Atlas

by Teddy Atlas

  The first few days there, everyone was getting lost because the place was so huge. I was busy, but my crew would meet in different places, and I’d try to join them whenever I could. I’d see Larry, and Larry would hug me and say, “I’ve been good, Teddy.”

  “You need anything?”

  “Nah.”

  I’d give him a few bucks anyway, and he’d say, “Thanks, Pops.” He called me Pops.

  “Stop the bullshit, Larry. You being good?”

  Then he would see Elaine, and he’d say, “Tell Teddy I’m being good.”

  Early on, Larry made a discovery. He sat down at one of the bars in the MGM that was right along one of the central thoroughfares. Now Larry wasn’t much of a gambler, but he sat down at this table that had a video poker game built into it. He took out five bucks and fed it in, and he started playing on that five bucks, a quarter at a time. Now, five bucks can last you a long time that way, and while Larry was sitting there, a cocktail waitress came over and asked him if he wanted a drink. Naturally, he said yes.

  A couple of minutes later she brought him back a Bud—and didn’t charge him for it. Ten minutes later, he ordered another one. Again no charge. He didn’t know that in Vegas as long as you’re gambling, they don’t charge you for drinks. Larry thought he’d found Shangri-la. He was looking around, and he was like, “I ain’t telling no one about this.” And he wasn’t moving. Not for anybody.

  Some of the guys found him there. They’d been looking all over for him. I’d asked Smitty to keep an eye on him.

  “C’mon, Larry, we’re going to the Steak House.”

  “I’m staying here.”

  “C’mon.”

  Nope. Not moving. Larry didn’t know what the explanation was, but he’d found a seam in the fabric of the universe, here in this little corner of Las Vegas, and he wasn’t budging. “I ain’t fuckin’ this up, and I’m not gonna let anyone else fuck it up for me either.” He didn’t know when the seam might close, and he wasn’t taking any chances. So he just stayed there. Five hours. Seven hours. Nine hours. Twelve hours. He stayed in that spot and the waitress kept bringing him drinks.

  Word got back to me. Larry was in this spot, and he thinks he found the one place in the universe where liquor flows eternally, and if he moves he ain’t ever gonna get the same deal. Meanwhile, everyone else was making their plans for dinner, for shows, for music, whatever, because apart from the guys I’d flown in, there were about 130 other friends and relatives of mine who’d come for the fight. They started making every plan around where Larry was, because that was the only thing they could count on in Vegas. Where are we going to meet? That corner bar where Larry is. For the entire week, everyone would meet there, where Larry was sitting. And anytime someone would see Larry, he’d say, “It’s okay. I’m good. I’m behaving. Tell Teddy I’m behaving.”

  Fight night finally arrived, and from the moment we got into the ring, the bad feeling I’d been carrying around got worse. For one thing, Foreman jogged into the ring the same way we had for the Holyfield fight. He had never jogged into a ring in his life. As if that weren’t bad enough, he was wearing the same boxing trunks that he had worn against Ali in Zaire in 1974. I had to use all my discipline to push away negative thoughts when I saw that—because what those trunks indicated to me was that here was a man who was facing down his past. He wasn’t running from his ghosts. He was confronting them head-on. I was scared. A guy who was able to face the truth that way was a dangerous guy. That was why I had thrown up on the day of the press conference. I had recognized that about Foreman.

  Even so, as the fight got under way, it seemed as if Michael was too young, too fast, and too skilled for Foreman to keep up. I had been hoping the Holyfield fight and all that we had gone through would complete Michael. He was a better person now, a more confident man. But were those qualities going to be his ally against Foreman? I knew in general they were, but would they be for this specific fight? The truth is, the careful way he’d fought against Holyfield, as frustrating as it was for me, was the way he should have fought against Foreman. But I couldn’t tell him that. My job had been to make Michael more whole, and now that he was, I couldn’t steer away from it. I couldn’t tell him not to be Secretariat, to pull back and not be a champion horse. I let him gallop. For most of the night, it looked like a smart move. He took the fight to Foreman in every round. He was dominant.

