by Teddy Atlas
As it turned out, the real reason I didn’t get indicted—and if I had, it would have changed my whole life; I would have been gone for years—was not because of anything I said in front of the grand jury. It was because the guy that I beat up changed his story. What I found out was that a couple of wiseguys, who were patients of my father, went and had a talk with the guy. They told him they’d pay his medical bills, but he better change his story. It’s not like my father asked these guys to do this; they did it on their own just because of their feelings for him. After the guy changed his story, the grand jury had no choice but to throw the indictment out.
What was interesting to me was that while I was locked up, the thing I was most upset about wasn’t my own plight, it was that I was letting down Freddie and Joe, that I wasn’t around to train them.
The day after I was released, Joe came over to my house, ten o’clock at night. He said, “Teddy, could you come outside?” He wouldn’t talk inside. I went with him. It was getting cool out. Summer was ending. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen with Freddie and Joe in the fall.
“Listen, it’s those guys, the ones from the bar,” Joe said. “Word on the street is that they’re looking to kill you.”
“They don’t have the balls,” I said.
“They’re sneaky bastards, Teddy. They won’t fight with you, but they’re liable to put two in you one night because they’re so scared and embarrassed.”
We walked down to the end of the block. “Let’s not wait for them to do something, Ted.” Joe reached into his waistband and pulled out a gun. “We’ll go take care of them.”
I didn’t know how to react. You see that kind of true loyalty so rarely. For what I had done for him, he was willing to do this thing for me without even thinking about it. I know it sounds screwed up, but in my mind this was the way everyone should act. Not that people should go around killing people out of loyalty, but they should be willing to risk themselves. After that, it’s up to the person to whom they’re being loyal to protect them.
That was how I thought about it, at least. So I made a choice. I said to myself, “I can’t let him do this. I can’t let Joe risk himself this way.” I was his trainer, and I had that responsibility to him. That’s what allowed me to get off the hook. Normally, I’d have gotten in the car, gone down there, and taken care of the problem myself. But all of a sudden, there was this other element: Joe’s involvement.
I went right inside, picked up the phone, and called Cus. I could never do it before. It would have been like I was chicken, like I was running from these guys. But now it wasn’t about protecting myself or my image. It wasn’t about me. It was about being responsible to someone else. At that moment, I became a real trainer.
I called up Cus and said, “Do you still want me to come train fighters for you?”
Without even hesitating, he said, “Come up now.” It was late at night and he said, “Come up now.”
“I can’t come up now. First of all, I’ve got two kids I’ve been training….”
“You’ve been training kids?”
“Yeah. I’ll tell you about it later. The thing is I can’t come unless I can bring them with me.”
“Bring them with you. Come up now.”
“I’ll come tomorrow.”
And that was it. We packed our stuff, and the three of us went up there the next day.
SMOKERS
JOE AND FREDDIE COULDN’T BELIEVE THE SIZE OF the house in Catskill. It had nine bedrooms and was on ten acres of land. Here were these two kids who’d grown up poor in Staten Island, and now they were moving to this country estate. I felt like I’d accomplished something, bringing them there. There was structure to their lives now, stability, a family of sorts. Camille nourished them with delicious home-cooked meals, and Cus gave lessons in life in and out of the ring. To earn their keep, Joe did chores around the house for Camille, and Freddie got work in town as a house painter.
For me, it was a totally different experience being back. Before, I had been a fighter, with limited responsibilities—most of them to myself. Now I was running things. In the space of a few short months, the gym over the police station went from being empty most of the time to being packed morning till night. Two things led to that: one, the fact that I was in the gym every day from ten in the morning till nine or ten at night (whereas Cus had only been showing up three or four times a week for a couple of hours at a stretch); two, the arrival of Gerry Cooney, his trainer, Victor Valle, and a group of his sparring partners. Cooney was undefeated in seven fights at that point, and an up-and-coming heavyweight. His arrival on the scene, along with mine, helped create a kind of critical mass that drew others. Word got around that I was a good teacher, and that our gym was a haven for troubled kids. Suddenly, kids started showing up from all over, wanting to learn how to box.
