Atlas (23 page)

“It's better to take the day off today. That's what I think,” I said. “I don't want you to be faking it. It's not healthy.”

We turned back. At first Gerard didn't say anything more. He wasn't much of a talker anyway. But then he turned to me and said, “I don't know what I want. I don't know what I wanna be.”

“That's okay. You're young,” I said.

“Sometimes I think about being a fireman. What do you think about that?”

“I think that's good.”

“Really?”

“A fireman's good.”

“Yeah, I think of that sometimes. But I don't know….”

“A lot of people don't know what they wanna be,” I said. “Especially at your age.”

“You really think I could be a fireman?”

I felt for Gerard because I understood what he was wrestling with. He was afraid to tell his father what he was feeling. Like every son, he just wanted his father's approval, and he was afraid to tell him. Even though he was hesitant with me, I could tell that he was talking more freely than he ever had with his father. It made me feel bad for him. I knew how much Sammy was a prisoner of his need to be a tough guy, and how his son was really just an extension of that need. Gerard was paying a big price for something that had more to do with his father than it did with him.

Near the end of October, a woman named Louise Rizzuto, who was friends with Louie and Sammy and me, called up. She was crying.

“What's the matter?” I said.

“Louie will tell you,” she said. “He's on his way over to see you.”

“Did something happen to Sammy?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

“He'll tell you.”

As soon as I hung up, I got a call from Louie. “Meet me downstairs,” he said.

I walked downstairs, I didn't take the elevator. As I was going, it hit me, it just clicked. The fucking guy flipped. I tried not to think that's what it was, because it was as if the fact that I thought it made it true. When I got downstairs, Louie was there, dressed in a suit, as always. “Let's take a walk,” he said.

We went up near the park. It was raining lightly. He was shaking his head slowly and I could see there were tears coming from his eyes. I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Lou,” and he kept walking and looking ahead, not at me.

“This fucking guy. I can't believe he did this.”

Louie had gone to see Sammy that morning at the Manhattan Metropolitan Correctional Center, like he did every day. The MCC was where they kept all the high-profile guys. But Sammy wasn't there. They had taken him out. Before long, every news station had the story. Sammy “the Bull” had turned state's evidence. He was going to be a government witness and testify against his old boss, John Gotti. The headline of the
New York Post
called him “King Rat.” I had seen too much by that point to be surprised by anything. I wasn't alone in that. A New York police detective named Joe Coffey had said about Sammy even before they arrested him, “You see that guy? When we get him he's going to roll like a tumbleweed. 'Cause he's got no balls. Cowards make the best informants.”

The first thing I thought about, though, wasn't that; it was Gerard. I knew he was going to be devastated. It was like he was one of my fighters and I had an obligation and a responsibility to him. Somebody even told me that he was asking for me, and that added to it, knowing that.

It was strange because once his father did what he did, once he flipped, it changed everything. Sammy was no longer perceived as a tough guy and criminal but as something much, much worse. People I talked to were like, “Fuck his kid.” People actually said that. “Fuck the fucking kid, his father's a fucking rat.” I heard that Gerard was afraid that I would abandon him, that I wouldn't be his friend anymore.

I went over to his house that night. I was so naive that I thought I would just be able to go over and see the kid. But when I got off the Staten Island Expressway, the place was surrounded by every news truck in New York. As soon as they saw my car, even though they didn't know
who I was, they started running toward me. I had made the mistake of slowing down, but I recognized what was going on and hit the gas. It was crazy. This mob of TV and print reporters chased after me, running down the street after my car.

I thought about giving up at that point and leaving. A lot of people had been telling me not to continue training Gerard. But I thought,
No, I can't leave. I want the kid to know that I don't hate him. That I haven't abandoned him just because his father is a rat. That would be too easy.
Instead, I ditched my car around the corner and made a mad dash for the house. The news reporters had already backtracked from where they had chased me, but when they saw me sprinting for the house, they tried to cut me off. It was like a freaking hundred-yard dash to the front door.

I got there ahead of them and started banging on the door. The camera guys and reporters were rushing up the walk toward me. Just before they got to me, the door opened and I squeezed in, slamming it shut behind me. Though the outside of the house was fairly ordinary, the inside had a few touches that you might expect to see in a Hollywood movie about a high-profile mob underboss, including a giant saltwater fish tank and a small pool with a waterfall. Sammy's wife, Debra, said, “Teddy, they almost got you, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That was close.”

“It's crazy,” she said. We tried to joke about the situation, but what was going on was no joke. It was real. I could see the pain in her face. There were a bunch of people there, mostly family. The house had the mood of a wake. Debra yelled out, “Gerard! Teddy's here.”

He didn't hear her, or at least he didn't respond.

“He's in the basement,” she said. “Why don't you just go down?”

I went down the stairs. There were weight machines and a Jacuzzi. I remembered that Louie had told me that Sammy had built a big vault into the wall down there, and that sometimes there was so much money in there that it literally went higher than Sammy's head. I wondered where all that money was now.

I found Gerard sitting on a black leather couch, reading a comic book. He looked up. There were tears in his eyes. “Why did he do it, Teddy? Why?” Gerard had always hidden his emotions and had been careful about what he said, but now he looked open and vulnerable and terribly young. “Why did he do that?”

I tried to think of something that would help him. I was thinking about the kid, not the father, even though I had to talk about the father. “You know, sometimes a person is under pressure and he wants to do the right thing but he's just not strong enough to do it. You just never know until you're in that position.”

Gerard was almost sobbing at that point. “I guess what I'm trying to tell you,” I said, “is that the feeling I'm talking about can overwhelm everything else. A guy comes in a room wanting to be a fighter, wanting to go out there and hear the crowd cheer for him and have his hand raised and feel good, but then something happens and suddenly all he can think about is his fear. It becomes too much for him.” When I said “fear,” I thought,
Here I am talking to Sammy's kid about fear when Sammy couldn't even say the word.
I had to push aside what I had been thinking about Sammy. “What I'm trying to tell you,” I went on, “is that what your father did doesn't mean he don't love you. It's just that he couldn't face the fight. Do you understand?”

“Sort of,” Gerard said. “I guess so.”

“It's your father, it's not you. It's his weakness, not yours. But you don't have to hate him for that. He wasn't trying to hurt you. He just wasn't thinking about anything but this fight that he couldn't face.”

I didn't know if Gerard understood what I was trying to tell him or not, or if it helped. I think it might have a little. I told him I'd still train him if he wanted to. I thought it was important to offer him that. He was surprised. “You will?” he said. So we kept training for a couple of weeks after that. But then we stopped. He didn't want to do it anymore. His father wasn't around. His whole reason for training with me in the first place had been to get his father's approval. Now, not only was his father not around, he wasn't the guy he pretended to be, so the kid didn't want to train anymore. I felt bad about it, but there wasn't much I could do.

J
OHN
D
AVIMOS 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.”