by Teddy Atlas
So I had Jeff ’s leg in my hands, and she was talking to me, and I was holding his leg up, with my hand on his hamstring, and suddenly I thought I felt a little something. A tiny contraction. I said, “I think I felt something.”
She said, “You didn’t feel anything.”
I said, “I don’t know. I thought I did. Maybe not.”
The physical therapist was disgusted with me. You could see it. “I have to leave for the day,” she said. “But I don’t think this is productive, talking this way. I think you should stick to things you know.”
After she left, I went right back to telling Jeff about the dam. The complete and the incomplete. I said, “It’s like you’ve got a stream and there are these beavers and—” He was looking at me like I was nuts, but he was being entertained. Here was this kid who had to lie there twenty-four hours a day getting bedsores, and this was the best shit he’d heard in a long time. I said, “It’s like you’ve got this stream that’s jammed up, and you’re just waiting, because there’s no water, there’s nothing running, so there’s no sense in doing anything. But what if the exercise was just to think about moving your feet.”
“What do you mean?” he said.
I had learned this from my father. I said, “You know, electric stimuli gets sent from your brain to your toe, to move your toe….”
“Yes?”
“You’ve got veins that carry blood, and you’ve got these other things that carry this electric stimuli.” I really thought I was Ben Casey. I did. I said, “You’ve stopped sending those signals because you figure there’s no reason to. Because Nurse Shithead tells you that you can’t do it. And the doctors tell you you’re never gonna do it. So you’re not sending the things you’re supposed to be sending. But how about if your exercise was just to send the impulse and keep hitting that mud every day, keep hitting the dam, and by sending these impulses, hitting the mud, hitting the mud, all of a sudden it gets through? See, because if you don’t send impulses it won’t ever get through and you might just be lying here your whole life.”
This was two days before I was supposed to leave with Tyson for the National Junior Olympics in Colorado. Suddenly I had an inspiration. “Listen, Jeff,” I said, “while I’m gone, you’ve got to try and make your toes move every day. Tell yourself, ‘I’m making my toes move,’ keep sending those signals.”
“I’ll try,” he said.
“Don’t give me that ‘try’ bullshit. Just do it. I’ll make you a deal. You keep sending messages to your toes, I’ll make sure Tyson wins all his fights and defends his title.” This was the second year I was taking Tyson to Denver. He’d won the national amateur title the year earlier.
“That’s not nearly as hard as what you’re asking me to do,” Jeff said. “He won every fight last time.”
“All right, what if he wins every fight by knockout this time?”
“He won every fight last year by knockout.”
“In the first round?”
“You’re telling me he’s gonna knock everyone out in the first round?”
“Are you gonna send those messages to your toes?”
So we went out there, and Tyson knocked out every guy he faced in the first round. I came back a week later, and I know this sounds too much like the movies, but I came back and Jeff was moving two toes. This guy who was supposed to be a paraplegic was moving two toes. None of the doctors could believe it.
Over the next few months, he continued to progress. Even with all the other stuff that was going on, my wedding included, I kept visiting him and pushing him. Elaine had to stay on me about taking care of wedding stuff. She did a lot of the organizing, but I had plenty of responsibility, too. In most cultures, the bride’s father pays for everything; not so with the Albanians. They didn’t have that tradition. All their traditions, and they couldn’t have that one. I wound up cashing in some of my stocks to pay for things. I got five grand, which was basically seed money, and we found this resort ten miles outside of Catskill. It was beautiful. Elaine wound up with everything she wanted. They put up a tent, we had ice sculptures, swans, dolphins, a glass pond full of fresh shrimp. She wore a designer gown.
The people in that area had never seen anything like it around there. It was like a mob wedding. Wiseguys showed up in limos. Dennis and Brian Hamill came. Jose Torres was there. All my kids from the gym showed up. The only one who didn’t make it was Tyson. His mother had died, and her funeral was the day of the wedding. So the day before, I drove him to the train station. He was wearing a new warm-up suit I’d bought him with my last fifty bucks.
