by Teddy Atlas
It was an excruciating few months, but awe-inspiring, too, watching him die, seeing his strong, clear mind refuse to capitulate. A week or so before his kidneys shut down, I was in his room discussing his treatment with his doctors. My father was listening, and he shook his head. “Ted,” Dr. Caractor said to him, “you’ve got to stop being a doctor. You’re a terrible patient. We’re the doctors.”
But my father shook his head again. I brought him the pad, and he wrote something down. I showed it to Caractor.
“Ted, that’s only if you have kidney problems,” he told my father, “and you don’t have any kidney problems.”
Five days later, my father’s kidneys failed.
I guess he knew even he couldn’t come back from that. When nobody was in the room, he pulled out all his tubes. Shortly after he did that, he went into a coma.
After hearing about it, Jerry Izenberg, a writer for the Newark Star-Ledger, did a story about my father’s life called “The Real Root of Toughness.” I took it with me the next time I went to the hospital and read it to him. My father always hated to hear things about himself. He’d never allow it, but now, lying there, all the machines and tubes hooked back up to him, he couldn’t stop me or say shut up. The thrust of the story was that the guys you think of when you think of tough, guys like Mike Tyson, weren’t really that tough. If you wanted really tough, you had to hear about this doctor in Staten Island.
The story ended with Izenberg quoting me. It was strange when I reached that part, because I was reading about myself aloud in the third person. “‘You want to know about tough?’ Atlas asked,” I read. “‘Do you realize how many times he could have quit? He’s the toughest man I ever met. He’s my father and I love him.’”
I lowered the newspaper and looked at the body on the hospital bed. My father’s eyes were shut. You could barely see his breath moving his chest. The monitors pulsed, indicating he was still alive, but there were no other obvious signs of life. Yet the only way I could tell him I loved him was to read it to him out loud from a story in a newspaper. Only then could I say the words—when he wasn’t awake or aware that I was saying them.
He was so much a part of me. That’s why I continued training through this whole period—because that’s what he would have done. I was working with Michael Moorer and another fighter I had, Shannon Briggs, a young heavyweight from Brooklyn whom I’d been training. Briggs had a fight down in Atlantic City. A few days before we went down there, he caught a cold and decided he wanted to back out of the fight. I made him go through with it anyway. I knew Briggs was just looking for an excuse, and I didn’t want to give it to him. The day of the fight, a Wednesday, I spent the morning with my father in his hospital room, then drove down to Atlantic City. I knew there was a good chance Dad wouldn’t make it through the night, but I felt I needed to honor my commitment.
During the first couple of rounds of the fight, Briggs was drifting and unfocused, but I stayed on him. He wound up knocking the guy out in the third round. I talked to my mother afterward. My father was still hanging in. Just after I fell asleep, about three in the morning, the phone rang. I knew before I answered what it meant. It was weird. Thursday had always been the one day a week my father didn’t have office hours. It was just like him to wait until his day off to die.
After the call, I showered and got dressed. Then I got in the car with Elaine and the kids—they had all come with me—and we drove back to Staten Island at four in the morning. My whole family was there. My brother Terryl and my sister and my mother. I helped with the arrangements, and later that same morning—the wake wasn’t until the next day—I went to the gym to train Moorer.
Michael came into the gym. He said he didn’t feel like training.
“You go get dressed and put your shoes on and get ready to work,” I said.
“I’m tired and sore. I need a day off, Teddy.”
This was after I’d already been through all kinds of this bullshit with him, so he was a little bit less forceful than he would have been a few weeks earlier, when I practically smacked his head into a wall.
“It’s just a day,” he said. “What’s the big deal?”
