lagging behind Michael and his crew, he’d suddenly stop and go, “Where’s Teddy? Where’s Teddy?”

  Boorman thought it was hysterical. “He’s your best friend now, huh?”