by Teddy Atlas
The lawyer was momentarily thrown by my refusal to cooperate. He gathered himself, pointing a finger in the air as if gauging the direction of the wind. “All right,” he said. “Let me rephrase that.”
“No,” I said again, before he could continue.
“I’m just going to put it in different terminology—”
“No!” I said.
“Well—”
“Hey! What part of ‘no’ do you not understand? No! I don’t care how many freakin’ ways you want to ask me—”
“Could you please instruct the witness to answer only what he’s asked?”
“Maybe someone will instruct you to stop lying,” I said. The whole room was murmuring now.
“Mr. Atlas, please,” the arbitrator said.
“This guy’s trying to get me to say something untrue,” I said. I looked at the lawyer with contempt. “I know what you’re doing. You can phrase it any way you wanna phrase it and the answer will still be no!”
By the time I was excused, the room was in a complete uproar. I walked out of there, and nobody on Wolfe’s side would look at me. I understood what it meant, that they were going to take LaLonde from me. I had no contract. I knew.
The next day, I went into Gleason’s. I was scheduled to work with LaLonde, only he never showed up. I didn’t bother calling him. I wasn’t going to beg or crawl. Fuck him and fuck them. I knew what was right and wrong. I had warned Wolfe not to try to make me lie on the witness stand, and he hadn’t listened. It wasn’t complicated to me. There were no subtleties to the situation.
LaLonde was getting two hundred dollars a week from Wolfe, plus the apartment at 50 Barrow Street. When forced to choose, it was easier for him to go with Wolfe. He had gotten what he wanted from me. At least he thought he had. I’d built up his confidence, taught him to use his left hand, brought him to the next level.
Less than a week after the hearing, I found out that Wolfe had hired LaLonde a new trainer, Tommy Gallagher, a former cop. I’m not going to lie and say it didn’t affect me. It did. What made it worse was that during the time I was still LaLonde’s trainer, I had been offered a job with boxing manager Josephine Abercrombie that would have given me security and peace of mind. Abercrombie was one of the richest women in the country. She was new to boxing, but she brought a lot of money to the table. One weekend, she flew me down to Houston on her private jet to see the situation there. She had a nice stable of fighters, state-of-the-art facilities, a very impressive setup. By the end of the weekend, she wound up offering me a job, a house, and all kinds of perks. It was an offer that would have alleviated all my financial worries. But accepting would have required me to leave LaLonde, so I said no.
I don’t want to blow it up into something that it wasn’t, but I wouldn’t have been able to bring LaLonde with me to Houston because Wolfe had a problem with one of the people in Abercrombie’s organization, Jeff Levine. So I said no. I felt obligated to my commitment. Not long after, and for the same reason, I turned down an offer from the Duvas to train some of their stable, which included Vinnie Pazienza, Meldrick Taylor, and Pernell Whitaker.
Months went by after that day at the Boxing Commission with Wolfe and Poole. I was barely making it. Elaine and I and the kids were living month to month, never able to get ahead, always just scraping by. Meanwhile, in 1987, LaLonde fought Eddie Davis for the vacant WBC light heavyweight title.
I watched the fight with the sportswriter Wallace Matthews, Nick Baffi, and some other guys at the Sporting Club on Hudson Street. Just as I had predicted the day I approached Wolfe about him being LaLonde’s manager, LaLonde won the title. He knocked out Davis, who was forty years old and shot, in two rounds. I probably shouldn’t have watched. It was just fuel for my anger. But I guess that’s partly why I watched.
LaLonde had a second good payday a few months later, defending the title against another shot fighter, Leslie Stewart. I actually ran into LaLonde around that time. I was in the city, on my way to the Felt Forum, and he was walking across the street with somebody. He saw me and I saw him. He was in a white suit. I began walking in his direction, right toward him. He didn’t know how to react. He started to say something, trying to gauge my intent, but I didn’t say a word. I just kept walking toward him. When I got about fifteen feet away, he turned and jogged away. I didn’t chase him or anything. But he was right to run.