Before you knew it I had ten fighters. Then fifteen. Then twenty. Then thirty. It was something, it really was. I was obsessed, and the energy I brought to what I was doing rubbed off on everyone else. Cus was smart. He really was a clever old bastard, and he had understood that I was someone who would be able to breathe life into him and his gym. The fact that I was doing it free of charge was icing on the cake. In fact, it was better than that, because I was actually paying for the privilege—or, to be more accurate, my father was paying. Cus was collecting the same fifty bucks a week off me that he had been when I was getting trained, not doing the training. “It’s less money than college, Atlas,” he would say. “And you’re getting a better education.”
It was true. More important, I was committed to something. I was responsible to something larger than myself. Every day, first thing in the morning, I was in the gym. I’d work with the pros until late afternoon, then with the amateurs in the evening. Often, after training was finished, I’d sit around with the kids, talking to them about whatever problems they might be having at home, trying to help them figure out how to deal with what were often difficult situations.
There was one young kid named Mane Moore, who came by the gym one day, then didn’t show up for weeks, then came by again and disappeared again. He was a skinny kid, about eleven years old, with a shy manner, and an engaging, toothy smile that didn’t show itself nearly enough—at least in the beginning. I asked some of the other kids about him. They told me his father was gone, and he and his younger brother and sister lived alone with their mother, who was very religious. They also told me that there was a bully in his school named Goo who was beating him up every day and taking his lunch money. A lot of the kids who came to me had similar home situations. It was interesting how many of them had mothers who tried to cope by leaning on religion. There’s nothing wrong with it, really, but on the other hand, it wasn’t helping a kid like Mane much. The fact that Mane’s mother went to church and prayed a lot wasn’t stopping a bully in school from taking his lunch money every day. That’s why he kept coming to the gym and then disappearing. He knew he needed to do something, but he was afraid because he lacked confidence.
The next time he came to the gym, I had a talk with him. I said, “Come here. I want you to try something.” I walked over to the mirror we used for shadowboxing, and Mane followed me. “Come here. I’m not going to bite you.” I threw a jab toward the mirror. “Try that.” I threw another jab. “Just like that.”
He threw his left fist out weakly.
“That’s good.”
“Yeah?”
“Definitely. You got natural ability, Mane. You sure you never boxed in another state?”
“No, never.”
“Tell me the truth, ’cause if I’m gonna be training you, I don’t want to find out that you already got a contract with another trainer.”
“I don’t got no contrack.”
“Good, then you got yourself a trainer.”
I put out my hand, and we shook on it.
He started coming to the gym regularly after that, and I began teaching him the fundamentals: how to throw a punch,
how to slip a punch, footwork, the basic stuff. After a couple of months, I decided he was ready to spar with another kid, but when the day came, he broke down and started crying. Then he ran out of the gym.
I caught up to him outside the gym door on the second-floor landing. “Come here,” I said. I led him into the empty courtroom across the hall (the police station was downstairs). He was still sniffling. I put my hand on his shoulder.
“Well, it’s good to see you’re normal,” I said.
“What do you mean, normal?”
“I mean, everybody gets scared.”
“Not like me.”
“No, you’re just more honest than most people. You show what you’re feeling. Most people try to hide it even though they actually feel the same way you do.”
“They do?”
“Sure. Let me tell you something I never told too many people. When I was a boy in school I used to get picked on by a bigger kid. He’d push me around and take my money.”
“He took your money?” Mane brushed away the last of his tears with the cotton sleeve of his shirt. He didn’t know that I knew all about him and Goo.
“Yeah. He was a bully, and I was afraid.”
“You were afraid? But you’re not afraid of nobody.”
