Atlas

by Teddy Atlas

  Normally, with a green kid like this, we wouldn’t put him in the ring, but this was an unusual situation. It was a one-day audition, and we needed to find out about Tyson; we needed to see his character and find out some things about him that we weren’t going to find out by watching him hit a bag. It was understood that if we decided we wanted to get involved, there would be no more boxing until we taught him what we needed to teach him. But for this day what made sense was to see him box.

  Tyson knew this day was important. He was nervous and he wanted to impress. Stewart, for his part, had a true desire to help him. He was hoping that we’d get involved, because, let’s face it, Tyson was getting out of reform school in several months, and he had no life waiting for him. If he went back to Brownsville, there was a very good chance he’d wind up in prison again, maybe a more serious prison. This was a road out, a real way for him to alter the course of his life.

  When the bell rang, Tyson came at Stewart hard. He was extremely aggressive. You could see right away how strong he was. He fired shots at Stewart’s ribs and stomach, and they hurt. I saw Stewart wincing. Tyson was extremely raw. His technique was crude. But there was a quickness and resolve in his attack that was unusual in an unschooled fighter. Stewart had to keep hitting him just to hold him off.

  In the second round, Tyson got a bloody nose, but by then I had seen enough. Stewart was working hard as hell to keep him in his place, to keep from being overrun by this kid’s power, and that told us a lot. We were professionals. We knew what we were looking at.

  At the end of the second round, I looked over at Cus. He was smiling. I shouted, “Okay, that’s it, that’s enough!” Cus already knew I was going to be the kid’s trainer, so he just sat there, watching and not saying anything, wanting to see how I handled things.

  Tyson objected in that lispy voice of his, which was an octave higher then, “No, no. I’m going another round. I want another round.” He was trying to show how tough he was, because he wanted to be accepted by us, he wanted to ace his audition. His life audition.

  I already knew what was going to happen. I knew that I would be working with him, and it was important to establish the way things would be. I said, “That’s it! Get out of the ring! Two rounds is all you’re going today.”

  The way I said it stopped him for a moment. He didn’t really want to go another round. He wanted me to think that he wanted to go, but he didn’t really want to. He kept making a fuss, looking over at Stewart and saying, “We always go three rounds.”

  I got up in his face. “That’s it, you’re done! Now get out of the ring!” I wiped off his nose with a towel, and he stopped.

  I was showing him that I knew he was coming back and that I knew I was going to be in charge of him. Cus always said that I was born to be a teacher—and part of it, I guess, was that I could recognize what was going on with a kid like this and know what I needed to do.

  Of course, Cus was also flattering me, throwing me pieces of candy like that. He was good at it. He knew when I needed stroking. I remember one day, a year or two after this first encounter we had with Tyson, Cus and I were sitting in a lunch counter in Catskill, eating cheeseburgers. The guy behind the counter, the owner, said to me, “I saw you on ESPN the other night….” I was training Rooney at the time and the fight had been on TV. Cus jumped right in. He said to the guy, “This is the Young Master. This is Teddy Atlas, the Young Master.”

  When we went to pay, the guy waved his hand and said, “No charge.” He was a boxing fan and he wanted to buy us our cheeseburgers. Cus could have been gracious about it and just said thanks, but instead he said, “One of these days Atlas will come back here and buy this place out from under you. This is the Young Master and he’s going to be rich and famous and have nothing but world champions.” Meanwhile, I could barely afford a freaking cheeseburger—it was lucky the guy was treating. All the same, I walked out of that diner feeling like I already owned it and was a successful trainer of world champions. That’s how intoxicating it was to hear that stuff.

  So now, here we were, standing outside the ring with Tyson and Stewart and Don Shanager, and Cus turned to me and said, “What do you think?”

  “Strong kid. He can learn.”

  “This young man can be heavyweight champion of the world,” Cus said. “He might be your first heavyweight champ, Atlas.”