We wound up having about 400 people at the wedding. It was the biggest thing they’d ever had in that area. Today, a wedding like that would cost two hundred grand. In the middle of it, I started opening some of the gift envelopes so I could pay for everything, and the guy who ran the resort said, “Don’t do that. Pay me after your honeymoon.”
Lots of people gave toasts, including my brother Terryl, who was my best man. But the big moment came when Jeff Amen pushed forward in his wheelchair toward the microphone. He said he had a wedding present for me and Elaine, and then he slowly got up out of the wheelchair, stood up, and walked ten steps across the dance floor before collapsing in my arms. It was incredible, it really was. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place after he did that.
ELAINE AND I WENT TO SAN FRANCISCO ON OUR HONEYMOON. We were supposed to be there nine days, but I cut it short after three days and went back to work the corner for Tyson and the kids in an amateur show. I regret that now, when I think about it, because the show got canceled, but also because of the way things developed later. At the time I thought I needed to be there. I thought my responsibility to Tyson and Cus and the rest of the kids was more important than my honeymoon. To Elaine’s credit, she didn’t complain. It was like something my father would have done, cutting short the honeymoon, just like he never went on vacation with us, or the way he got up from dinner parties in the middle because he had to be at the hospital. But Elaine was incredibly understanding. She knew who she was marrying going in, and for better or worse, she signed on anyway. Luckily for me.
Elmore Leonard always talks in his novels about how tough the Albanians are. Let me tell you, he knows what he’s talking about. Elaine is probably one of the toughest women I’ve ever known, in addition to being one of the most loyal. This one time, after we’d left Catskill and were back living in Staten Island, she was driving, and we were down in the area between Stapleton and Park Hill, near the projects, when she suddenly turned into a gas station.
This was the worst part of Staten Island, and we were just asking for trouble stopping there. There was no reason to, we still had a quarter of a tank left. “Elaine, why are you going in here?” I asked.
“Why not?” she said.
We weren’t quite arguing; I was just trying to make a point, but she ignored me and pulled in anyway. Just as she did, this car cut her off. I saw that there were two big guys in it. Elaine angled ahead and barely missed clipping them. She stopped the car and got out. The driver of the other car stuck his head out the window. “Hey, bitch. Move your ride.” Now I was going to myself, “This is why I told you not to come in here.” Elaine was outside the car, and she wasn’t helping the situation much. “Is that the way your mother taught you to talk?” she said. That was it. The two guys got out, and there was no stopping things now. The guy on the passenger side said, “Your bitch has to do your talking for you?” Well, that was all I had to hear. I was out of the car, on a beeline for them. I cracked the driver, and he went down.
Then I half slid, half vaulted over the hood of the car and started fighting with the other guy. We got ahold of each other, and I drove him into the pumps, forcing him between them because I was afraid he had a knife, and I didn’t want him to be able to reach for it. This wasn’t far from the place I got my face cut. So I was thinking about that, I was worried about being stabbed, and I was also worrying about how long the other guy was
going to be on the ground. I knew I had to take care of the passenger quickly. I was banging him and hitting him shots. And then I felt someone over my shoulder. A punch grazed me and hit the other guy. Suddenly, I heard this voice saying, “Get out of the way.” It was Elaine. She reached past me and took hold of the guy’s Afro, pulling his hair out. He was screaming. By now, a whole crowd from the projects had gathered round. Someone yelled, “You got a bad woman there!”
I literally had to pull Elaine off this guy. She came away with a handful of his hair. It could have been ugly with the crowd there, but they were actually on our side. I mean, they weren’t doing anything, but they were saying shit, rooting us on. Anyway, we got back in the car, and were about to pull away, and the guy whose hair Elaine had pulled out said, “I’m gonna get a gun and I’m gonna come after you and kill you.”
Elaine opened the car door, got out, and said, “Go get the gun now. We’ll wait. Go get the gun now, so I can stick it up your ass and blow out your brains.”