  Still, I knew, as a strategic approach, it was dangerous. There came a moment in the eighth round, where my corner, I think it was Mo, said to me, “Great job, Teddy. This one’s in the bag.” I went nuts. “Shut up! Don’t you say nothing about this fucking fight being over. Don’t fucking say that!”

  Mo apologized. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “This fight is far from over! Don’t you understand?”

  He didn’t say another word. It was so obvious to my corner that I was scared. “This fight ain’t nowhere near over,” I said. “This guy’s been waiting twenty years for one moment. It ain’t about the rounds. He didn’t come here to win a decision!”

  They got very quiet. In between the ninth and tenth rounds, I told Michael again, as I had been telling him throughout, that he was doing great, that he was a champ. I also warned him for the thousandth time that Foreman was looking for that one punch, and that it was going to be a right hand.

  “The only way he can do it, Michael, is with your cooperation. You have to keep moving to your right. He can’t pull it off if you keep moving to your right.”

  In the tenth round, it was almost as if I could see the future before it happened. I could see the thoughts form in Foreman’s mind. He threw a left hook, and I understood exactly what he was thinking. I screamed, “No!” It was just a throwaway hook. It wasn’t going to end the fight or even hurt Michael, but it was thrown to stop Michael from moving to the place he needed to move. It was thrown to make him move the other way. And I screamed “No!” because I saw it and understood immediately. It was like a hunter shooting in front of his prey to make it move into an open field where his partner had a clean line and an unobstructed shot.

  It was weird to watch Foreman’s reaction. His face lit up. He smiled almost. Then he did just what we had gone over in camp every day. He followed the left with the right—bang—and just like that the fight was over. The moment the punch landed and Michael went down, I was going up the steps to get into the ring. My guys grabbed me. They didn’t understand.

  “It’s over,” I said.

  “No, he’s going to get up,” they said. It looked like nothing. Which is what I’d been saying to them all along. That it was going to look like a nothing punch. They were actually waiting for Michael to get up, thinking he would survive the round. I knew better. There was no getting up.

  “This is over,” I said. “He did it.”

  They didn’t understand. It didn’t look like anything.

  “He’ll get up.”

  “No. Foreman did what he wanted to do. Michael ain’t getting up.”

  I got angry afterward at people who said that Michael quit. They didn’t understand. Neither did the people who said Foreman got lucky. He didn’t get lucky. He spent twenty years preparing to throw that punch, learning what he needed to get to that precise moment in time. When it landed, it was like pulling a plug out of a circuit. It was over. Foreman knew it. I knew it. And Michael—Christ, the force of the punch split his mouthpiece in half. It drove his tooth through his lip! I’m not a protector of George. He doesn’t need me standing up for him. But I believe in giving credit where it’s due. He came prepared physically and mentally to be tortured and to endure, to be ready to do what he needed to do after all that punishment from a younger guy who could punch. Was that lucky? No. That was preparation. That was work. That was sacrifice.

  After the fight, I got on the service elevator with Michael and Mike Boorman. It was just the three of us in this big steel box. Michael was holding a towel to his bloody split lip. I had called ahead
to a plastic surgeon because if Michael decided that he didn’t want to fight again, I didn’t want him to have a scar. Suddenly Michael said, “Where is everybody?” Boorman looked at him, at this guy who normally had this huge entourage, and he said, “This is everybody.” Michael nodded, taking that in, understanding what it meant.

  Obviously there was a lot of depression after something like that. In the aftermath, all of my friends, people who had come out to Vegas, didn’t know quite what to do. The next day, Mikey Smith got so drunk that he climbed this huge fake tree that towered over a boulder and a waterfall right there in the middle of the MGM lobby. Larry Coughlin was still in his spot, drinking beers, and watching Smitty, who was supposed to be looking after him, climbing this tree. What the fuck was the guy doing?

