by Teddy Atlas
It cracked me up. The heavyweight champion shows up at his door and Anthony, a big boxing fan, not only gets to talk to him but gets to give him pointers on top of it! It was like Derek Jeter showing up at your house a couple of days after winning the World Series, and after high-fiving him you mention that he should have stretched that one single into a double. Not to mention the fact that you’re delivering this critique while under house arrest.
BEFORE TRAINING CAMP I HAD GONE TO VISIT MY FATHER’S grave. When I got back home, to acknowledge his help in winning the title and pay tribute to him, I went to a florist and bought five dozen red roses. My father had loved red roses and always had a bunch of rosebushes at the house I grew up in.
As I was coming out of the florist’s with my five dozen roses—which is a lot of roses for one person to carry—this car full of young wiseass kids slowed down and one of them yelled, “Hey, Teddy! Those ain’t for the champ, are they?”
I looked at them, ready to say something, but then one of them said, “Hey, we’re just kidding! Congratulations!” And they pumped their fists and beeped the horn.
When I got to the grave, I laid out all the roses on Dad’s grave. Then I wrote a note to him. Nothing long or involved. Just a little note. “Dad, thanks for helping us win the fight.” I put it under the roses and left.
THE OTHER THING I DID, AND THIS, AGAIN, WAS TO COMPLETE a circle, something that was begun in an earlier part of my life that I wanted to connect to the place I had come to now, was to go up to Catskill, because the kids up there, my old kids, wanted to see me. Greg, Gary, Rodney, Kevin, and George were there, as was John Chetti, who had become a youth counselor.
They handed me a plaque, another plaque—it had been many years since that first plaque—and this one said, “From your friends at the (old) Catskill Boxing Club, and the people who really know. Finally your time has come. We love you.”
In a way, my winning the title with Michael was validation for them, too, because they had believed in me, they had supported me, and it affirmed their faith in all the stuff I had taught them. It made them feel they had been right to put their trust in me. It made them feel—at least maybe a little bit—like they had won as well.
BIG GEORGE
IN BEATING HOLYFIELD, MICHAEL HAD TAKEN A huge step toward overcoming some of his demons and becoming the guy he—and I—wanted him to become. But defending the title would be a very different thing than winning it.
When I finally sat down in late May or early June of 1994 with John Davimos and Bill Kozerski to discuss the future, we carefully considered the factors involved in Michael’s first title defense. Number one, of course, was money. Who could we fight that would make for the biggest payday? That was the first thing. At the same time, we had to weigh any short-term windfall against the possibility of losing. If we picked the wrong fight we could lose both the title and our economic hammer in a hurry. So we wanted to make sure we chose a fight we felt confident about winning. That meant not picking a guy whose style would give Michael trouble.
A bunch of names were thrown out. Tyson was in jail. Lennox Lewis was too dangerous. Oliver McCall wasn’t enough of a draw. There were other guys mentioned, but all of them were discarded for one reason or another.
Suddenly, it came to me. “George Foreman.”
It was as if a flashbulb had popped. Everybody stared at me, and you could see it in their faces. George Foreman! Of course! That was the fight! It gave you everything. There was the draw of his name. His ongoing comeback story. His big personality and ability as a salesman. And the best part: George was an old man, forty-four years old, a guy Michael matched up well against. It was a fight, at least on the surface, we should have no problem winning.
From that moment on, all our efforts went into making the bout happen. Supposedly—and sometimes it’s hard to know what’s true and what just fits into the lore—Foreman had been telling his people, even before we approached him, that he wanted to fight Michael. He had seen something in Michael while broadcasting the Holyfield fight for HBO that made him feel he could win.
A guy once said that there are no second acts in American life. I’ll tell you one thing, he wasn’t thinking of Big George Foreman. In his first life, Foreman had been an aloof, antisocial strongman, a bully who pounded his boxing foes into submission and looked for all the world to be invincible. But in 1974, in a fight famously promoted as the Rumble in the Jungle, in Kinshasa, Zaire, Foreman was knocked out by Muhammad Ali in what still stands as one of the biggest, most stunning upsets in boxing history. Three years later, having never really recovered from the loss, Foreman experienced a religious awakening and became an ordained Christian minister. He also became a family man, fathering five daughters and five sons (all of the boys named George, like him).