  It was extraordinary when you think about it. When you put it into words it sounds too much like some hoked-up Hollywood moment. But he actually said that. He said, “You and I will teach him, Atlas, and if this young man listens and does what we say and lets us take him there, he will be heavyweight champion someday.”

  Tyson soaked up Cus’s words. He let himself smile a little smile. Cus was like the Al Pacino character in The Godfather when he sees the beautiful girl in Sicily. It was the thunderbolt. Love at first sight. He said, “We’ll make arrangements when he gets paroled for him to come live with us.” He turned to Tyson. “Would you like to come live with us?”

  This all happened within an hour—it was incredibly fast. For someone else it might have been too fast, but really, when you think about it, what was this kid, with no real home, nothing to go back to, going to say? Especially when visions of fame and glory were dancing in his brain. So Tyson said, “Yes, live where? Your house?”

  “Yes,” Cus said. “How would you like that? We could arrange that. You could come live with us and become a fighter. You work hard, you could become champion of the world.”

  From what I learned afterward, Tyson kept saying to Bobby Stewart on their way back to Tryon, “Did you hear what he said? Did you?”

  Tyson wasn’t due to be released for four months or so, but Cus didn’t want to waste any time. He was lazy about a lot of things—he would eat his tuna fish and watch Barney Miller and walk around in his bathrobe all day—but now for the first time since I’d been there, he seemed to really wake up and come to life. He said, “Okay, we’ve got to make sure this gets done, and he comes here to live.” He enlisted Don Shanager’s help, because Shanager had a friend in the county office whose approval we’d need before Tyson could be released into our custody.

  Meanwhile, during the next few months, while we waited for Tyson’s official release, Bobby Stewart brought him in every Monday to train with me. “This way,” Cus said, “by the time he gets out, he’ll already be developed to a certain point.” I worked with him, showing him moves and combinations, and he’d go back to Tryon and, in every spare moment he had, practice the things I’d taught him. I heard that a couple of guards found him in his room one night past midnight, grunting and snorting as he shadowboxed in the pitch dark.

  One stipulation of him being released into our custody was that he spend a couple of weekends at the house to see how it would go. During his first sleepover, we were eating dinner, and the table was crammed with food as usual because Cus, as was his way, had forced Camille to cook too much. I’d helped her count the number of chicken legs we needed, but Cus barged into the kitchen and insisted we needed more. “I eat six,” he said, “so if everybody eats six, there won’t be enough.”

  “But nobody eats six chicken legs.”

  “I eat six,” Cus said. “And if everybody else eats six, one person will be left with five.”

  “No, that’s it,” Camille said. “Thirty chicken legs is enough. I’m not cooking any more.”

  At that point, Cus went into the refrigerator and found a frozen kielbasa sausage to add to the feast. “Cook this, just in case,” he said. So we had thirty chicken legs and a big kielbasa sausage, plus mashed potatoes, string beans, peas, carrots, baskets of bread, all of it served in these big, heavy dishes that weighed down the table.

  Tyson was sitting there with us, his back facing the cabinets, a little overwhelmed by the contrast between this warm, bountiful dinner table and what he was used to. Everything with him was “Yes, sir” and “No, sir,” and I knew it was all bullshit. In fact, later on, when he had moved in,
I actually said to him one day, “Stop with the ‘Yes, sir,’ because in a few months you’re going to be wanting to say something a whole lot less ingratiating, like ‘fuck you,’ but you’re not going to be allowed to say that. So don’t go too far in this direction, either.”

  He was a kid who was really the opposite of the image that built up around him later on. He grew up in a rough place and got knocked around. He had no father to look up to. He had a mother who for whatever reasons, although I don’t want to pass too much judgment on her, wasn’t able to raise him the way you’d want to raise a kid. And he suffered. He was made fun of and picked on by other kids, who called him “Stinky Mike” because he didn’t bathe. By his own account, he avoided getting beat up by hiding between the walls in abandoned buildings—an image that has always stuck with me.

