Atlas (9 page)

The mortician had found a bullet hole near her ear and called the cops. It wasn't a cerebral hemorrhage at all. The fact that my father, the legendary Dr. Atlas, had missed something so crucial and apparently obvious was puzzling. One of the detectives said, “Of course we know that you would never have intentionally tried to cover this up….” But the implication was there. Faced suddenly with a very different set of facts, my father immediately understood the truth: “Let me call the house, and make sure Tommy doesn't leave,” he said. There was another problem—namely, me. He knew right away that Tommy had done it, but he must have had some fears about the way I would react. That's why he asked for Ralph first. But when Ralph passed off the phone to me, he had no choice except to tell me.

“I gotta go get Tommy,” I said as soon as I heard that the cops were on their way. “Get him out of here.” That was my instinct. The thing my father had been afraid of.

“Wait a minute!” he yelled with a ferociousness that shook me. There was no in-between with my father. He either said nothing and kept his feelings to himself—or he exploded. “You've done a lot of things wrong in your life! Don't let this be another one!”

Maybe there was nothing worse he could have said to me at that moment. Here, I'd been up in Catskill, trying to turn my life around, and
he said this thing that made me feel as though what I'd been doing didn't count, or he hadn't noticed, or didn't care. Of course, there was truth to what he'd said, too. That was why it hurt so much.

“You've screwed up a lot of things,” he said. “You've hurt your family enough. Don't screw this up!”

He hung up on me, and I lowered the phone, looking at Ralph Metz. For some reason, Ralph couldn't even meet my eyes. I found out why almost immediately, as he grabbed his coat out of the closet and headed for the front door. Here was this guy, who was supposed to be my father's best friend, walking out of the house. Just abandoning fuckin' ship.
You piece of shit,
I thought. I started up the stairs toward my brother's room. Everyone in the kitchen saw Ralph leaving. They knew that it had been my father on the phone. It was clear something was wrong.

“Ralph, wait,” my mother said. He was the one they focused on. The guy who was walking out the door, who knew the police were coming and didn't want to get involved.

I got to my brother's room and opened the door, and there he was, stretched out on his bed, asleep. In that moment, looking at him, I knew that my father was right, that Tommy had murdered my grandmother. I don't know why I knew that, because Tommy looked so peaceful lying there. In sleep, his handsome, square-jawed face was nearly angelic. There was no sign of torment, no way of understanding the demons inside. I stood a few feet inside the door, looking at him, knowing the police were coming, knowing that I had to make a choice. Did I wake him up, get him out of there, and worry about the consequences later? Or did I do what my father wanted?

Every instinct in me told me not to abandon my brother. At the same time I was afraid of my father. I could still hear his words echoing in my head. How I'd let everyone down in the past, and how I was about to do it again.

I don't know how long I stood there, but the next thing I knew there were loud voices, footsteps thundering up the stairs. It was too late. The door flew open behind me, four cops rushed into the room, and I was thrown aside. I could hear my mother and everyone screaming.

When I looked over at Tommy, they had him belly-down on the floor, head turned to one side, and they were slapping cuffs on him. One of the cops was holding me back, and two of them were holding him
down, but somehow Tommy's eyes went right to mine, as if he knew I'd been standing there watching him all that time. There was no madness in his eyes, no anger, he was just looking at me. His older brother.

One of the cops flipped over his mattress, and there it was, a .22 rifle. They got Tommy to his feet, marched him past me, down the stairs and out the front door. I followed. The street was icy. Tommy slipped as they hustled him toward the open back door of a patrol car, but they didn't let him fall. They held him up, and then they shoved him in the backseat, a hand on his head so he didn't crack himself on the car's door frame. All the noise from the house became distant to me as I watched the cop car pull away, the light on top spinning.

After he was gone, I stood there for a couple of minutes. I didn't want to talk to anybody, so I got in my car and started driving. I was in a dangerous state of mind. I remember that I started running red lights, hoping something would happen. Logically, I knew that my brother was not well. That didn't make me feel any better about how I had acted. Everyone had a price. Mine had been my father's approval. All the things I'd gone through that time I hadn't signed that sheet the cops put in front of me—now, I was just another guy who'd signed.

I must have run fifteen or twenty red lights, pushing my foot to the floor each time I approached an intersection. If there was such a thing as it not being your time, then I guess it wasn't my time. Eventually, I wound up in Greenwich Village, outside Brother Tim's place on Waverly. I double-parked and waited for him. I knew that he left for Rikers each morning around five a.m. Sure enough, a few minutes before five, the door opened and he came out, wearing his blue pea coat and watch cap.