In 1987, ten years after his retirement from the sport, Foreman reinvented himself yet again and launched a boxing comeback. It took him a few years, building up his record against carefully selected opponents, but he fought his way back into contention, finally landing a championship bout against Evander Holyfield in 1991. Though Holyfield beat him convincingly, Foreman proved he was no fraud or novelty act. Even so, most people encouraged him to retire again. But Foreman was stubborn. He wanted redemption, and kept looking for another chance to win back the title.
After he did the TV color work on the Moorer-Holyfield fight, from what I heard, he basically called up the HBO people and said, “Get me this fight.” They tried to talk him out of it. “Come on, George, you did it already. You came back. You had your shot. You fell short. It was a great thing. Because of it, you’ve got all these commercials and endorsements, you’ve got this TV gig with us. Why keep going? You’re not getting any younger. You don’t need to prove anything. You could get hurt.”
“No, I can do it,” he said. “I can actually finish it now.”
What he had seen in Michael, I believe, was somebody he could beat mentally. You see, George was a guy who found out the hard way that it was tougher to quit than it was to fight. He had quit in Zaire. There’s no doubt about it. He pirouetted around the ring and gave up. He got broken down by a man that he couldn’t deal with, Muhammad Ali, and he had been forced to live with the indignity of that, the lonely truth of that, for all these years. He’d been forced to confront the kind of truth that visits you at three o’clock in the morning and comes out of the mouths of people who are not on your payroll and never seems to go away. He’d been up against that all these years, and now he saw a way out. Independent of us, he started up the machinery to get the fight. Meanwhile, at our end, we were seeing what we needed to see, and starting the wheels turning, too.
All of us were seeing opportunity, and it was great and very American that way. Everybody saw their end. We went from defending the title for probably a couple of million dollars to a $7 million payday because of George Foreman. In what would be an easier fight for us—at least theoretically.
And yet, even as the words were coming out of my mouth, as George Foreman’s name was rolling off my tongue, there was something in my gut, a sharp stab of—I don’t know what else to call it—fear. It didn’t stop me from uttering his name, but there was this dark, ominous feeling that went along with it. I said to myself, “Do I really want this?” At the same time it made sense, as was obvious from everyone’s enthusiastic response.
The negotiation for the fight went like most fight negotiations go, which is to say back and forth and on and off. Don King is always knocked as being a devious guy, which he is. But Bob Arum is just as scheming, though in a less flamboyant way; he’s a hand-painted shingle to King’s neon sign. I’ll give you an example. The negotiation had been going on for a while. It was on, it was off, it was dead, it was back on. At one point, Davimos and Kozerski and the Duvas were on a conference call with Arum, and Arum said, “I just want you to know, you’re going to have to call up your fighter and tell him you just fucked up his career—and if you don’t tell him, I will—because Don K
ing’s got George Foreman on a plane as we speak, and they’re halfway to Jakarta to sign contracts, and you fucked your fighter out of a tremendous payday. Don King’s got George.”
At which point someone from our side said, “That’s funny, Bob, because our lawyer just spoke with Foreman ten minutes ago and he was in Houston. So unless he’s using a Star Trek transporter, it seems unlikely that he’s halfway to anywhere.”
Arum didn’t even blink. He said, “Forget that then. Let’s move past that,” and he segued right into whatever the next negotiating point was. Davimos and Kozerski and the rest couldn’t contain themselves. They began howling with laughter. Arum was so utterly shameless.
