Atlas Page 21

  Sammy went into the Witness Protection Program in 1992. His family didn’t, but they did leave New York shortly afterward. The city was too dangerous. Gerard got beaten up and Sammy’s daughter, Karen, was running around, drinking, drugging, staying out all night. It was sad.

  Less than a year later, Sammy left the Witness Protection Program, and his family joined him in Arizona. Sammy had always told me he would try to steer Gerard away from the criminal life. But in February of 2000, Sammy, his wife, Debra, his daughter, Karen, and her husband—along with the twenty-four-year-old Gerard—were charged with running a massive drug ring, trafficking in the club drug ecstasy. Sammy was sentenced to nineteen years. Gerard got nine years.

  WHAT IT MEANS

  TO BE A PRO

  JOHN DAVIMOS APPROACHED ME IN THE FALL OF 1993 and asked me if I’d be interested in training his fighter Michael Moorer. At the time, Moorer was undefeated and the number-one contender in the heavyweight division. He was a guy with enough physical ability to win a title, but he was something of a problem child who’d gone through a number of trainers over the course of his career, driving them crazy with his moodiness and bad training habits. Guys with terrific reputations, like Emanuel Steward, Lou Duva, and Georgie Benton, ultimately found Moorer unmanageable and threw up their hands in despair.

  I had a reputation at that point as a psychology guy, as someone who would stand up to difficult fighters and discipline them and not take any prisoners along the way. So Davimos came to me. After Tyson’s shocking loss to Buster Douglas in 1990, the heavyweight division had opened up. Riddick Bowe, the current world champ, was about to fight a rematch with Evander Holyfield, but with Mike Tyson at least temporarily out of the heavyweight picture because he was serving time in an Indiana penitentiary for the rape of Desiree Washington, Michael Moorer was next in line.

  Everyone thought Bowe would knock out Holyfield, and then we would fight Bowe after that. At that point Bowe was a young, popular champion who a lot of people thought would be around for a long time. But Holyfield shocked everyone by beating Bowe and reclaiming the title. My assessment was that it was probably a good thing for us. Bowe was bigger and stronger, and I thought he’d give us more problems. Moorer matched up well against Holyfield. He was a southpaw (there had never been a left-handed heavyweight champion) and a counter-puncher with a good jab. The question was his character and mental toughness. He had a history of walking out of training camps, refusing to spar, and drinking too much. I didn’t consider him a nut. I knew he had problems, but most of his problems stemmed from the same thing: He was scared and he was constantly testing people to see whether they were going to be there for him when he needed them.

  I had heard about some of the things he did. Before one fight, he called up Davimos at two in the morning and said, “I’m sitting here in my room drinking a bottle of vodka and I’ve got a gun that I’m pointing at my head. Tell me why I shouldn’t pull the trigger.” Another time, he took a giant bowie knife and cut his legs up. The scars are still there.

  The point is, he was a troubled and tortured soul, and now he was going to be asked to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world against a true warrior. When Davimos came to me, I told him that I would meet with Moorer and we’d see how it went.

  Michael flew in to Jersey a few days later. He brought his four-year-old son with him—basically he was using his kid as a security blanket. At least that’s how it struck me. We met at a House of Pancakes in West Orange. We sat in a booth. I didn’t waste any time with preliminaries or bullshit. I had done my homework on him and found out some of the things I’ve just mentioned, so I was prepared, I was armed. I’d formed a preliminary diagnosis of him, the same way that my father would have with one of his patients. I’d noted the symptoms; now I was ready to conduct a more thorough examination.

  One thing that struck me right away with Michael was that he had difficulty meeting my eyes. He kept looking down. This was a guy known as a badass and a troublemaker. To me, though, it couldn’t have been more obvious what he really was: a scared, insecure guy with an inferiority complex and a fear of what he had to do and had to face.