“Teddy, what are you doing here?” he said when he saw me. He knew it must have been something bad. It wasn't even light out yet.

I told him what had happened. He said, “Oh, my God.” He put his arm around me. “I'm so sorry.”

“I feel like I was supposed to do something more, like I let Tommy down,” I said. I told him about running the red lights. It was tough to admit it to him, because it felt like weakness.

“Teddy, I want you to listen to me,” Brother Tim said. “Sometimes there's nothing you can do for a person. It becomes more important to save yourself. You've gotten on a good track with your life. You mustn't stop now. Those kids in Catskill need you.”

“But what about Tommy?”

“I'll pray for him,” Brother Tim said.

Somehow the fact that I made it there that morning, that I ran all those red lights hoping something would happen and nothing did, got me past my darkest urges. At least that was the last day of that period of my life when I could act like I didn't care.

S
OMETIME IN THE FALL OF
1979, C
US GOT A CALL
from a guy named Bobby Stewart, who was a counselor at the Tryon reform school in Johnstown, New York. He had a twelve-year-old kid under his charge there he wanted us to take a look at. The kid's name was Mike Tyson.

Stewart, a former U.S. Golden Gloves light heavyweight champ and, briefly, a pro, was in charge of Elmwood Cottage, a disciplinary dorm where the worst kids at Tryon often wound up. Tyson, recently arrived from the Spofford Juvenile Detention Center in the Bronx, landed in Elmwood after going into a rage and beating up a kid while in one of the lower-security cottages. The violent outburst wasn't surprising to anyone who knew Tyson's background. This was a poor kid, raised in the worst section of Brooklyn, who had accumulated, by the age of eleven, a rap sheet longer than the menu in a Greek diner. What set Tyson apart from most other violent young kids his age was his freakish physical size—five feet nine inches, a muscular hundred and ninety pounds—along with a survivor's instinct for self-improvement. It's unlikely, but not entirely out of the question, that the incident that got Tyson moved to Elmwood was calculated. He had been intent on meeting Bobby Stewart from the
moment he learned Stewart was a former pro fighter. The assault—premeditated or not—helped him achieve that goal.

Tyson, like a lot of kids from rough backgrounds, saw boxing as a way out. When then-champ Muhammad Ali had visited Spofford the previous year, the impact on Tyson had been huge. Seeing “the Greatest” in the flesh was exciting enough for an underprivileged kid, but even more mind-bending was to see the way the other kids and the guards reacted to him, the way they hung on his every word and smiled and tried to touch him. If that's what being the champ of the world got you, then Tyson wanted to be champ of the world. In Bobby Stewart, he saw someone who might be able to help him—if not to become a champion boxer, at least to help him improve his immediate situation and maybe gain him some special privileges.

Stewart, for his part, saw in this kid someone he might be able to help. He used boxing lessons as an incentive and a tool to get Tyson to behave better. It gives you a measure of Tyson's ambition: He was so determined to take what he needed from Bobby Stewart that, to prove to his prospective mentor that he was sincere, this supposedly uncontrollable kid became a model inmate.

When Stewart began teaching him, several things became apparent almost immediately. First, and most obvious, was that Tyson was tremendously large and powerful for his age. Second, he was a prodigiously gifted athlete with exceptional hand speed. Third, and perhaps most impressive, he was a sponge who soaked up everything Stewart threw at him and then asked for more.

After a few months, Stewart decided he needed another set of eyes to confirm that this kid was as special as he thought, so he took Tyson over to Matt Baranski's Trinity Club in Albany. Baranski had trained Stewart in his amateur career (and would later become Tyson's cut man in the professional ranks). He seconded his former pupil's assessment. The two discussed what to do next. Neither Baranski nor Stewart felt they had the time or the resources to unlock Tyson's full potential. They both knew Cus and Jimmy Jacobs (Stewart had been managed by Jacobs during his brief pro career), and they knew about the program I'd been running for kids, some of whom actually lived in the house with us. It could be a good situation for Tyson, they agreed. They should definitely try to get Cus to take a look.

Bobby Stewart made the call. “The kid's pretty good,” he told Cus, “but I think I've taken him as far as I can.”

Cus agreed to let them come down. He came to me and said, “I want your input, Teddy. You're the one who'll be working with him. Maybe Stewart is right and he's a special kid.”