Dave Wolfe was smart. He managed LaLonde beautifully, matching him against the right guys. He orchestrated his career like a maestro. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was the Sugar Ray Leonard fight. Leonard, who was no dummy himself, saw in LaLonde a guy that would allow him to move up in weight so that he could add another championship belt to his legacy. LaLonde got six million for the fight, which he lost on a ninth-round TKO. My share would have been six hundred thousand.
It’s funny, with Tyson I never really thought about the money. For one thing, it wasn’t real to me when I left Catskill; I was young, I couldn’t envision that kind of payoff. It had the same reality as a lottery ticket. Then, when it did happen, when Tyson became the youngest heavyweight champion in history, Cus was already dead. So that changed how I felt. I could have dwelled on the millions that Tyson made, that Rooney made, but as much as possible I didn’t let myself go there.
LaLonde was different. When he got the six million for the Leonard fight it tore me up. It made me want to kill him. I had sacrificed for him, and in return he had betrayed me. The idea that he should be rewarded for that? It made me murderous.
I’m not proud to say that. I understand that we live in a society of laws. I understand all that. But at the time I simply felt he no longer had a right to live.
It’s hard for me to remember the exact moment I decided I was going to kill Donnie LaLonde. My anger just kept festering and growing. It didn’t go away. I realized it wouldn’t until I did something. I got a gun.
On a cold, rainy night in December of 1988, I drove into the city with a friend, who I’ll call Tony. He came with me because he wanted to be with me. He felt the same way I felt, that there were dues to be paid. He was my friend and he was angry for me.
We parked the car blocks away from LaLonde’s apartment. We were very careful not to open the car doors until we could get out without being seen. We both wore hooded sweatshirts. I had the gun hidden in my waistband.
We walked through the rain to 50 Barrow Street. There was a gate out front. I told Tony to wait. I went through the gate, and there was a door with a row of mailboxes and buzzers on the wall next to it. I rang one of the buzzers. No answer. I tried another.
“Who is it?” It was an elderly woman’s voice.
“I’m a friend of Donnie’s.”
“Are you one of the ones that was making all that noise the other night?” Despite the admonishment, there was a pleasant quality to her voice. I could tell there was something I could work with in that voice.
“No, ma’am,” I said. “Ma’am” wasn’t a form of address I used ordinarily, but I just knew to use it.
“Oh, well, you sound like a nice fella. Do you wanna go in?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The buzzer sounded, and I pushed open the door. LaLonde’s apartment was on the first floor. I walked down the short hallway, which was dimly lit and had dingy green flowered wallpaper. I got to the familiar door of his apartment. I thought of all the nights I had come over to talk him through his doubts and fears. I pulled out the gun and knocked.
If he had opened the door, he was dead. Nobody had seen me. The old lady upstairs had heard a disembodied voice, nothing more. I had gloves on, so there were no fingerprints. It would have been easy and clean. I would have pulled the trigger, turned around, and walked away.
Only he wasn’t home. Thank God.
Of course, I wasn’t thinking that at the time, and I didn’t give up that easily. I went back out, but first I jammed up the door bolt with a matchbook cover so it wouldn’t lock. Tony was waiting in the rain, across the s
treet. I crossed over.
“You take care of it?”
“He’s not there.”
“What do you want to do?”
“We’ll wait.”
“Okay.”
There was a phone booth a couple of blocks away near a deli. We stood under the awning of the deli, out of the rain. Every twenty minutes I walked over to the phone, dropped a dime in, and tried calling. Even though it had been nearly two years since I called that number regularly, I remembered it. Eleven o’clock came and went. Then twelve. Then one. I kept calling.
At two a.m., his girlfriend answered.
I put the neck of my sweatshirt over the mouthpiece to mask my voice. “Donnie there?”
“Yeah, hold on a minute.”
There was a rustling sound as the phone was handed over. “Hello?” It was LaLonde.
I hung up.
Tony looked at me as I ducked back under the awning. I guess my expression told everything.
“Let’s go.”