The crowd that was watching went crazy when she said this. The guy was all puffed up, angry and embarrassed, and someone yelled, “Ain’t you learned your lesson yet, fool?”
We finally left, and I said to Elaine, “What the hell were you doing? I told you not to go in there.” But she totally ignored me. She was looking at her nails and going “Ooh.” Very ladylike. “Ooh, that’s disgusting.” And she started pulling some of the guy’s hair out from where it had gotten stuck under her nails. I’m telling you, my wife is one of the toughest people I’ve ever met. She really is.
WORDS AND
ACTIONS
ELAINE AND I TOOK A GROUND-FLOOR APARTMENT IN a two-family house outside of Catskill; the rent wasn’t high, but it was more than I had been paying at Camille and Cus’s. Money was obviously more of a concern with a baby on the way. The strange thing was that although I knew Tyson had an enormous future—I’d been training him for almost four years, and understood better than anyone what we had—how that would translate financially for me was still a hard thing to grasp. Cus told me I was training a future champion, and I trusted him. But I was naive when it came to money. I believed that if I moved through life with purpose, commitment, and direction, money would take care of itself.
A lot of people have talked and written about Cus’s disregard for money, and how he was interested only in reclaiming young lives. He certainly helped many troubled kids, myself included. But a couple of things happened that made me begin to look at Cus in a different light. Ironically, it’s Cus’s own words—“You never know about people until they’re tested”—that come to mind when I think about these things.
Cus had a number of people in local government whom he relied upon for favors. One friend had managed to help procure a twenty-five-thousand-dollar government grant for Cus through a political connection he had in Washington. The proposal for the grant stated that part of the funds were needed to pay one full-time trainer for the gym—namely, me.
Even though I never saw a dime of the twenty-five thousand dollars, at the end of the year Don Shanager asked me if I could sign the proper tax papers, to show that I had received a salary. Shanager assured me that I wouldn’t be liable for any taxes, and I wound up signing the thing, though it made me uncomfortable.
What Cus actually did with the money, I can’t say. He might have spent a couple of thousand on equipment for the gym, but the rest is anybody’s guess. What I heard was that he used the money to reward the people in Catskill who were helping him keep quiet Tyson’s run-ins with the authorities; in other words, it was hush money. I also know that one night Camille opened Cus’s door unannounced (I’ve already mentioned how paranoid he was about anyone going into his room) and found Cus in there with one of his local cronies and ten thousand dollars spread out on the bed. He went crazy, scooping up the money frantically while screaming at her for entering his lair.
The other thing that occurred that really disturbed me had to do with a kid named Russell D’Amico, whom Cus basically ran out of the house. Russell was a fifteen-year-old who was terribly screwed up and had gotten into trouble with the law a number of times. Cus had no use for him because he didn’t have any talent as a boxer. We had other kids who were never going to amount to anything as fighters, but Cus didn’t run them off. It was just that Russell had the double whammy of being untalented and rubbing Cus the wrong way.
I didn’t care. The kid needed us. He was desperate. I told Cus, I pleaded with him, not to forsake this kid. I said, “Tyson pulls the same crap, but you let him slide because he’s Tyson. If this kid could box, you’d let him slide.” It didn’t matter what I said, Cus wouldn’t listen. He kept calling Russell a liar to his face, giving him a terrible time, and Russell couldn’t take it. He left the house, and not long after that he got arrested again. While he was in jail, he hanged himself with the drawstring from his hooded sweatshirt. I was extremely upset by it at the time, and even now, all this time later, I still think about it.
It was strange. I had been able to get from Cus the kind of encouragement and support that I had always wanted from my father, that my father had always had difficulty expressing. But my father never had to tell me who he was. He expressed his character in his actions and deeds. Now, here was Cus, telling me one thing, but in his actions beginning to show me he was something else.