  Meanwhile, people were checking in and out of the hotel at the front desk. There was this one mother with two small children. She had all her bags and she was giving them to the bellman, and the kids were going, “Look, Ma, it’s a show!,” and they were pointing at Smitty. They were smart kids and they figured it must be a show. The woman was distracted, but the kids kept pulling at her sleeve, telling her to watch, and she finally looked over just as Smitty fell out of the tree, crashed down about fifteen feet onto the boulder, hit his head, and then bounced off into the waterfall and lay there.

  Now the kids were cheering, and Larry could see the mother trying to get them away, trying to shield them from this ugly scene with the drunk and the boulder that now had blood on it. She was saying, “C’mon, we gotta go.” And the kids were going, “No, I want to see the man. I want to watch him do that again.” And the mother was trying to pull them away before some other nut climbed the tree, before some other Smitty came along.

  After they were gone, Smitty finally got up and staggered out of the waterfall, dripping wet, with a knot on his head the size of a baseball and growing larger by the moment. People were looking at him and gasping as he just calmly walked over to where Larry was and sat down.

  The barmaid came over. She said, “You better go to a hospital. That looks bad.”

  Smitty shook his head and told her to get him a beer. Eventually, Jimmy McMahon, who hadn’t even met Smitty before this trip, talked some sense into him and got him to a hospital to get checked out.

  As for Larry, well…a couple of years ago, I came home from a trip, and when Elaine saw me she couldn’t even speak. I asked her to tell me what was going on, and she burst into tears and said, “Larry’s brother Brian just called—” I didn’t let her finish. I grabbed her mouth. I shouldn’t have done that, but I didn’t want her to tell me the rest.

  I guess I had known on some level that Larry was capable of killing himself. But not really. Maybe I had gotten too soft. I thought he was more resilient. In my mind, Larry was Larry. I knew he was hurting, but that was part of his life, part of who he was. It was normal. I didn’t think he’d ever do anything.

  Forty-five minutes before he hanged himself in his basement apartment, he had called and left a message on my answering machine. It was tough as hell to find that out. I know if I had been home, I would have stopped him. But I wasn’t, and it still haunts me. It’s been a couple of years now. Sometimes a week will go by and I’ll be okay, and then all of a sudden, three days in a row, I’ll be mad at him. I’ll say, “Goddamn you, Larry, you motherfucker,” and then I’ll be mad at myself, mad that I didn’t pay closer attention.

  AND ONCE

  AGAIN

  AFTER THE LOSS TO FOREMAN, MICHAEL WENT BACK to his house in Boca Raton, and I went back to Staten Island. It was a tough time. A lot of people were saying things that weren’t fair—that Michael quit, that he lost to an old man, that kind of stuff. On top of the normal depression of losing, Michael had to deal with that, and basically he decided to retire.

  In Florida, with time on his hands, he began drinking again. There were occasions when he would call up Davimos and ramble on incoherently about what he should do. One time, he called while he was shooting a gun at the ceiling. Davimos phoned to tell me, and he was panicking. It was scary because Michael’s girlfriend had been there and she had run out of the house, and the cops were on the way. I got him on the phone. I could hear the sirens in the background. I said, “Michael, if you don’t put that gun down and not shoot it in the next minute or two, you’re gonna get yourself killed.” I was scared. Especially him being down in Florida. Luckily, nothing happened.

  Around the same time, I was receiving some interesting business offers. Lennox Lewis’s people called me to see if I would be available to train him. From an emotional standpoint and an economic one, Lewis was certainly an attractive prospect. He was coming off a loss to Oliver McCall. Even so, you didn’t have to be Angelo Dundee to recognize that he was a much better bet to come back than Michael. A lot of friends were telling me that I should go with him. But despite the fact that Michael couldn’t give me a definitive answer about his plans, I told the Lewis people no.

