by Teddy Atlas
“Then what happened, happened. Because of a mistake on your part and because of his experience. The good part of that fight for you was good. That shouldn’t be erased. That shouldn’t be forgotten. That shouldn’t be mixed up with the defeat.”
“But what should I do?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “That’s not how it works.” To me, it was like showing pictures to a kid. What’s really in the picture, what’s hidden there? Is there a horse? Do you see any pigs? He was the one who had to find the answer. “Look, I know what’s going on,” I said. “People are saying you lost to a forty-four-year-old guy. Why hide from that? You lost to a special guy, who had a special mission, and you made a mistake. But for nine and three-quarters rounds, you weren’t just winning, you were kicking the shit out of him.”
For the first time since we’d started talking, he smiled. “I was, wasn’t I? I was busting his ass.”
“Let me tell you something,” I said. “If that weren’t the case I would have come down here anyway, because it’s the right thing to stay partners with somebody you did something with and be able to tell them, ‘No more.’ If you weren’t good enough, I would tell you to stay away. I would tell you to take your money, put it in T-bills, stop being a jerkoff buying these freakin’ Mercedes-Benzes, and walk away. But the fact is you dominated him every second of every round the way a good fighter should, a fighter with a future, a fighter that’s more than a one-trick pony. And because of that it’s not complete. You haven’t fulfilled your destiny. Michael, you always trusted my judgment as a trainer. I’m talking to you as your trainer now. You could still take those steps toward where we want. I can’t tell you we’re going to get exactly where I thought we could. But we can still get somewhere in that direction. Isn’t part of living finding that out?”
After all the depression and drunkenness and all the crazy shit he’d done, now he grabbed me and looked at me and said, “You really think we can get the title back?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think, Michael. That’s what I’m saying. You know what I think.”
I saw him make the decision. “Let’s do it,” he said. “Let’s get it back.”
“I’ll call Davimos and tell him to set it up.”
FOREMAN HAD PROMISED TO GIVE US A REMATCH, AND THAT was what we wanted, obviously. But King was trying to move his guys in, and the whole corrupt machinery of boxing was in play. We moved forward as if the rematch would get worked out. We weren’t stupid or naive enough to think that Foreman and his people might not fuck us, but we also knew we had to act. There was a certain date the fight was going to happen, if we could set it up, and that was only a few months away. So my call was to start training camp. Michael had gotten heavy. There was a lot of work to do on his body and his psyche. We went to Woodland Hills, California, and we spent three weeks there. He dropped about twenty pounds and training went well. Meanwhile, I was keeping in touch with Davimos about the negotiations. We were going to get three million for the fight, and Foreman wanted eight to ten million. When HBO wouldn’t come up with the money, I offered to give up my end of the purse, about $300,000. Michael offered to give up some, too. It went back and forth, on and off, and finally the call came, the last call: it was gone.
I took an hour by myself to think about what I was going to tell Michael. I didn’t want to lose him. I finally went to his room, and as soon as I walked through the door, he said, “It’s off, isn’t it?” He could tell just from looking at me.
“Look, Michael,” I began, “there was never a guarantee that this was going to happen, but that doesn’t mean that what we did here doesn’t matter. This was about us, it wasn’t about George Foreman….”
As I was talking to him, Michael turned away from me. I thought he was giving me a problem, and I grabbed his shoulder.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” I said, spinning him around. I was expecting attitude and I was stunned when I saw his face. He was crying.
“Michael, I thought—”
“It’s okay, Teddy,” he said. The tears slid down his cheeks. “I’m going to be all right.”
All the people—people in his own camp—who thought he didn’t care. I’d been right all along. He was just trying to protect himself; all the bullshit, it was just because he was afraid to admit or show how much he cared.
“Mike—”
“It’s okay, Teddy…. Go ahead and talk, because you’re going to have to talk anyway. I know. That’s what you do.” He was standing there in sweatpants, not wearing a shirt. The TV was going in the background. “I know you do it because you care,” he said. “I know, and I want to hear what you have to say, but I also want you to know I’m okay. I ain’t gonna fall back.”