We started walking. My heart was thumping hard. I heard this rushing sound in my ears. It was so loud it distorted everything else, as if I were underwater or in a plane taking off. Behind it was just the usual sounds of the city. Cars’ tires on the wet asphalt. People’s voices. A horn. But I couldn’t seem to hear them right. I wasn’t hearing things the normal way.
When we got to LaLonde’s block, I saw the gate outside number fifty, and I started to get cold. I began shivering. I was thinking about the girl who had answered the phone. LaLonde’s girl. I was thinking that I was probably going to have to kill her, too, because I couldn’t be seen. If I got lucky and LaLonde came to the door, I could shoot him, and maybe I could get away without her seeing me. It was a small apartment. I didn’t know how it would go. There was a chance I wouldn’t have to kill her.
The more I thought about it, the more it bothered me. Thinking about LaLonde’s blonde girlfriend, I flashed on Nicole. I thought about my daughter. My beautiful five-year-old daughter. Then I thought about my son.
As I thought about them, I remembered what had happened on Christmas Eve, after I put them to bed.
It was strange the ways the anger came out. LaLonde fought Leonard in November, and I stopped being able to sleep. Every night, lying there in the dark, I could feel my jaw clenched and my teeth grinding. Then one night, a few days before Christmas, I was in a bar. This big skinhead was shooting his mouth off. He was a Hitler Youth guy. I didn’t even know what that was at the time, but I knew what he was saying. He was drunk, and he was saying, “All the Jews should have been killed.”
And I said, “My father is Jewish.”
The odd thing is that although I had never exactly hidden the fact that I was half Jewish, I had never been open about it either. Because I was raised Catholic, everyone assumed I was Irish, and I never made a point of correcting that assumption. Now here I was, after all the problems I’d had with my father growing up, turning to this guy and saying, “My father’s Jewish.”
Not surprisingly, it set him off. He came after me, which I guess is what I wanted. I smashed him in the face and messed him up pretty bad. A few days later, on Christmas Eve, right after I put my kids to bed, there was a knock on the door. It was a New York police detective. He wanted me to go down to the station with him and answer some questions. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I was processed and fingerprinted and given a desk appearance ticket, which meant I had to return for the arraignment, but I got to go back home that night. Eventually the problem went away entirely. My lawyer paid the skinhead’s lawyer off on the steps of the courthouse with seventy-five hundred dollars that I had borrowed from a friend. In return, the guy didn’t press charges. But before that, what I remember is sitting with my kids on Christmas, not knowing what was going to happen, this thing hanging over me, and they were so happy and they loved me so much, and Elaine said to me, “You’re throwing this all away because some jerkoff said something stupid. You’re throwing this all away?”
HALFWAY DOWN THE BLOCK, ALL PHYSICAL SENSATION LEFT me. The cold. The noise. The ringing in my ears. The rushing of my blood. It all left me, and there was nothing. Hollowness. Detachment. Like I was dead and the world had ceased to exist. All my reservations were gone; I was going to do what I had come there to do.
I got to the gate. I opened it. And then I could hear Elaine again, crying the way she’d been crying on Christmas Day, saying, “You might not be able to do this with us no more.”
I wanted to kill him so badly. So badly. And the faces of my kids kept flashing in front of me.
I turned to Tony.
He looked at me expectantly.
I shook my head and started walking away.
“Teddy, what? That’s it?” he said.
“That’s it.”
I wish I could say the rage went away. But it wasn’t that easy. I had to keep reminding myself of my responsibilities, thinking of the people who loved me and counted on me. I had to keep thinking about what would happen to them. Otherwise I was lost.
I WON’T TELL ANYBODY
YOU TOOK A DIVE
WILLEM DAFOE CAME TO ME IN THE FALL OF 1987 because he needed a boxing trainer to help him get prepared to play the role of a Jewish boxer in a movie called Triumph of the Spirit. The film’s producer, Arnold Kopelson (who’s big film before that was the Academy Award–winning Platoon), had contacted Mickey Duff, and Mickey had recommended me. After meeting and talking to Willem, I wound up being hired for a thousand dollars a week.