  The thing was, I knew that Michael didn’t really want to retire, that it was a knee-jerk reaction and a sign of him sliding back a little. We had lost some of the ground that we had gained during the Holyfield fight, but I felt in a profound way that he was my responsibility. I had made money with him. More important, I had made demands of him that I could make only as long as I could stand and deliver on them myself.

  I decided that I had to find out what Michael was going to do and help him do that. Loyalty demanded that. At the same time, I felt I couldn’t sit back and wait. I had to talk to him. It was delicate, though. It had to be something that he wanted to do for himself. Also, though I wanted to go talk to him, I realized that it shouldn’t come in the form of Davimos or Duva buying me a ticket and sending me down there. It had to be me just doing it. Especially with Michael being as vulnerable and fractured as he was. That was important. I called him up and told him I was catching the next plane.

  I could hear in his voice that it meant a lot.

  He said, “You’re coming down?”

  “Yeah. Give me your address.”

  “No, I’ll pick you up at the airport.” It was like his father was coming home.

  And he was there at the airport waiting for me. I could see how glad he was to see me by the way his face lit up, but in the next moment it was as if he said to himself, “I better act a little bit ornery.” It was like a switch went on. There was the spontaneous love and comfort in seeing me, and then all of a sudden it was like, “Oh, I better show him that I’m fractured, and that he’s gotta deal with that.”

  All of a sudden it was, “I ain’t fuckin’ fighting.”

  I didn’t even let him go there. I said, “Shut up. I want to eat something.”

  He was completely disarmed. “You want to eat?”

  “Yeah. I haven’t eaten anything. I’m hungry. I don’t want to talk to you about this now.”

  When we got to his house, we ordered Domino’s Pizza. There was no point in arguing about his diet at that point. Even though I knew that was what he was living on. We ate the pizza, then he took me on a tour. I had never seen the Florida house, and he was proud of it. Proud of what he had accomplished that enabled him to get a big house like that. He showed me his cars, including his twin Mercedes-Benzes.

  “I still don’t believe you bought the second one,” I said. “You’re an idiot. You already have the same exact model, and the second you drive it out of the showroom, it’s worth half of what you paid for it.”

  He got so mad. “Oooahh, you always have to say stuff like that.”

  “Well, you always have to act like a moron.”

  It was our routine. People would say, “There they go again.” Like we were Abbott and Costello. Only sometimes there was a serious edge to it. Like now when he started his thing again about “I’m not coming back.”

  “Be quiet,” I said. “I’m not here to tell you that you gotta fight.”

  As soon as I said that, I could see the disappointment. He got scared. I
s Teddy gonna leave me? He’s just going to let me hang here?

  I knew I had him then. I knew right there what the answer was. I didn’t know when I got on the plane, but I knew right there. This guy wanted to fight again.

  “If you tell me you’re retired, you’re retired,” I said.

  “Well, that’s what I’m going to do,” he said.

  “Fine, you just better be sure that’s what you want. Because I’ll tell you what you’re not doing. You’re not calling me in a year and telling me, ‘Let’s do it again.’ That’s what you’re not doing. You make your choice now and you live with it.”

  That was the point at which he began to break. “So what should I do?” he asked.

  “No, no, no, no. I’m not going to tell you what to do. I’ll point out to you what’s there to be done. And if you want to do it, then it’s your decision.”

  He looked at me, wanting me to continue.

  “Look, you grew after that Holyfield fight,” I said. “And the fact is, it might have hurt you against Foreman.”

  All the edge in him was gone now. He just looked at me with those big brown eyes wanting to hear more.

  “You felt like a champion,” I said. “Maybe it was my fault. I let you feel like too much of a champion, because from a strategic standpoint you went after him too much. But who could hold you back, who would want to hold you back from becoming what you always wanted to be? It’s a lot more than having a belt or two over your shoulders. It’s about what you felt. It’s about feeling it and being it. And you were being it. I’m proud of that.