  I used the same tactics with him that I had used years earlier with Mane Moore: I told him a story. Just like with Mane and his bully, I knew things about Michael that he didn’t necessarily know I knew. I incorporated them into a story so that I could grab his attention in a way that would make an impact but not be too direct.

  “There was one fighter I knew who reminds me a little of you. I’m not going to use his name, but he was an undefeated middleweight, who a lot of people thought had a shot to be world champ….” Michael was only half listening to me, and I thought, I’m going to test him out. I said, “Now, this guy had a reputation for being a real badass kind of guy, and when he got closer to a fight, he would go out and start drinking….”

  All of a sudden, Michael looked up. I said to myself, “I got him. I’m on the right track.” As I continued the story, I noticed that every time I touched on something that reminded him of himself, he would get very interested and curious. It showed me that I might actually be able to help him. He wouldn’t perk up like that or get curious if he didn’t care.

  “So this guy would go out and drink and do all these things, but he always made sure everybody saw him.” Again, Michael looked up. “Whether it was him walking out of a sparring session, or getting drunk in a nightclub, he made sure everybody was watching.”

  “Why would he do that?” Michael asked.

  “Because he wanted an excuse to lose. He didn’t have the guts to lose on his own. If people saw him out drinking, then they could say that he lost because he didn’t care. But the strange part is that later on, he’d sneak into the gym to make up for what he did wrong.”

  “He’d sneak in?”

  “There was a part of him that actually wanted to win. It was kind of like hedging his bet. You know, he might actually have to fight, so maybe that would give him a chance, if he actually was in shape.”

  “Well, what happened to him?” Michael asked.

  “One day, he met somebody who understood what he was doing. This guy told him he knew and he said, ‘Now you can’t hide no more. I know what you’re doing. I know you’re sneaking into the gym. Now if you lose it’s not because you’re not in shape. Which means either you better quit entirely or start giving yourself reasons to win instead of reasons to lose.’”

  “Did he quit?” Michael asked.

  “He became middleweight champion of the world.”

  Michael took that in. “That’s for real? Who is he?”

  “That’s not the point. You know that’s not the point.”

  “Okay. So where we gonna train, Teddy?”

  “Right here.”

  “It’s cold here. I like to train somewhere warm. I don’t—”

  “I don’t care what you like. We’re training here. What else you want to know?”

  He looked at me and I stared right back at him. He looked away and started talking to his son, whispering in his ear and hugging him, and again I knew I was right about him, that he was very, very weak but wished he could be strong.

  Cus always used to tell me that when fighters came to the Gramercy Gym on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan that he knew the minute they walked in the door if they had a chance to become a fighter. There were three flights of steps to get to that place. Three long flights. Cus said that as you walked up those steps you would hear different things at each level. “When you got to the first level you could just start to hear the speed bag. By the second level you could hear the heavy bag. At the third level you began to hear people sparring, gloves hitting flesh, grunting. Each level forced you to consider anew whether you wanted to keep going….” By the time someone finally came through the door of the gym, Cus was in a position where he could see them. He said, “If they walked in alone, they had a shot. If they walked in with a friend or their father, I didn’t want them. To me, if
they made that journey up those three flights of steps by themselves, they had already exhibited a certain amount of ability to be a fighter. They had shown discipline and control. If they needed someone with them, either I didn’t want them or I said, ‘I got a hell of a job on my hands.’”

  I thought about what Cus had said the moment I saw Michael show up with his son. And then again when he focused on his son to avoid dealing with me. As we continued to discuss the possibility and mechanics of my becoming his trainer, the final thing he said to me was, “What time am I gonna run?”

  “Five in the morning.”

  “I always run in the afternoon.”

  “You used to run in the afternoon.”

  “Why is it so important that I run at five in the morning?”

  “Because you don’t want to.”

  Michael grunted, shook his head a little, and let the smallest of smiles form on his lips. That was it, basically. That was the way our initial meeting wrapped up.