“Just a day! Just a fuckin’ day!” I was livid, which probably wasn’t fair. He had no idea what had happened. “You’re supposed to be a professional,” I said. “If you win this fight, you’re gonna fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. ‘Just a day!’ Don’t you understand anything about commitment, about being a pro, about sticking with what you say you wanna be? You don’t do it just when you feel good. You don’t do it just when you’re not tired. You don’t do it just when it’s sunny. You do it every day of your life. You do it when it hurts to do it, when it’s the last thing in the world you wanna do, when there are a million reasons not to do it. You do it because you’re a professional.” I didn’t scream. I just said these things quietly and firmly, and when I was finished, Michael looked at me and said, “I’ll go get dressed.”
That night, John Davimos called Michael and told him that my father had died. Michael immediately called me at home.
“Why didn’t you tell me your father died?” he said.
“I don’t know. There was no reason to tell you.”
“You shouldn’t have come to the gym. We didn’t have to train.”
“You got a fight in two weeks.”
“But your father died.”
“It’s two separate things.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“There’s nothing to be sorry about. When you’re doing something you believe in, when you’re committed to something, you do what you need to do. I’ll see you tomorrow, Michael.”
“You sure there’s nothing I can do?”
“Besides showing up on time? No.”
AGAIN, TEDDY?
IN THE WEEKS AFTER THE EVANS FIGHT, MICHAEL started running amok, eating too much and drinking heavily, falling back on old bad habits. It was the holidays, so it was a tough season for that kind of stuff anyway, but having the Holyfield fight looming on the horizon didn’t encourage Michael toward discipline. Once a date was set for the fight, a weeklong publicity tour was arranged by TVKO and HBO. I decided that rather than wait until we headed to Palm Springs to set up training camp, which was still a ways off (it was January now and the fight wasn’t until April), I would run a minicamp for Michael in West Orange, New Jersey. I knew he wouldn’t like it, but my instinct was to draw a line in the sand. I could already see that he was heading in the wrong direction. I wanted to cut him off before things really got out of hand. The easiest thing would have been to just wait and run one camp starting at the end of February. Something told me not to.
Michael wasn’t happy when I told him what I had in mind, but he came in because I didn’t give him a choice. He flew into Newark with one of his guys, Flem, a near-fifty-year-old semiretired cop from Detroit. (Michael loved cops and guns. In fact, he got very friendly with the cops in Detroit, to the point where they let him ride around with them and go out on raids, which was how he hooked up with Flem and some of the other guys who made up his entourage and security team. People made all sorts of assumptions about why Michael was drawn to cops and guns, but I always knew his real affinity was the brotherhood of it, the sense of family.)
Originally, I planned for Michael to stay five days at the minicamp, but after two days he told me he was leaving. Wednesday morning I was in the gym, waiting for him to come in, and he called and said, “I’m leaving. I’m going.”
“What are you freakin’ talkin’ about? I’m here in the gym waiting for you.”
“I’m leaving. I’m goin’ home.”
“No, you’re not. You’re comin’ in.”
“I got a plane to catch. I’ll talk to you later,” he said, and hung up. I was stunned for a moment, although when I actually gathered my thoughts, I realized it was almost predictable. I got in my car and drove straight over to his hotel, which wasn’t as easy as it might sound. I didn
’t even know where he was staying. I wound up having to call Davimos to find out.
When I arrived at Michael’s room, Flem opened the door. Michael had his clothes laid out on the bed. He was packing his bag.
“Michael, you think I’m joking about this? You think this is a fuckin’ joke?”
“You ain’t gonna tell me what to do, Teddy. I’m leavin’.”
“Yeah? Then you’re gonna have to find yourself a new trainer.”
I looked over at Flem, but he was no help. I liked Flem, but in most instances he was just Michael’s yes-man. He was there to protect him and support him in whatever he wanted to do. Unfortunately, like a lot of guys who are captured by the glamour of professional athletes, Flem had sold himself out a little, compromised his own dignity to be in that world.
Michael kept folding shirts and laying them into his travel bag.
“You think I’m fuckin’ kidding?” I said. “I’m going back to the gym now. You don’t follow me, you won’t be the only one packing your bag.”
