by Teddy Atlas
“But you’re my guy. You brought me to a title. You and me can do a lot of things together….”
“I guess I didn’t teach you anything, did I, Michael? I thought I did, but I guess I really didn’t teach you much, did I?”
“But, Teddy—”
“No, Michael. You either understand what’s right or you don’t. If you don’t know the difference, I don’t care how many times you win the title, you ain’t no champion.”
I hung up.
A few weeks went by. Everybody knew what was going on, of course. Davimos and all of them thanked me for being loyal.
“I don’t know what to say to you, Teddy,” Davimos said. “You need the money more than I do.”
It was true. Davimos had been born rich. Elaine and the kids and I were still living in the same apartment in Staten Island that we’d been in since before little Teddy had been born.
Unless Michael changed his mind, I was walking away from the Holyfield fight, which was worth $800,000 to me. There was also an interim fight against a young unbeaten heavyweight named Vaughn Bean, which Michael needed to win or it would jeopardize things with Holyfield. But I didn’t hear anything from Michael, and at a certain point we didn’t know where it was going to go. It was getting closer to the Bean fight, which we had lost control over. I decided to write a letter to him. It was a hard letter. I said tough things, but caring things. Apparently he showed it to a girl that he was with at the time. He asked her what she thought. The girl said, “Whoever wrote this letter is a very unusual person.” What did she mean by that? “Well, he only cares about what’s right. And about you. He doesn’t care about anything else.”
It was as if he needed someone to tell him. He couldn’t recognize that for himself. He needed an excuse. He wound up calling me and coming back. He signed the deal, ensuring that Davimos, Kozerski, and the Duvas would make the money they deserved. For me, however, the worst was just beginning.
Somebody had to pay a price. That was just the dynamic of it. Michael was embarrassed by what he’d done, the side of himself that he’d shown and for which I’d held him accountable. It was complicated but it was also simple. Michael had always wanted it to be about family and love. He had always been testing to make sure that you weren’t there just for the money. I’d passed the test, but he hadn’t. He’d been exposed because I hadn’t gone along with him and sold out to Roger King. It filled him with shame and self-loathing, along with resentment toward me for pointing out his weakness. The result, the only way he could make things right, was by acting so terribly that I would be forced to abuse and punish him. I know it sounds crazy, but I think that was the unconscious logic. I’m going to be as awful as Teddy thinks I am so that he can feel justified in hating me. The other thing was that if he was abusive to me and everyone else, then in a way we’d all be selling out by staying. If we were being abused and staying, it must be for the money. It was very twisted.
We started training camp for the Vaughn Bean fight, and it was the worst, most fucked-up camp I’d ever been involved in. One session, he took off his headgear and threw it at me, and I picked it up and threw it back in his face. Another time, we got into something in his truck, and I smacked him. It got to the point where we were driving in separate cars, never eating together, seeing each other only in the gym. The amazing thing is he still kept his curfew. But it was awful. The whole experience made me feel selfish and small. I sat in my room one night, nearly crying, wondering why I was treating him so badly. I knew that I had to hold myself accountable, that it wasn’t all on him, but I couldn’t figure a way out of it.
The next day, I took a walk with him after our training session. We went down the road, beyond the hotel.
“Michael, listen, this has gone too far. This isn’t good, the way things are with us. I know you made a mistake when you went with these people, and when I wrote you the letter, you realized it. I pointed out some things to you, some flaws in the way you acted, and that made you feel exposed. I understand that you’re acting the way you’ve been acting almost as a kind of protection. You’re pushing all this off from what it is. I understand. You think I don’t care no more. You think that because you made a decision that was based on money, or appeared to be based on money, and not on loyalty, commitment, and principle, that I’ve written you off. But you’re being a moron. Don’t you know anything about me? Don’t you know that what we’ve done together is something that can’t be lost or minimized that easily? Don’t you understand that just the act of me being here means that I still care about you?”