  Our first fight together was one that Davimos had already contracted, an HBO bout against Mike Evans. If Michael won that, he would get his shot at the title against Holyfield. So it was a tricky fight, and a dangerous one. If he tripped up, his opportunity would be lost. Given his psyche there were compelling reasons to think that he might mess up for precisely that reason—so he wouldn’t have to face Holyfield.

  We trained in West Orange, New Jersey, for seven weeks, and there were days when he would start to get out of the ring right in the middle of a sparring session. When he tried, I put my leg in front of his head, blocking him, and said, “What are you doing?”

  “Your leg’s in my way.”

  “No, your head’s in my way. Get your freakin’ head back in the ring.”

  He backed down and got back in the ring. That was on an easy day. On a tough day, he might refuse to even get in the ring. One time, he took off his headgear in the middle of a sparring session and started to climb out between the ropes. I tried to stop him.

  “Where do you think you’re goin’?”

  “I don’t feel good.”

  “Yeah? What’s wrong?”

  “My wrist is sore.” He climbed out and tried to move past me.

  I grabbed his headgear out of his hand and threw it across the room. “If you don’t want to be a fighter, then get out and get out for good!”

  It was a very fine line you had to walk as a trainer. The guy could really be hurting, and if that was the case, it was your responsibility not to get him injured further. But I had good instincts. I usually knew what I was looking at. My father had been the same way. I remember this time when I was a kid, telling him that I was sick and couldn’t go to school.

  “Your stomach hurts?” he said, putting his fingers on my stomach.

  “Yeah.”

  “What else do you feel?”

  I laid it on thick, a real Academy Award performance, groaning and grimacing as I described my symptoms. When I was finished, he looked at me and said, “All right, now get dressed and go to school.”

  That’s how it was with me and Michael. I knew when it was real and when it was a lie. I knew he was trying to escape. I wouldn’t let him. He had been getting away with crap his whole life. I knew if I let him slide even one time, I’d lose my authority. I knew, no matter what his actions showed, that in the end he did want to face his fears. He just needed some help.

  Still, there were times when we’d leave a training session barely speaking to each other, or with me having nearly threatened him. Then, later that night, ten or eleven o’clock, he’d call me and say, “Are we okay?,” because he was afraid that he might have lost me, that maybe I wasn’t coming into the gym the next day. He didn’t understand how I was built. That my not coming in would have been like my father not showing up at his office or not going out on a house call when he was needed. For my part, I couldn’t comprehend him feeling that way at first, but then I remembered something that Davimos had told me, that all the other guys—Benton, Steward, Duva—had left him. Every one of them had left. Just like his father had left him when he was a kid. Then it made sense.

  Anyway, I managed to get him through the training camp, and he won the Evans fight, though he didn’t look good doing it. I was still learning about him. There were things I didn’t have a good handle on. In the dressing room, before the fight, he suddenly wanted everything quiet, no music or anything. He even lay down and tried to sleep. He was going into his shell, trying to avoid thinking about the fight, but I didn’t fully realize it. I indulged him. Coming out of the dressing room, I tried to pep him up a bit, but I didn’t do enough. He was lethargic and it showed in the ring. The lesson wasn’t lost on me.

  It has also occurred to me that I was less focused at the time than I should have been. Looking back now, that seems entirely possible. My father had died two weeks before the day of the fight.

  What had happened was that three months earlier, at the age of eighty-eight, he had decided to get a hip replacement. What a tough son of a bitch he was! His heart had been skipping for years, and he was taking medication for it, but he didn’t care about the risks of undergoing a major surgery at his age and in his condition. He felt the pain in his hip was bad enough that it was worth any risk. The doctors he consulted told him surgery was a lousy idea, but he was a different kind of man, my father. He insisted, and nobody could tell him otherwise.