In the end, the deal got made anyway. We got our seven million. As soon as we held the first press conference and got into the next phase, I had to face in a real way my worries about losing the title. More important, I had to confront my worries about losing the ground that Michael had already gained as a person and as an athlete. I realized then why I’d had that stab of fear when Foreman’s name came out of my mouth. I knew what George had already been through. He could recognize weakness and fear in other men because he recognized it in himself. I always said that the old George Foreman, the forty-four-year-old man, would have knocked out the young George Foreman. He wasn’t as good physically, not nearly so, but he was tougher mentally by far. He understood the difference between lies and the truth. He understood what the boundaries were. And his hard-won self-knowledge made him a much more formidable foe. He could look at an opponent with near X-ray vision and recognize the very same shortcomings he had once had himself before he had been forced to deal with them.
I went to the first press conference aware of all these things, wanting to make sure that we didn’t lose a battle before the war had even really started. Sure enough, I was right: I saw Foreman was ready to start setting land traps already. Michael made the mistake, which I didn’t correct, of showing up in dark glasses. Foreman immediately said, “What’s the matter with you, boy? You afraid to show your eyes?” It was nearly an echo of what I’d said to Michael myself when he’d shown up in Palm Springs one day wearing sunglasses.
I knew I needed to do something. I went after Foreman on the spot. I called him a fraud, then I grabbed him and pushed him. I challenged him. It was on TV all over the country that night. The two of us scuffling on the stage at the press conference. People thought I was crazy. Out of my mind. Foreman, by contrast, didn’t lose his cool. He knew how to play it. He restrained himself.
But I knew what I was doing, too. I was protecting my kid. I didn’t want my kid to lose the prelim. It was like being in Rikers. Once you gave up the sneakers, it was only a matter of time before they took everything else. George grasped it all, how you can be the victim or the emperor of these things. And fortunately, or unfortunately, whatever your perspective is about a tough world, I understood, too.
When we held the next press conference in Vegas, what had happened at the first one was all over the newspapers and TV, this 150pound guy shoving this 260-pound guy who was the former heavyweight champ of the world. It made the promoters very happy. They were all smiles. “We couldn’t have paid for that kind of publicity.” But that wasn’t where I was coming from. It wasn’t part of the promotion for me. It wasn’t some pro wrestling stunt. It was real. Michael knew what it was. He understood.
Michael went to the next press conference without the sunglasses. He knew he needed to do that and that I wanted him to do that. But Foreman was the master of this universe. He used it against Michael. He said, “I see that I made you take your glasses off, boy.”
Right after that press conference, I went back to my room and threw up. Mark Kriegel, the writer for the Daily News, who was following me again, as he had before the Holyfield fight, heard me in the bathroom, and when I came out, he asked me if I was okay.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“It’s because of Foreman, isn’t it?” Kriegel was a good reporter with good instincts.
“My stomach’s a little upset is all.”
“You got a bad feeling about this one, don’t you?”
I shrugged. His question made me uncomfortable. Because just as there had been an aura of destiny that made me believe we would win the fight against Holyfield, this one filled me with dread. Michael and I had needed to win the Holyfield fight for vindication and validation. Now we were champions. George Foreman, on the other hand, had been waiting twenty years to redeem himself. So when Kriegel asked me if I had a bad feeling, the truth was I did, I just didn’t want to say it.
Unlike our previous training camp, this one, also in Palm Springs, was trouble-free throughout. Michael was a model of perfect behavior and hard work. But it only added to my apprehension because I knew the one way we could lose the fight was if Foreman suckered him.
I told Michael that the best thing that Foreman did was to throw a slow jab at you. He didn’t throw it full. If he threw it full, you’d know what your line of distance was, you’d know the range where you were safe. But if he threw it a few inches short, the way he did, you’d get a false sense of security and be fooled into thinking that was as far as it went. Nobody else had really picked up on this. I had watched a lot of tape. I knew Foreman inside out.
“George is forty-four,” I said. “This is his best thing. This is the only way he can beat you, by lulling you to sleep, by making you think you’re safe when you’re not. He’ll throw this slow jab, he’ll make you slow to his pace, he’ll get you feeling comfortable, and then suddenly there’ll be a right hand behind it. You’ll never even see it coming. It won’t even look like a big punch. It’ll look like nothing.”