He stopped and looked at me. I could tell he wanted to get past what was there between us, but that he was struggling with it. There was another thing, I realized, that might be involved. “Maybe you think I care more for Davimos, that I somehow took his side in this,” I said. “That’s not why I did what I did. If I made that stand and was willing to risk everything for John, don’t you friggin’ understand that it would be no less for you? It’s always been you that I cared the most about. But I wasn’t going to let you do something that I wouldn’t let someone do to you. How could you stand here with me and respect me and trust me, if I let that happen to John? Could I be any different for you?”
It didn’t matter. He couldn’t get out of the place he was in.
“Okay,” I said. “The final thing I’m going to tell you is that I’m going to do everything I can to keep the title for you, so you can fight for the eight million against Holyfield. I’ll do everything I can, and then I’m gone. I will not spend one more second talking to you the way I have had to talk to you for the last few months. I will not flush away everything we’ve done with this kind of shit. I won’t do it.”
We went three more weeks and it didn’t get any better. Everyone knew I was going to leave, that this was my last fight with Michael. Boorman almost cried. He begged Michael to talk to me. “Please. He’s not kidding around. He’s going to leave.” Davimos was trying to get me to hold off making it public, asking me to think about it, to reconsider. “Please, Teddy, wait until after.” They didn’t understand. I had spent plenty of time thinking about it. The press couldn’t wait to get to me. The first time they put a microphone in front of me, I said, “It’s my last fight with Michael Moorer.”
The night of the fight, Michael was so lethargic, even the TV commentators, who knew about his tendencies in that direction, were stunned. His opponent, Vaughn Bean, a turban-wearing black Muslim, was undefeated, but against a string of nobodies. He was small for a heavyweight, and though he had some skills, and an all-star corner that included Joe Frazier, Michael Spinks, and Butch Lewis, he was a guy that Michael should have dominated. The fact was Michael went into the fight in decent shape physically. It was his head that was all messed up.
There was a point in the fight where I knew I had to do something again. I’d had a feeling that I might, and the day before, when Flem had said, “You need anything, boss?,” I had told him, “Yeah, bring a cell phone.” He looked at me, like, what the hell? Anyway, we reached this moment in the fight, and I told Flem that when Michael came back to the corner, I wanted him to hand me the cell phone. Flem was nervous. He didn’t know what the hell I was going to do. But as soon as Michael sat on his stool, he handed me the cell phone. I pulled up the antenna and put it to my ear. I said, “Yeah? You’ve been watching? I don’t know. I’ll ask him.” I handed the phone back to Flem. “Michael, that was your ex-wife, Bobbi. Your son is home crying. He just heard the commentator on TV say that you don’t want to be champion no more, and he’s crying. He wants to know why Daddy doesn’t want to be heavyweight champ no more.”
Somehow Michael managed to eke out a win. I think he won by a point. If he had lost that fight, he would have missed out on the Holyfield fight and the $8 million payday that went along with it. It was a big thing. A very big thing. That money would have meant a lot to me and my family, too. It would have put me over the top. I wouldn’t have a mortgage today. But Michael was stubborn. He couldn’t
find a way to come back to me. He called me one time, it was getting closer and closer to the fight and having to go to camp, and he called me from a bar, drunk, at three in the morning. He started to say something about wanting me to come back. I told him to call me in the morning when he was sober.
He never called back.
Part of it was that he had beaten Holyfield already. I had helped him defeat that dragon, and he had enough confidence to think that he could do it again, without me. I’ll tell you one thing: if it was Tyson he was fighting, he would have called back. I guarantee you that. Michael would not have gotten in the ring with Tyson without me.
FOR YEARS AFTER THAT HE WAS DEAD TO ME.
He used to call when I wasn’t home to talk to Elaine. He’d beg her to intervene. She would sneak these calls with him. I found out and it almost caused a serious problem between her and me. That’s how bad it was. I told her he could be fucking lying in the street and I wouldn’t slow down. I felt I had the right. He had ruined our destiny.