  He had the surgery done on Friday the thirteenth, 1993. Everybody busted his chops for that. “What are you getting an operation on Friday the freaking thirteenth for?” He said, “What difference does it make?” We all said, “Do it some other day.” But my father looked everything right in the face. “No, it’s a good day, as good as any day.”

  The surgery went well. It was a success. The next day an intern stopped by his room—the main doctors were gone for the weekend—and my father very calmly told him, “Give me one hundred cc’s of heparin.” Or whatever it was.

  The intern said, “I can’t do that. You just had an operation.”

  “I’m having a heart attack,” my father said. “So you’re going to have to give it to me.”

  “But you can’t take that,” the intern said. The drug my father was asking for was an anticoagulant that was used to combat heart attacks, but it would also have thinned the blood and quite possibly have led to a hemorrhage in his hip.

  “Listen,” my father said, “if you don’t give me what I’m asking for, I’ll have a massive heart attack and die in two or three hours.”

  “Dr. Atlas,” the intern said, “I really think what you’re feeling is just anxiety from the operation.”

  “I don’t have anxiety,” my father said. “I have never had anxiety.” The intern stood there uncertainly. “Let me put it another way,” my father said. “If you were fixing a car and you were going to do something that would destroy the brakes, but if you didn’t do it the engine would be ruined, you’d give up the brakes. Now you’re right to worry about hemorrhaging. I might die from hemorrhaging. But I will definitely die from a heart attack if you don’t do what I say.”

  “I’m sorry,” the intern said, “but I disagree with your diagnosis.” He refused to administer the heparin.

  Three hours later, as he had predicted, my father had a massive heart attack. I got there late that night. My mother called me and I went straight to the hospital. I was upset, obviously, but I didn’t let anyone see. My father had never wanted any of us to show emotion.

  I walked into the hospital room and he was on a ventilator. Like I said, he was a tough bastard. The heart attack hadn’t killed him. With the help of the ventilator, he hung on for months. I was there with him every day for hours, half-asleep, walking the halls. He was a medical marvel. I’d hear doctors going, “Boy, that guy’s incredible. Can you believe he’s still alive?” At first I didn’t even realize it was him they were talking about. It was like the scene in The Godfather with Brando. “He took eight shots and he’s still alive, the son of a bitc
h!”

  Eventually, I put things together, as far as what had happened to him. My mother and sister had been in the room at the time, so I got the information from them. No one else in my family really wanted to deal with it. This was the hospital my father had founded and loved. But what had happened made me furious. I went right to the director of the hospital and said, “Your doctors killed him!”

  He said, “Teddy, I think you’re overreacting.”

  “Don’t tell me I’m fucking overreacting. Your incompetence is going to cost this doctor, my father, his life.”

  They were afraid I was going to sue the hospital. But in the end I couldn’t do it. It was his hospital, and I couldn’t do it.

  He stayed alive for three months. He couldn’t talk, but he understood everything, and he could write things down in this scribble on a pad. One day, he indicated to me that he wanted all the medicines that were on the intravenous—and there must have been twenty of them—turned around so that he could see what they were. He pointed a finger toward his eyes, and I got his glasses and put them on him. Then he motioned that he wanted the IV rolled closer. I rolled it closer. He pointed at one of the medicines and nodded at me.

  I called in a nurse and said to her, “One of his medicines is wrong.”

  “Honey, your father is under a lot of medication.”

  “No, no, no, I’m telling you, one of the medicines is wrong. Please! Please call the pharmacist downstairs and have him check it.”

  So she called the pharmacist and he looked it up in his book, and he told her, “He’s right. Get him off of it right away. He’s right!”

  My father nodded at me, a slight smile, and it was like I was transported back to being a kid again, going out on house calls with him. I was so proud to be connected to him. It was equal to being in the dugout watching Mickey Mantle hit home runs, or on the court as Michael Jordan drove the baseline. I was right there. I was a part of it. It was just me and him, my childhood hero, on the field together. Only here he was doing it on his deathbed.