The movie was based on the true story of Salamo Arouch, a Greek Jew from the Balkans who got sent to Auschwitz during World War II and literally had to fight for his life in boxing matches with other concentration camp inmates. Though I wasn’t aware of it, among the many atrocities committed by the Nazis during the war was the practice of taking camp inmates and pitting them against one another in Friday-night fights while SS officers sat around with their girlfriends and drank cognac and gambled on the outcomes. The winner of the bout might get an extra piece of bread so that he could live a bit longer, while the unfortunate loser got sent to the ovens.
The challenge I faced in the job was to bring an actor, in a period of a few months, to a point of proficiency where a movie audience would believe that he was a real fighter. Dafoe was a tremendous actor, very thorough and committed, and his primary concern was that he be authentic. He had never done any boxing before, so we started with the basics. I taught him how to hold his hands, how to throw the various punches, and how to move. It was important that he be believable as a fighter from that era, so I looked at old fight films to prepare myself. I didn’t want him to be too slick or fancy or use his feet too much. A fighter from the Balkans in that era wouldn’t fight like fighters of today.
Willem worked very hard, and he absorbed things quickly. Even though he had no background as a fighter, he was a real professional. You can recognize that quality in anybody if they have it. I had already seen it with Twyla. It was interesting—I never would have guessed that I’d see a parallel between the kind of toughness and discipline that my world required and what was needed to be a professional actor or dancer. But Willem and Twyla both opened up my eyes in that way.
Willem was a guy who believed in the spiritual side of life; he was intelligent, thoughtful, and took pride in his profession. He was a purist, who did all this stuff outside of Hollywood for the Wooster Group, which was an avant-garde theater company. His work with them reminded me of my work in the gym with the amateurs, where it was just a matter of being committed and not with hopes of money or glory. Willem was almost embarrassed about his big Hollywood movies. “I just do them so I can afford to do the stuff I really love,” he told me.
He was constantly on a quest for knowledge, going off on retreats to meditate. He was trying to find a higher place, and he thought I knew some things. During the time I was training him, we had dinner frequently and talked about big questions. One time he said, “I’m having trouble with t
he truth.”
“The truth is just an exercise,” I said.
He loved that. He loved the sound of it. “Tell me exactly.”
“Like how much truth can you stand?” I said. “How much can you lift? How many reps can you do?”
“Yeah. I’ve never thought about it that way before,” he said. “But that makes a lot of sense to me.”
Though Willem was not actually going to fight in the movie (the boxing scenes would be choreographed), I felt it was important that he get in the ring and experience what it felt like to hit and be hit. He agreed.
I put a mask on him so he wouldn’t get marked up (it was a mask I had gotten custom-made for Chris Reid because Chris used to get cut a lot), and we did some sparring. There’s no doubt that it gave him a feel for what it was really like to be in a ring with another fighter in actual combat.
We were training three hours a day in the middle of the day, and by the time Willem arrived each afternoon at Gleason’s, he had already been up since four in the morning, because he was also rehearsing a play that he was doing with the Wooster Group at the Performing Garage. I guess he started to get a bit run-down from it all. I noticed at a certain point that he was looking a little ragged.
He was such a pro that he never said anything. Willem didn’t know if what he was feeling was sickness or mental fatigue, and because he wasn’t sure, he refused to capitulate. That pretty much defines a pro, for me: someone who will not allow himself the out of thinking that there is something wrong, because then there is a tendency to give in or formulate an excuse. It was up to me, as a professional trainer and teacher, to recognize if something was really wrong.
At a certain point, I decided that something was wrong, and I took him to the best doctor I knew: my father. It turned out that Willem had pneumonia. He had been training for days with it. My father put him on penicillin; he also gave him vials of liquid penicillin to inject as additional treatment while he was off in the Philippines shooting the movie Born on the Fourth of July with Tom Cruise. If Willem hadn’t been such a pro, he would have been stopped by a lot less.