Some sportswriter read me a quote from Michael’s new trainer, Freddy Roach, before the Holyfield fight. Roach said, “I’m not a dictator. I don’t want a prisoner here. I let Michael be Michael.” The writer asked me what I thought of that. I said, “What do I think? I always understood that it was my job to never let Michael be Michael.”
It didn’t surprise me when Michael lost the rematch. Do I think the result would have been different if I’d been in his corner? Yeah, I do. I know it sounds self-serving and conceited, but that’s how I feel.
The thing was, no matter how many times I ignored Michael’s calls over the years, he kept calling. He even cried one time. Eventually, he wore me down. I guess I was getting soft, because I was on a plane flying to Seattle to train this heavyweight, Kirk Johnson, and I took out some paper and started writing. Ten or twelve pages later I had a letter written. I just felt I had to explain how hurt I’d been to my core, to at least let him know why he was being held accountable, and not just suffering as some kind of innocent, which I thought might be how he thought about it.
He read the letter while I was in Seattle, and he called Elaine. He said, “I’ve been sitting in my truck for five hours. And I’ve read his letter seven times, and I can’t cry no more, and I can’t leave the truck. And I don’t know what to do because I lost the only man who ever loved me. The only person who ever loved me in my life. And I don’t know what to do.”
I let him come back. I allowed him into my life and into my family again, just a little bit at first, but a little bit more as the years have gone by. There came a point when he asked me to train him again. I knew better than to go there. That part, at least for me, was over.
THE
FOUNDATION
IN A WAY, MY EXPERIENCE WITH MICHAEL, DESPITE its many incredible highs, ultimately led me away from my life as a trainer. I still loved the sweat and the discipline and the commitment. I loved helping a fighter achieve a level of accomplishment in the ring. But the emotional toll of investing so much in people who were almost certain to betray me finally started to outweigh my passion. I began to get involved in other pursuits that, more and more, took me away from the gym and training. It wasn’t a conscious decision, just something that evolved over time. I got involved in broadcasting, doing the boxing commentary on ESPN Friday Night Fights. spent more time with Elaine and the kids. And I started a charitable foundation in my father’s name, the Dr. Theodore A. Atlas Foundation.
In a way, the genesis of that idea came from the writer Mark Kriegel, who said something to me that got me thinking. Remember this was someone who had spent a fair amount of time observing me, and what he said was, “You think that if somebody’s written about and remembered in the newspapers, or they’re recognized publicly, it means their life has been worthwhile. It makes everything okay.”
I turned that over for a good long while, and thought, Maybe he’s right. Maybe I do think that. I know that when Jack Newfield wrote something about my dad in the New York Post, it meant a lot to me. It made me feel good to see my father acknowledged in print that way. Even with all the difficulties we’d had, I’d always felt it important that my dad not be forgotten. I didn’t think he ever got paid enough on this planet for what he did.
Although winning the heavyweight title had validated a lot of what my father had done for me and meant to me, my acknowledgment of that was a mostly private sentiment. I realized I wanted a more public expression of my regard for him and what he had accomplished in his life. Maybe I needed a way to communicate with him that I didn’t have when he was alive, a way of making him take credit for things and receive praise for things that he would never take when he was alive. A foundation, I decided, would serve that purpose.
From a practical standpoint, I wanted to do something that would serve people, as he had, in a very direct way. I wanted what I was going to do to be free of bureaucracy and the kind of little humiliations that charities often put people through. It wasn’t enough just to create a foundation. It was going to be a foundation the way I wanted it. It wasn’t going to be for one specific cause, like muscular dystrophy or diabetes or cerebral palsy, it was going to help people who needed help in a variety of circumstances, people who might otherwise fall through the cracks. My father was a general practitioner, and that’s what we would be. We would make house calls. Not only for medical problems, but for any kind of problems that required a helping hand.