I turned around and walked out. I drove back to the gym. When twenty minutes had passed and Michael hadn’t shown up, I called Davimos. I told him what was going on, that Michael was skipping out. He wasn’t surprised.
“He’s done this before, Teddy. There’s nothing you can do about it. You’re right about him. He’s scared.”
Listening to someone else express it, I got worked up all over again. “What flight is he on?” I said.
“American flight one-forty-two,” he said.
I was stubborn. I couldn’t just let him go without trying one more time to make him understand what he was doing. I got in my car and sped over to Newark Airport. It probably took me twenty minutes. I arrived at the terminal and found Flem doing all the grunt work, checking the bags, doing the tickets, while Michael sat there like a spoiled athlete.
I walked up to him, angry but trying to contain it. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing. I know exactly what you’re doing, and you’re not gonna get me to go along with it. You think I’m gonna let you freakin’ dictate what we do? That we’re not gonna train here now, and then you think I’m gonna go train you somewhere later on, and get you ready to fight Holyfield and watch you make more excuses not to win?”
Flem wandered back over to where we were. Michael got to his feet. “There’ll be plenty of time to train later on,” he said.
“Bullshit,” I said. “Will you listen to yourself? You’re afraid of fighting this fight. What do you want? Somebody who’ll lie to you and let you lie? Is that what you want? Fine. Get somebody else. ’Cause it ain’t gonna be me. I’m telling you, Michael. I’d have to let you take my manhood away for that to happen. For me to let you do what you wanna do, I’d have to give up my manhood, and I’m not doing that. I ain’t givin’ it away.”
He didn’t know how to respond to that, so he nodded to Flem and they began walking away, heading off toward the gate.
“You walk,” I yelled after him. “You’re gonna keep walkin’.”
He kept walking. A while later I called Davimos and told him I was quitting. The hard part came later, at home.
Elaine was in the kitchen of our tiny apartment making lunch for the kids when I got back.
“You’re home early,” she said.
A lot of times in the past, I hadn’t said anything. I hadn’t talked much. With Tyson, with LaLonde, I’d done what I’d done and that was that. But this time I owed her more consideration. I knew she was depending on the Holyfield fight, counting on it, because the fight was already made, and it was going to be a $200,000 payday for me, the first time we were ever going to have any real money.
“I had to walk away,” I said.
“What?” She nearly dropped the plate she was holding.
“Michael wasn’t listening to me,” I said. “He wouldn’t do what I wanted. So I quit.”
“Again, Teddy?”
The look on Elaine’s face in that moment, the way she said “again,” really got to me. In that moment, I questioned whether it was a matter of principle and honor that I was acting on, or whether it was just selfishness and pride. Suddenly, I was unsure, and then almost instantly I felt myself getting angry with her. It was unnerving. My responsibility to her and to my family had clouded the truth and the purity of the decision I had made—a decision that had felt right at the time, but now, weighed against the disappointment in her face, seemed wrong. It was a nearly unbearable clash of opposing feelings. I couldn’t allow myself to think that I had done the wrong thing, and yet at the same time I didn’t want to be angry with her for being disappointed in me. I turned and walked out of the kitchen.
The next few days, not surprisingly, were tense with us. I was sure that I had done the right thing, but Elaine’s disappointment was palpable, and that made things very difficult. I was almost relieved when I had to leave home to take Shannon Briggs to Biloxi, Mississippi, for a fight there.
The night before the fight, Shannon and Mark Roberts, his manager, and one of his guys, Troy, and I went to eat dinner at a joint in Biloxi called the Bombay Bicycle Club. It was close to our motel, along one of those stretches of highway made up of motels and fast-food restaurants. We parked the car in the lot off to the side, and Shannon, Troy, and Mark started walking toward the front entrance. I was about fifteen steps behind them, thinking my own thoughts, not really tuned in, except that suddenly I was aware of these voices and this harsh laughter, someone saying in an ugly, drunken twang, “What the fuck is that on your head, boy? What kind of monkey are you?” Even then it took me a second to realize that it was directed at my guys, that it was a racial thing, because Shannon had these dyed orange dreadlocks that he sometimes tied up in a pile on top of his head.