I almost laughed—it was a good moment. It showed how well he knew me. And he was right. I was going to talk anyway. I said, “It’s just part of the test, Michael. That’s all it is. I mean, beating Foreman? I wanted you to have that. But whoever you wind up fighting, the most important thing is that you’ve honored your commitment to come back and be whole again and be champion again. I’m proud of you for your three weeks here. It’s not going to register in your record, but it’s going to register down the road.”
We broke camp after that and went home. The Foreman fight, instead of taking place in the ring, took place in court. But before that could happen, we set up another fight for Michael, on HBO. It was a nontitle fight against a Jewish heavyweight named Tim Puller, and on the same card, Lennox Lewis was set to make his comeback fight. We trained in Tampa this time, and it was a very different atmosphere. All Michael’s guys were gone. Only Flem was left. It was different, but it wasn’t bad and it was what it needed to be.
My relationship with Michael at that point was—there’s no other way to describe it—like father and son. There was one episode that encapsulated it perfectly. Our day’s training was over, and just as at the other camps, I’d retreated to the pool to read a book in the late afternoon sun. I was sitting there on the chaise, sipping iced tea, when suddenly this shadow fell over me.
“We have a problem, Teddy.” It was Michael, with Flem standing off to one side behind him.
I shaded my eyes. “No, we don’t. I’m reading a book. It’s a beautiful afternoon. We don’t have no problems.”
Michael rubbed his hands. “Yeah, we do. Oh, boy, Flem, I can’t wait to see what Teddy’s going to do to this guy.”
“What guy?” At that moment, a waiter came by and refilled my iced tea.
“Come on. You gotta get dressed and come with me.”
“I ain’t going nowhere.” I took a sip of my tea.
Now I noticed that Flem was holding a small glass of water.
“You’re gonna teach this guy a lesson,” Michael said.
“What guy?”
“The guy I bought the clippers from.”
You have to understand, Michael was like Felix Unger from The Odd Couple. He was a cleanliness freak, obsessed with germs and personal grooming. When he brushed his teeth, he brushed his tongue. When he shaved his head, he put alcohol all over it to make sure it was sterilized. Earlier that afternoon, he had gone into downtown Tampa and bought a brand-new top-of-the-line electric clipper for $120. Someone else would have just brought it home and used it. Not Michael. He took it apart, took out the clip, and dipped it into water.
“Show it to him, Flem.”
Flem showed me the glass of water he was holding.
“So you got a glass of water,” I said.
“No, look closer. See the hair?”
I saw little microscopic hairs floating on the surface.
“That’s nasty,” Michael said. “Nasty. These damn Koreans. They sold me used clippers. I can’t wait till you go up to them and tell ’em who the hell they’re dealing with.”
“I ain’t going.”
“You gotta go.”
“I’m not going.”
“You gotta.”
We went back and forth like
that idiotically. In the end I realized that it was a losing battle, that with Michael this was part of the deal, and if I didn’t give in he would make me pay some other way. I put on my T-shirt.
Michael said, “Teddy, what are you going to do if he says, ‘Fuck you, nigger, I ain’t giving you your money back.’”
“I’m not gonna do a thing,” I said, “because it will be obvious at that point that he isn’t talking to me.”
“Come on. Come on. You’re gonna go crazy. I know you will.”
I could only shake my head as I laced up my sneakers. We got in his truck and drove downtown. Before we got there, I laid down the law. “Listen to me. I’m telling you right now, Michael, when we go in, you keep your mouth shut. Let me do all the talking. Do not say a damn word.”
He wasn’t listening; he was rubbing his hands together, saying to Flem, “Wait till Teddy takes care of this guy.”
We drove over to the place, a Korean variety and electronics store, and Michael jumped out of the truck. He told Flem to give him the glass of water, and when Flem handed it to him, he held it out in front of him at a distance from his body, like it was a urine sample.
“Remember,” I warned him. “Keep your mouth shut. I’m not playing with you.”