“I’m afraid all the time,” I said. “That doesn’t mean you would ever know it. I’m afraid of a lot of things. You should be afraid. If you didn’t get afraid, you wouldn’t be aware when danger’s close by. You just have to learn how to deal with your fear.”
“So what about the bully?”
“Well, one day he caught me in the lunch room by the garbage pails where the kids dump their trays. He told me to give him some money for dessert.”
“Did you give it to him?”
“I didn’t have it.”
“So did he beat you up?”
“He tried. But I had realized something.”
“What?”
“That I would feel better if I fought back.”
“You fought back?”
“Yeah. It’s a funny thing. You know that garbage pail where the kids would dump their lunch trays?”
“Yeah.”
“The bully wound up with his head in it and his legs sticking out.”
Mane wasn’t sniffling anymore. He was smiling.
“Did that really happen?”
“Yeah.”
“What about the next day?”
“He never bothered me after that. See, what I realized afterward was that I had always had a choice. Sometimes it takes a while to realize that. You do what you think is easiest and you don’t know that there’s another option. Now, I know that this has nothing to do with you, Mane, but for me, the feeling I had all those days before that happened—going home without my money and without having eaten lunch—was a lot worse than dealing with this guy for one minute. Not dealing with it meant it was there every minute, every hour, every day. I never realized that until that day. But I’ve never forgotten it.”
I gave Mane a hug and a little pat. “Now let’s go back inside the gym before they come looking for us.”
That was the first of several conversations that Mane and I had in that courtroom. It was funny and strange for me to be hanging out in a courtroom given my previous experiences in one. As Mane and I got more comfortable, sometimes I would even sit in the judge’s chair. After that first day, Mane would still have these little regressions, where he would get scared and start to cry, but he got better and better, until finally I could get him through a whole round of sparring without him shedding a tear or giving up.
One day, weeks later, I was in the gym training the pros, and Mane came running in. It was around lunchtime, and he’d run all the way to the gym, even though he wasn’t supposed to leave the school grounds. He said, “I just had to tell you, I had to tell you, Goo ain’t going to pick on me no more.”
I was working in the ring with Kevin Rooney. From other parts of the gym came the thudding sound of someone hitting the heavy bag, the rat-a-tat-tat from the speed bag, the rhythmic creaking of the floorboards, and suddenly this eighty-pound kid comes running in, saying, “Goo ain’t gonna pick on me no more!,” and the place fell silent for a moment; then, all at once, these big, tough guys started to laugh.
Mane didn’t notice or care. He was so happy he couldn’t contain himself. “Goo tried to take my lunch money, and I pushed him and told him, ‘No,’ and he ain’t going to pick on me no more.”
I climbed out of the ring, went over to him, and gave him a hug. “I’m proud of you, Mane. That took a lot of guts. Now I want you to go back to school before you get both of us in trouble. I’ll see you tonight.”
I can’t tell you how great it was to see this kid, who used to be sad all the time, happy that way.
That was the way it was with the kids. It went beyond the gym. I took them out on picnics, to the movies, we went out for pizza, because that was all part of it. That was part of their development—and mine. Some of them came to the gym because they didn’t have fathers, or they came from rough situations. I recognized what it was they needed; I understood them instinctively because of things I had gone through myself. I was strict with them. I gave them discipline. But I showed them I cared, too.
When you’re developing young fighters, after they reach a certain skill level, you need to find suitable opponents for them to fight so they can continue to grow. There were very few good fights for my kids in or around Catskill, so I started taking them down to the city. Cus knew this guy Nelson Cuevas who ran these Saturday night “smokers”—unsanctioned amateur boxing shows—at a club on Westchester Avenue in the South Bronx. Nelson was a former fighter of Cus’s from the Gramercy Gym days. He was an interesting guy. He’d been around when Jose Torres won the light heavyweight title with Cus, but his own fight career hadn’t amounted to what he’d thought it would. Now he ran the smokers, both as a way to pick up a few extra bucks on weekends (he had a day job as a construction worker with the electrical union) and also to keep his hand in the fight game. Who could say he wouldn’t develop his own champion?