  The point is, this was a kid with no self-confidence, who had this very imposing physical presence, but underneath, though he tried to project power, felt like a fraud. He was a con man and a predator, which was how he ended up in reform school. His real crimes, which very few people know about, were against old ladies. He’d go up to them in the projects when they were carrying bags of groceries and ask them in that sweet lispy voice, “Can I help you, ma’am?” Just like he was saying “Yes, sir” to me and Cus now. When these old ladies would say, “Yes, thank you, young man,” he’d carry their bags into the elevator, and after the doors closed, he’d knock their teeth out and take their money. The difference was—as he was about to learn—not everybody was as gullible or weak as those old ladies.

  Here at the dinner table, he was nervous. He felt that he was still auditioning because he hadn’t yet gotten paroled to us. He was on his best behavior.

  When Camille said, “Mike, can you please get me a fork? They’re right behind you in the cabinet,” he didn’t react the way a normal person who was secure with himself would react. He thought that the quicker he got the fork, the more points he’d get. So he jumped up to get it, and one of his legs—and he had big, muscular legs—caught underneath the table and literally picked up that end of the table. The food—all those chicken legs and mashed potatoes and everything—started sliding off.

  I had reached the point in my life in Catskill where I was able to step back a little and observe things in an almost detached way. I was noticing more and more how wacky Cus was, how he was this kind of lovable old crank. There was an odd geometry that described his relationships with Camille and me—and now Tyson (everyone else, even Rooney, was in the background). Now in the moment, with the table crashing back to the ground and dishes rattling around and nearly spilling, everyone had a different angle on what was happening. Camille was saying, “Careful, you’re going to knock the table over, Mike.” Tyson had his hands up, overreacting as if he’d committed a crime, going, “Oh, my God! I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Cus was saying, “Look at that power! Wow! What savage raw power!” And I was thinking, “This is weird. This kid is going to be fucking heavyweight champ.” It was just a moment, but it was naked, everyone revealed in their essence, and for that reason it’s stayed with me.

  It was one of the only times I saw Cus not care about food. If it had been Rooney or Frankie Minicelli, Cus would have said, “Frankie, you jerk, be careful, you’re going to knock that kielbasa on the floor.” But with Tyson everything was different. He was Cus’s way back to the big time, to the promised land.

  In the end, that would be all that Cus could see.

  It’s funny to think about, but if Bobby Stewart had never made that phone call, a lot of things would have been different. At the very least, Cus, Jimmy Jacobs, Bill Cayton—and Tyson himself, probably—would have lost out on millions of dollars. Cus promised Stewart that he would be taken care of when Tyson became champion. But what reward or recognition did Bobby Stewart finally get for his discovery? Well, six years later, when Tyson became the youngest heavyweight champion in history, and Cus was dead, a lot of promises were forgotten. What I heard, and what Peter Heller found out in the course of researching his book Bad Intentions, was that Jimmy Jacobs had to be badgered by Kevin Rooney before giving Stewart, his former fighter, a check for $10,000. Stewart, who had left the Tryon School by that point and become a chauffeur for a doctor, told Heller that he actually wished “they didn’t give me nothing…. It belittled me in my own mind. Money can ruin people. I liked the kid. I did it because I liked doing it. I really cared about the kid.”

  THE TRUTH

  AND A LIE

  I HAD A GUY TRAINING WITH ME NAMED LENNY Daniels, a 220-pound heavyweight who had played college ball at Lehigh and had a tryout with the Cleveland Browns. Lenny was in his twenties. He was strong and a good athlete. Even so, I had to be really careful letting him spar with Tyson. I had to stand in the ring with them and stay on top of them. I had to remind Tyson, “Have some respect. Do not hurt this guy.”