I opened the door of the store. There was a guy to one side, behind a counter. “Is that him?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“All right, now be quiet.”
I walked over to the counter, with Michael and Flem behind me. The guy behind the counter was in his twenties and had a wide, flat face and a full head of jet-black hair. I looked at him in a certain way, very cold, and put the clippers down on the counter. I opened up the box.
“These are used,” I said. “I want my money back.”
He looked at me, and started to say something, but I stared at him so cold and so hard that he changed his mind. I kept staring at him, and finally he rung open the cash register. He used his two forefingers to slide six twenty-dollar bills out from under the spring arm, then he handed them to me.
I turned around and said, “Let’s go.”
Michael started in with the guy. “Man, you nasty,” he said. He couldn’t let it be. “You nasty.”
“Michael.” I tugged his arm.
“You thought you was gonna get away with it, didn’t you?”
“Michael. Shut up. We got our money. Let’s go.”
I had to drag him out the door. He was growling and cursing the whole way.
MEANTIME, WHILE WE WERE IN TRAINING, FOREMAN FOUGHT Axel Schulz, who was the number-one contender. We watched the fight on the TV in the hotel bar. It was tough. We were the ones who should’ve been fighting Foreman. We would have been if he and his managers hadn’t screwed us. Even so, we were cheering for him. If he won he’d have to give us a rematch. But Schulz was not being cooperative. A crew-cut German, not great in any one area, but pretty good technically, with a good chin and some confidence, Schulz was making the fight close. We were on the edge of our seats, watching. At the final bell, it was too close to call. A lot of people thought Schulz actually won, but the judges gave it to Foreman. In my mind, it was a fair decision.
At the last second, the guy we were supposed to fight in our comeback bout fell out. They got another fighter to fill in, Melvin Foster, who was trained by Victor Valle. I didn’t like the change and balked. They begged me to go forward. They flew guys out to Sacramento to talk to me. It was like the Camp David Summit. Eventually, I relented, but then I had only two days to get Michael prepped for Foster. Two days! I brought film in. We had to cram to adjust to a completely different style. But we did it. We won a unanimous decision.
The toughest part, really, was the first round. Anytime you have a fighter coming off a knockout, the first round is tricky. When Michael came back to the corner after the opening three minutes, I didn’t criticize him at all. I just allowed him to sit. I said, “Welcome back. Now you know you’re okay. Let’s just fight a regular fight.” George Foreman was the commentator again, and he said something nice. He said, “That Teddy Atlas is a pretty smart guy. He knows what a fighter’s thinking. He knows just what to say.” Everyone was startled by that. People said to me, “He gave you that compliment even though you went after him?” But George was a smart son of a bitch. He was like the Godfather. It was always business with him. It was never personal.
Despite our hopes for the rematch with George, it never happened. He wanted to go his own way, and as a result he was stripped of his title. Then King and Bob Lee tried to do an end-around, and have Schulz and François Botha, who was a King fighter, fight for the vacated title. They told us maybe we would be next, but who knew? So we took them to court. We had lots of ammo, evidence of payoffs and graft, things like that. Pat English, our lawyer, put a very good lawsuit together. (It prompted a federal investigation that eventually led to an indictment of Bob Lee, who is currently in jail as a result.) Ultimately, a settlement was reached, in which we dropped the lawsuit in return for a title shot against the winner of the Schulz-Botha fight. But when Botha tested positive for steroids, King and Lee tried to void the agreement, so we had to bring a second lawsuit, which we won, and which resulted in Michael getting his shot against Schulz.
The Schulz fight was a challenge, more because of the circumstances than because of his abilities as a fighter. The biggest obstacle was that we had to go fight in an outdoor stadium in Dortmund, Germany, and try not to get robbed. That might sound like an exaggeration, but it’s not. We had to exert all our muscle and influence to get the right judges. That was the key to that fight. We won because we won the fight before the fight. We wound up getting two honest judges, and that was the difference in a split decision. That’s what boxing is about sometimes, I’m sorry to say.