Cus called Nelson one day and paved the way for me to bring my kids to his place. “Teddy’s doing a good job with them,” Cus told him. “I want you to help him out. Take care of him.”
From then on, every Saturday afternoon I’d drive my kids down to the South Bronx in an eight-year-old blue Chevy station wagon. It took two and a half or three hours, depending on traffic. The club was located in an area so rough the police didn’t bother with it. There was a guy across the street, Mr. Santos, who owned a bar, and he and his people would look after my car. We’d come out at the end of the night and some of the batteries from other cars would be stolen, but my car was never touched; the people in the bar made sure nobody fucked with it. (Funny story: I began writing up accounts of the smokers for the local paper in Catskill, and the editor, a guy named Gunther, who admired what I was doing with the kids, made the mistake of offering me the use of his brand-new station wagon if I ever needed it. Well, some time later, the car I usually used was in the shop, so I took him up on his offer. Saturday came, and the kids and I went over to the paper to pick up his brand-new Ford Country Squire. Gunther had grown up in Catskill, and he was a little naive, but even so, as we were getting in his car, the reality of where we were going began to dawn on him and he got a little nervous. He said, “So I don’t need to worry, do I, Teddy? I mean, where you’re going isn’t the kind of neighborhood where they’re going to steal my hubcaps, is it?” “No, not at all, Gunther,” I said, hitting the gas and waving good-bye. I turned to the kids, knowing he couldn’t hear me. “It’s the kind of neighborhood where they take the whole car!”)
The building where the Apollo Boxing Club was located was one of the few on the block that wasn’t boarded up, abandoned, or reduced to rubble. When you walked up the three flights of stairs, the stench of urine was thick. You’d see discarded needles, sometimes even a guy shooting up.
Nea
ring the third floor, you’d begin to hear the noise. Latin music blaring from a boom box and the din of a couple of hundred boisterous voices. It cost three dollars a head to get in, and the room was always packed to the rafters. There was a pungent aroma of cigar smoke, booze, fried food, and sweat. On the near side of the room was the ring, and on the far side a makeshift counter where they sold liquor and Spanish food: fried bananas, empanadas, potatoes in oil, canned beer, and rum in paper cups. Out a row of windows were the tracks of the el. When a train thundered by every ten or fifteen minutes, you could see the sparks shooting from the wheels and feel the building shake, that’s how close it was. Families came to watch their kids and cheer. Men came to gamble and drink and talk smack. It was quite a scene, and one of the few positive things in that bombed-out neighborhood.
I was the only white guy in the place, me and some of my kids. And even though I didn’t speak Spanish, Nelson wound up making me the matchmaker after a few weeks. I think he knew I’d be good at it. But it was a difficult task because there was a lot of lying going on. Everybody wanted an edge. They’d say their guy was ten when he was actually twelve. They’d say their guy had no fights when he had five fights. But you learned the code, you learned that no fights meant a kid had a minimum of three fights; one fight meant six to ten; three meant anywhere from ten to fifteen; and once they said four or more, forget it, the kid was practically a pro. So you came to understand to what degree they were lying, and you took all that into account.
From the kids’ point of view, it was even rougher. They’d walk into this big room and look at the other kids and try to figure out who they’d be fighting, and they would grow up, in that way, right in front of me. They were on their way to becoming pros and they didn’t even know it. Pros for the real world. Their hearts were going a million miles an hour, they were dying inside. I remember looking at one of my kids one time, and I knew he was dying. I said, “Don’t worry, you can’t see it.” He said, “See what?” I said, “See your shirt moving up and down over your pounding heart.” He looked down at his shirt, and then at me. I smiled, and when he saw me smile, he smiled back because I was telling him it was okay.