  Then he’d go ahead and hurt him anyway. Even at the age of fourteen or fifteen, Tyson was so strong and so phenomenal that he would hurt these guys no matter what. It was difficult. All my kids meant a lot to me. The thing is, I was training only a few heavyweights that I could put in the ring with Tyson, and he wasn’t strong enough emotionally, he wasn’t sure enough of himself, so that when I would say, “Go easy here,” he would listen to me. After a round, I’d say, “I told you, don’t hit them,” but he’d still sneak in a hard one, and it was such a vicious, ferocious punch that he would damage these guys.

  Later on, we wound up paying guys to come down. I remember one day we got this guy Melvin somebody, an older guy, a heavyweight who’d been around a long time. We paid him twenty-five dollars to spar with Tyson. All I kept thinking was, You got twenty-five dollars but now you’ve got to go to the emergency room to get stitches, and that’s going to cost you a hell of a lot more than the twenty-five dollars.

  Cus went up to Tyson on one occasion as he was getting in the ring against another guy we’d hired, and said, even though he didn’t think I could hear him, “Make sure this guy earns his twenty-five dollars.” So of course Tyson practically knocked the guy’s head off, which was what Cus wanted. He wanted Tyson to get that confidence. Cus was Frankenstein creating his monster—whatever the expense to other people. It told you something for the future, though I wasn’t smart enough at the time to realize what.

  The first time I took Tyson down to the Bronx with the rest of the kids was around 1979. It was funny and at the same time predictable. When I was setting up the night’s bouts, I said, “Okay, Mike, get on the scale.” Everyone was watching as he stepped on the scale. “Okay,” I said. “Two hundred and five pounds. Zero fights. Twelve years old.” I jotted down his info. All of a sudden the other trainers were in an uproar. “Twelve years old?”

  Nelson came over. “Teddy, now you went too far! This beast, this thing here, twelve years old! Teddy, c’mon.”

  I said, “Nelson, to make you happy, do you want me to put down sixteen?”

  “Sixteen. You see, I knew you were just fooling.”

  I said, “No, actually, he is twelve. But I knew you were going to go crazy. So I guess I gotta put down sixteen just to appease you.”

  “You’re saying he’s really twelve?”

  “That’s right.”

  It didn’t matter. It wasn’t as if I’d be able to find a kid near his age to fight anyway. We wound up matching him with a seventeen-year-old, a Spanish kid with a big Afro who could really fight.

  Tyson was spectacular, a perpetual-motion machine of relentless, nonstop aggression. The Spanish kid was a hell of a fighter himself. He had to be to deal with all that power and speed without getting overwhelmed immediately. In the third round, Tyson pinned the kid on the ropes and hit him with a double left hook, one to the body, and then—bang!—one to the head. The guy went backward and collapsed on the bottom strand of the ropes and just sat there. He couldn’t fall because of the way he had landed against the ropes. Tyson hit him another shot. The force of the punch snapped his head back an
d the water and sweat from his Afro went flying into the back of the room and smacked against the wall with a loud thwack.

  The room wasn’t huge, maybe twenty feet across, but the water and sweat flew into the wall, followed by the mouthpiece, which landed six rows back. You had to see it to believe it.

  Don Shanager was there that night. He didn’t come too often, but I had all these kids now, and I needed someone to drive a second car. It was more than that, though. Cus wanted him there. He wanted another set of eyes to report back to him. It was a special night, Tyson’s coming-out, his first real competition, and Cus wanted to hear about it from every angle.

  When the fight was over, Shanager said, “I never saw anything like that. The sweat from that kid’s Afro slammed against the wall. You could hear it!”

  Before we got back in the cars to drive back to Catskill, I went over to Santos’s bar across the street and called Cus from a pay phone. He answered on the first ring, so I knew he was sitting there in his chair, waiting. He didn’t even ask about the other kids. It wasn’t, “We won six fights and we lost two,” the way it was on normal nights. I knew exactly where he wanted to start.

  “He knocked him out in the third round. He had a good fight.”

  We fell into a rhythm, almost a kind of shorthand.

  “This guy was a good fighter, then.”

  “And experienced.”