The day Stewart brought Tyson down, Cus showed up at the gym with his friend Don Shanager. I was training four of Shanager's sons, and he told me, only half jokingly, that I was the reason they weren't dead. He said he would have killed them if boxing and training with me hadn't steadied them out and calmed them down. Shanager was a transplanted New York character, a hard-drinking Irishman who did some bookmaking down in Queens and considered himself sharper than the country bumpkins in Catskill. He enjoyed being around Cus and ate up his stories, so Cus liked that. Also, Shanager was a bit of a finagler and had political connections in town, which made him potentially useful. That's the way Cus thought about things.

Anyway, it was the three of us there in the gym when Stewart showed up in the prison van—he had Tyson with him, and the kid was as impressive a physical specimen as advertised. A hundred and ninety pounds of pure muscle. It was hard to believe that he was an adolescent. In fact, when Stewart was gloving him up, Shanager said, “I gotta see this kid's birth certificate. The only way he's twelve years old is if he laid in his mother's blubber for twelve years before they discovered him.” That was the way Shanager talked.

Stewart actually had documentation. The kid was twelve. You have to imagine it. I was up in the ring with them, Stewart and Tyson. Cus and Shanager were sitting in these folding seats outside the ring. Cus wore his glasses. Stewart, as I said, was a former pro fighter, with about fourteen fights. He was twenty-eight, a light heavyweight. A man. And he was in there with a twelve-year-old kid. True, the kid outweighed him by a few pounds, but he was a kid. He couldn't even get into an R-rated movie by himself. It was one thing to look imposing; there were plenty of guys with impressive physiques who could shake the bag if you let them. It was something else entirely to put the gloves on and try to deal with another fighter.

Normally, with a green kid like this, we wouldn't put him in the ring, but this was an unusual situation. It was a one-day audition, and we
needed to find out about Tyson; we needed to see his character and find out some things about him that we weren't going to find out by watching him hit a bag. It was understood that if we decided we wanted to get involved, there would be no more boxing until we taught him what we needed to teach him. But for this day what made sense was to see him box.

Tyson knew this day was important. He was nervous and he wanted to impress. Stewart, for his part, had a true desire to help him. He was hoping that we'd get involved, because, let's face it, Tyson was getting out of reform school in several months, and he had no life waiting for him. If he went back to Brownsville, there was a very good chance he'd wind up in prison again, maybe a more serious prison. This was a road out, a real way for him to alter the course of his life.

When the bell rang, Tyson came at Stewart hard. He was extremely aggressive. You could see right away how strong he was. He fired shots at Stewart's ribs and stomach, and they hurt. I saw Stewart wincing. Tyson was extremely raw. His technique was crude. But there was a quickness and resolve in his attack that was unusual in an unschooled fighter. Stewart had to keep hitting him just to hold him off.

In the second round, Tyson got a bloody nose, but by then I had seen enough. Stewart was working hard as hell to keep him in his place, to keep from being overrun by this kid's power, and that told us a lot. We were professionals. We knew what we were looking at.

At the end of the second round, I looked over at Cus. He was smiling. I shouted, “Okay, that's it, that's enough!” Cus already knew I was going to be the kid's trainer, so he just sat there, watching and not saying anything, wanting to see how I handled things.

Tyson objected in that lispy voice of his, which was an octave higher then, “No, no. I'm going another round. I want another round.” He was trying to show how tough he was, because he wanted to be accepted by us, he wanted to ace his audition. His life audition.

I already knew what was going to happen. I knew that I would be working with him, and it was important to establish the way things would be. I said, “That's it! Get out of the ring! Two rounds is all you're going today.”

The way I said it stopped him for a moment. He didn't really want to go another round. He wanted me to think that he wanted to go, but he
didn't really want to. He kept making a fuss, looking over at Stewart and saying, “We always go three rounds.”

I got up in his face. “That's it, you're done! Now get out of the ring!” I wiped off his nose with a towel, and he stopped.

I was showing him that I knew he was coming back and that I knew I was going to be in charge of him. Cus always said that I was born to be a teacher—and part of it, I guess, was that I could recognize what was going on with a kid like this and know what I needed to do.

Of course, Cus was also flattering me, throwing me pieces of candy like that. He was good at it. He knew when I needed stroking. I remember one day, a year or two after this first encounter we had with Tyson, Cus and I were sitting in a lunch counter in Catskill, eating cheeseburgers. The guy behind the counter, the owner, said to me, “I saw you on ESPN the other night….” I was training Rooney at the time and the fight had been on TV. Cus jumped right in. He said to the guy, “This is the Young Master. This is Teddy Atlas, the Young Master.”