My method in the corner on that fight was the opposite of the Holyfield fight, where I was always going to the whip. Michael needed something else. In one round, I said, “All right, Michael, I know you’ve been wanting to hear it and you never hear it—I care about you. Okay? I care about you. You’re important to me.”
He looked at me, because he had always told Elaine, “You know, I love him, but he’s too tough, he’ll never say he loves me. How come he can never say he loves me? I know he does. How come he can never say it?”
Now, in the middle of this fight, when I needed him to care, I said, “All right, I care about you.” I couldn’t say the other word, but I said, “I care. Now it’s time for you to care. You’ve got to be able to say, ‘I care. I care about winning that title. I care about putting myself out there and daring to be champion again. I care.’”
He looked at me and he said, “All right.”
After that, Michael picked up his pace and did what he had to do. He won back the title. Outdoors. In Germany. In someone else’s backyard, with thirty-five thousand fans rooting for his opponent. Following a loss in which he had been devastated by a forty-four-year-old fighter who had God on his side. I allowed myself to feel pretty good about that. In some ways I appreciated it more than winning the title from Holyfield.
WHEN WE DEFENDED OUR IBF CHAMPIONSHIP FOR THE FIRST time, against François Botha, it was part of a night of champions that also featured Holyfield defending his WBA title against Mike Tyson. It marked the first time that I would be involved in a Tyson fight since I’d left Catskill. To make it even more interesting, if we beat Botha, we were going to fight the winner of that fight for ten million dollars.
I came to the press conference at the Rainbow Room prepared for anything. I brought a few guys with me that I trusted would be with me if I needed them. Tyson was known for trying to disrespect people in these situations, trying to break people, trying to intimidate people—even doing more than that, like he did with Lennox Lewis later on. He used to go up to people and tell them that he’d “rape” them. I wasn’t going to put up with any of that. If we got into it as a result, so be it. If I went down, I wasn’t going down without inflicting some damage. So I was ther
e with my friends, Bobby, Louie, and Eddie. We were well dressed and well behaved, quiet, not looking at anybody. King recognized the situation. He came right over on the stage and put his hands out and said, “Teddy, nice to meet you.” I didn’t say a word. I shook his hand. You could see he understood the playing field.
Tyson had this guy Crocodile who had just gotten out of prison. He used him to intimidate people. Crocodile was talking all this shit, jawing at Holyfield, and at one point he stopped and looked at me. I thought he might be wanting to start in with me. I stared right back at him—and if there’s such a thing as sending mind messages out, I sent them. The telepathic message he received was roughly: “Don’t continue looking at me, and don’t even think about saying anything, because if you say anything to us, I will be up and I will be on my way to you.” Apparently, it worked. He looked away. And Tyson took note.
Once we got to Vegas, other stuff happened, although not, for the most part, with Tyson. There was a writer who showed up at the Grand for the fight, a guy I’d done a lot for when he was a kid, who was now putting out a crummy boxing rag that Don King was funding. He wrote some nasty, slanted stuff about me. When I saw him, I lost it. I’m not proud to say that, but this guy was a real jackal, so I’m not sorry, either. I also think I was in a slightly deranged state of mind with Tyson around. Anyway, I went after him. The funny part was that I was on my way to do a live interview with CNN at the time. My friend Mike Boorman was coordinating it. He was up on the podium they’d built, waiting for me to get over there from the weigh-in. The interview was all set up, Boorman was on a walkie-talkie, and a guy was walking me over. Suddenly, across the floor of the convention hall, I caught sight of this piece of shit “writer”—I hesitate to even use the word, because he wasn’t a real writer.
The CNN guy said to Boorman, “You got Teddy Atlas, right?” Boorman was looking down at me as I walked across this vast carpeted floor. He knew the whole story about me and this guy, and he had begged me not to do anything. Begged me. “Please, Teddy! The guy’s not worth it.” But he also knew me. So he was holding the walkie-talkie, saying to the producer, “Yeah, I see Teddy. He’s on his way. He’ll be here in sixty sec—” All of a sudden he stopped. “Uh…we might have a problem.”