Once the philosophy was in place, I needed a structure and a way to raise money to accomplish the good deeds I envisioned. There were a number of people who got involved in this project with me and volunteered their time. There was Judge Mike Brennan and his assistant (who’s now a lawyer) Kenny Mitchell; there was Tom Conway, who coached basketball at St. Theresa’s; and there was John Rowan, who was a graduate of the Naval Academy and also a lawyer. Later on, others joined, including Kathy Zito, who does so much stuff now that it would take a whole chapter to cover; David Berlin, a lawyer who does pro bono work; Sean Sweeney, Paul Quatrocchi, Neil Murphy, Joe Fama, Kevin McCabe, John Hanson, Joanne Felice, Sue Hession, Roberta Davola, John Vatucchi, John Cirillo, Dan Tomei, Frank Lettera, Joe Spinelli, Seth Horowitz, C.E.O. of Everlast, and Steve Zawada, my old probation officer, who became a private investigator and checks out people we intend to help to make sure they’re legit.
Our first meeting, we didn’t have any place to convene, so my friend Neil Murphy, who, along with my friend Mike Peterson, owned a bar called Bottomley’s, down near Stapleton, let us have the upstairs room there and served us free pizza and beers. We pretty quickly agreed that an annual dinner with celebrities as the attraction was the simplest way to raise money. I was able to reach out to people like Willis Reed, Phil Simms, Bill Parcells, Pete Rose, and Harry Carson, and also guys from the boxing community, like George Foreman and Larry Holmes and Lou Duva (who brought in the comedian Pat Cooper), as well as some Hollywood people, like Willem Dafoe and Stephen Baldwin. We were off and running.
The first year we held the “Teddy” dinner at the Statten Catering Hall and had three hundred people and seven celebrities. The next year we had five hundred. The next year seven hundred. We finally had to leave the Statten. We had so many people in there it got to be a fire hazard. (Of course, with the fire marshals as our guests, nobody was saying anything.) In 2004, in our new home at the Staten Island Hilton, we had eleven hundred people and seventy-five celebrities. My committee said, “Teddy, please, we gotta have fewer celebrities. They’re taking away too many seats from people who will pay. It’s losing us money.”
Over the years, we’ve raised about 2 million bucks and given it to people in need. This past year alone we raised $500,000 and we also opened a food pantry that dispenses food to the hungry. Since everyone working for the foundation is a volunteer, there are no administrative costs; every dollar we get goes to people who need it. After 9/11, we raised over a quarter of a million dollars for victims who had fallen through the cracks. We couldn’t cov
er the whole city, but we got a list of everyone on Staten Island, the families of restaurant workers, messengers, window washers, and others, who had been killed or disabled when the towers came down. The firemen and policemen, God bless them, had organizations that took care of them, but there were other victims of 9/11 who needed help and weren’t getting it.
The Red Cross fund was supposed to help those families, but something went wrong. The money didn’t go where it was supposed to go. I don’t want to use the word “stolen,” and I’m not knowledgeable or in the know enough to say where the money went. I’m just saying that I know when a duck is a duck and when a duck ain’t a duck.
Attorney General Eliot Spitzer held a meeting at the Staten Island Hilton to address some of the people who were waiting for help. We found out about it and went down there with our checkbook. There were all these parents and grandparents and families crying—literally crying—saying where’s the money? We’ve been waiting for months, we went down and filled out a stack of papers, and meanwhile they make us feel worse because we got to prove that we’re victims.
It was terrible, absolutely heart-wrenching. They were asking for answers. A few of these politicians were decent, but a lot of them weren’t, and these poor people were being handed a load of bull. All of a sudden, one of the family members got up. He was crying. He said, “I don’t want to be bullshitted anymore. Don’t tell me you’re going to do something when you’re not.”
Kathy Zito and Sean Sweeney from my foundation went up to this man and said very quietly and nicely, “Look, sir, just give us your name. We’ve got a list already, and we can give you a check right now for a couple of thousand dollars.”
He was still upset. He said, “Please, I don’t want no more bullshit. Everybody’s been telling me that for months now and I don’t want—”
Kathy started to write a check out, and he looked at her, calming down a little, his face still wet with tears. “What are you doing?”