His handling of Tyson was what ultimately led to the biggest problems between us. Tyson had begun to grasp that his growing power inside a boxing ring gave him increasing power outside it. When we went to Denver the first year to fight for the National Junior Olympic title, the contrast between him and his peers was striking. During the weigh-in for a bout, we had to get on a line with all the other kids, all these fourteen-and fifteen-year-old heavyweights who looked their age, had acne, and had no real definition to their muscles. Suddenly we came in, and it was like Clint Eastwood coming down the freakin’ walkway. The only thing missing was the music. Tyson was up to 210 pounds by then, and he knew the moves. He didn’t smile, he didn’t talk to anybody, he just walked in, knowing he was intimidating the shit out of these kids. You’d hear them whispering. “Did you see that guy?” “I’m not fighting him, am I? If I am, I’m getting the fuck out of here.”
Cus always liked to talk about imagination. How, if you let your mind run amok, it would destroy you. Here were these kids falling right into that trap. I remember a rumor that got started about Tyson that first year, that he was twenty years old and was Sonny Liston’s nephew. Sonny Liston’s nephew! It was remarkable. He was winning fights before he even stepped in the ring.
Something else was happening, too: attention and adulation. The first year in Colorado, we were taking buses to get to the arena; by the second year, with Tyson knocking everybody dead, it was, “Can we give you a ride?” It wasn’t lost on him. For somebody who wasn’t emotionally mature or grounded, acquiring that kind of power was dangerous.
In Catskill, more and more, he began to push the boundaries. There were incidents at school. He was assaulting kids, grabbing girls, disobeying and disrespecting teachers. Cus made deals with the school principal to keep Tyson out of trouble. “Listen,” he’d tell the principal, “this is a different kind of kid. This kid could make this school and this town famous. We’ve got to keep this quiet.”
At the gym and in the house, we had always instilled an atmosphere of discipline. It meant something to have a set of rules in place that was consistent for everybody. It made for harmony and balance. After Tyson showed up, two sets of rules developed, one for him and one for everybody else. I didn’t think that was healthy for Tyson or the rest of the kids. I think that Tyson, like all kids, wanted boundaries, wanted discipline. But Cus was cutting corners with him. He was in a race against the clock. To discipline Tyson, the only punishment that would have had a real impact would have been to deprive him of time in the ring, the way Bobby Stewart had at Tryon. Cus couldn’t afford to lose that time, though. Not if Tyson was going to become the young
est heavyweight champion ever. If Tyson didn’t become the youngest heavyweight champ ever, Cus might not be alive to see it. So he indulged Tyson—he forgave and covered up his indiscretions—even though it was really himself he was indulging.
The more Cus let Tyson get away with, the further Tyson pushed, and the more out of control he got. If Cus had been younger, maybe he would have done things differently. Old age can make people fearful. Cus was afraid that he would lose Tyson, either by dying or by having him taken away. If the authorities in Albany found out about Tyson’s troubles, the jig was up. So Cus worked the locals, and made sure they kept their mouths shut. The only information that made its way upstate came from Cus: Tyson was doing great in school and knocking guys out. All these years of Cus talking about discipline and purity and honesty, and the importance of being a professional, and all of a sudden it was, “Oh, wait, I didn’t mean that.” Or, “I only mean it when it’s convenient.”
I had become dangerous to Cus because I had actually bought into what he had been preaching. When Tyson got in trouble for throwing containers of milk at the wall in the school cafeteria, it was just the latest in a string of incidents. I’m not saying I’m a saint. I stood by and watched him get away with stuff. At a certain point, though, I reached my limit. I decided to suspend Tyson from the gym until he shaped up and improved his behavior. Maybe it was too late, and I was just trying to make myself feel better. Maybe it wouldn’t have done any good anyway. Tyson certainly didn’t submit to it. He went straight to Cus, who not only didn’t back me up but brought Tyson to the gym himself, the next morning, and let Rooney train him.
For the four years I had been Tyson’s trainer, I had given him a mixture of support, guidance, and discipline. Now, Cus—whether I was right or wrong—was undermining me. A six-year partnership between the two of us based on loyalty and trust and the dream of developing a gym and championship fighters was going out the window. Rooney, my childhood friend, took Cus’s side. He thought I was the one being disloyal.