When we went to pay, the guy waved his hand and said, “No charge.” He was a boxing fan and he wanted to buy us our cheeseburgers. Cus could have been gracious about it and just said thanks, but instead he said, “One of these days Atlas will come back here and buy this place out from under you. This is the Young Master and he's going to be rich and famous and have nothing but world champions.” Meanwhile, I could barely afford a freaking cheeseburger—it was lucky the guy was treating. All the same, I walked out of that diner feeling like I already owned it and was a successful trainer of world champions. That's how intoxicating it was to hear that stuff.

So now, here we were, standing outside the ring with Tyson and Stewart and Don Shanager, and Cus turned to me and said, “What do you think?”

“Strong kid. He can learn.”

“This young man can be heavyweight champion of the world,” Cus said. “He might be your first heavyweight champ, Atlas.”

It was extraordinary when you think about it. When you put it into words it sounds too much like some hoked-up Hollywood moment. But he actually said that. He said, “You and I will teach him, Atlas, and if this young man listens and does what we say and lets us take him there, he will be heavyweight champion someday.”

Tyson soaked up Cus's words. He let himself smile a little smile. Cus was like the Al Pacino character in
The Godfather
when he sees the beautiful girl in Sicily. It was the thunderbolt. Love at first sight. He said, “We'll make arrangements when he gets paroled for him to come live with us.” He turned to Tyson. “Would you like to come live with us?”

This all happened within an hour—it was incredibly fast. For someone else it might have been too fast, but really, when you think about it, what was this kid, with no real home, nothing to go back to, going to say? Especially when visions of fame and glory were dancing in his brain. So Tyson said, “Yes, live where? Your house?”

“Yes,” Cus said. “How would you like that? We could arrange that. You could come live with us and become a fighter. You work hard, you could become champion of the world.”

From what I learned afterward, Tyson kept saying to Bobby Stewart on their way back to Tryon, “Did you hear what he said? Did you?”

Tyson wasn't due to be released for four months or so, but Cus didn't want to waste any time. He was lazy about a lot of things—he would eat his tuna fish and watch
Barney Miller
and walk around in his bathrobe all day—but now for the first time since I'd been there, he seemed to really wake up and come to life. He said, “Okay, we've got to make sure this gets done, and he comes here to live.” He enlisted Don Shanager's help, because Shanager had a friend in the county office whose approval we'd need before Tyson could be released into our custody.

Meanwhile, during the next few months, while we waited for Tyson's official release, Bobby Stewart brought him in every Monday to train with me. “This way,” Cus said, “by the time he gets out, he'll already be developed to a certain point.” I worked with him, showing him moves and combinations, and he'd go back to Tryon and, in every spare moment he had, practice the things I'd taught him. I heard that a couple of guards found him in his room one night past midnight, grunting and snorting as he shadowboxed in the pitch dark.

One stipulation of him being released into our custody was that he spend a couple of weekends at the house to see how it would go. During his first sleepover, we were eating dinner, and the table was crammed with food as usual because Cus, as was his way, had forced
Camille to cook too much. I'd helped her count the number of chicken legs we needed, but Cus barged into the kitchen and insisted we needed more. “I eat six,” he said, “so if everybody eats six, there won't be enough.”

“But nobody eats six chicken legs.”

“I eat six,” Cus said. “And if everybody else eats six, one person will be left with five.”

“No, that's it,” Camille said. “Thirty chicken legs is enough. I'm not cooking any more.”

At that point, Cus went into the refrigerator and found a frozen kielbasa sausage to add to the feast. “Cook this, just in case,” he said. So we had thirty chicken legs and a big kielbasa sausage, plus mashed potatoes, string beans, peas, carrots, baskets of bread, all of it served in these big, heavy dishes that weighed down the table.

Tyson was sitting there with us, his back facing the cabinets, a little overwhelmed by the contrast between this warm, bountiful dinner table and what he was used to. Everything with him was “Yes, sir” and “No, sir,” and I knew it was all bullshit. In fact, later on, when he had moved in, I actually said to him one day, “Stop with the ‘Yes, sir,' because in a few months you're going to be wanting to say something a whole lot less ingratiating, like ‘fuck you,' but you're not going to be allowed to say that. So don't go too far in this direction, either.”