The three of them, Shannon, Troy, and Mark, were by the door of the restaurant, up this set of steps. There were these other guys standing there, and words were being exchanged. I started up the steps. I could see Shannon trying to go past these guys into the restaurant. One of the guys, the biggest one, a muscular bruiser with long hair and a beard, in an oil-stained gimme cap, stepped in his way.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he said. Then he shoved Shannon, who fell back into me.
“You better go back to where you came from, boy,” the guy said. The rest of them laughed.
I stepped past Shannon and got right in the face of the guy who had pushed him.
“Who the fuck you talkin’ to?” I said.
“Why? You gonna do something? They ain’t gonna do nothin’, you gonna do something?”
“Yeah, I sure am!” I said, and cracked him one on the jaw. One of his friends came at me and I turned and cracked him. Then the first guy grabbed hold of me, and he was big. He pulled me toward him. We started to fall backward toward the stairs. As we started to fall, I heard Shannon scream, “Teddy!,” like he thought I was going to get hurt. But as I was falling, I twisted the big guy around and fell on top of him. We crashed down the stairs and his big body cushioned my fall. All my weight was on him and his head slammed against the ground and cracked wide open. I was able to get right up, but he was out, unconscious and bleeding.
Then these other guys came out of the restaurant. It turned into a brawl. Mark and Troy stayed off to the side, but Shannon joined in, and we busted up a bunch of them. We worked our way back to the parking lot. I said to Mark, “Get Shannon in the freaking car and get him out of here.” He was my fighter and my instinct was to protect him and get him out of there. While I was holding these guys at bay, I told Mark and Shannon to take off. Shannon didn’t want to, but Mark pushed him into the car. They drove away.
Troy and I made our way back to the road with a couple of these guys still following us. They were acting a little bit braver now that there was just me and Troy—plus it was clear Troy wasn’t a fighter. We were walking toward this gas station down the road, and they were about fifty feet behind us. Troy was getting all nervous.
“Ted, they’re followi
ng us.”
“Slow down. Let ’em catch up.”
“They’re coming after us.”
“I’m just leading them to where I want them. They got anything in their hands?”
Troy looked back. I didn’t want to look back. “No,” he said.
“Good.”
I was very calm, which reassured him. We’d gotten them to where it was a little dark, just past the gas station, away from all their friends. We were out of sight of the roadhouse. They were right behind us now. I could hear them saying things. “Motherfucker this” and “nigger that.”
Suddenly, I turned around. “Yeah, motherfucker? I’m a motherfucker?” I walked right toward them. They weren’t expecting it, they were taken off guard. I hit one of the guys so hard I thought I might have killed him. I dropped him with one shot. The other guy, when I started toward him, took off.
Troy said, “Oh, shit!”
“C’mon, let’s get out of here,” I said. We started across the street toward our hotel, which wasn’t more than a couple of hundred yards away. All of a sudden I noticed that a car full of them had pulled in front of us. I could see one of the guys was on a radio. Then another car came. I realized they were talking to each other on their CBs. They were calling all their friends to come over.
I tried to stay calm. “Come on,” I said to Troy, leading him across the street but away from our hotel.
“Where are we going?” he said. “The hotel’s there.”
“No, we can’t let ’em see us go in there. We’ll be cornered.” We started jogging through people’s yards, circling back around, until we could enter the hotel from the back. When we got there, the whole place was lit up with headlights and the spinning lights of cop cars.
We managed to sneak up to our room unseen, and we kept the lights inside off, peeking through the curtain. The whole place was cordoned off and surrounded by the police.