Every day, I went over this, trying to drill it into Michael, trying to make him understand. After a few weeks, he said, “Teddy, not again. I got it. I got it.”
“No. Get in the ring,” I said. “We need to go over it again.”
It reached the point where Michael would mimic me. He would say, “I know, he does this and then he does this, and then there’s a right hand and you never see it…. I know, Ted. I know.”
George was so good at running a con and making you dance to his beat that if you weren’t absolutely vigilant, you were lost. After the scrap at the first press conference, I really didn’t know what to expect from him in Vegas, so I went to that second press conference prepared for anything. I had somebody meet me on the way in and slip me a roll of quarters. I made a fist around the roll of quarters. Cus had always told me, although I knew it from the street, that a roll of quarters added twenty pounds to your punching power. I guess I felt I needed it against Foreman in case we got into anything again. I wanted to be ready. But George had instincts that were almost better than my instincts. He didn’t do anything. He was friendly, charming, and funny. He already had what he wanted, so there was no need to do anything. I’m telling you, George was a master.
One thing that having the title and a bit more money did was give me an opportunity to show my appreciation to a lot of people who had been loyal to me over the years. I flew a number of guys out to Vegas for the fight, old friends of mine and guys from the neighborhood. I probably flew four or five guys out, all told. There was my friend Mikey Smith—Smitty—who was a kid I hung out with on the corner; another guy, Ronnie Scripps, whose late father was a bookie; Jimmy McMahon, who had been Nick Baffi’s fighter, and who I’d managed until he retired because I’d made that promise to Nick when he was dying of cancer; and Larry Coughlin.
Of all my friends, there was probably no one as loyal to me as Larry Coughlin. Larry grew up in the projects, part of a large, hard-drinking Irish family. His uncle was a big shot in the transit union, and he got all the brothers and nephews jobs. Larry became a subway car cleaner. It was a pretty good job, but there was an accident in the yards and his left arm got partially crushed. The odd thing was that Larry acted like he’d lost the arm. The truth was, and it took me years to understand this, the arm wasn’t that bad. Despite a bunch
of operations and skin grafts, he could still move it. But psychologically it loomed very large for him; it was damaging. He always wore long-sleeved shirts to hide it.
As a result of the accident, he got what at the time we thought was a very large settlement. In fact, it was only about three hundred thousand dollars—half of which went to taxes and lawyers’ fees. Larry took twenty thousand and bought his mother a nice little house in the South Beach area of Staten Island, and took the rest of it and put it in bonds and lived off the dividends (although eventually he went through the principal, too). I helped move him and his mom with a U-Haul. He was so proud to be able to get her out of the projects and into this little house. He moved in there, too, into the basement. It was a pretty good setup. He lived well. The most important things he had down there were this mini-fridge that was always full of beer, and a TV. The two of us spent a lot of time in that basement together, drinking beer and watching Larry Bird on the tube. He loved Larry Bird.
The problem was, I was moving a little bit, and he wasn’t. He was in that basement, and his ambitions did not often lead him out. I didn’t kid myself about him. He had a drinking problem and he wasn’t comfortable socially. But he had an innocence and a spirit, and I loved him, and he loved me, and it was pretty simple in that sense. When his drinking got really bad, and this was when I was living in Catskill, I brought him up there and made him drink nothing but milk shakes. He dried out, and after a while he went back to his basement, the Bunker, we called it. Larry was almost like a cult figure to us. For a while, we called him Headband because he always wore a headband. Then he got called Bud because all he drank was Budweiser.
Anyway, Larry was one of the guys I flew out for the fight. He’d never been to Vegas. I mean, he’d hardly ever left his basement. So a huge five-thousand-room casino and hotel like the MGM Grand might as well have been a foreign country to him. I’d told him that he’d better behave himself, that he better be good, so that was on his mind. “Teddy told me I better be good.” I wasn’t being a hard-ass—it was lighthearted—but I sincerely didn’t want him to get in trouble.