Atlas (31 page)

“That's nasty,” Michael said. “
Nasty.
These damn Koreans. They sold me used clippers. I can't wait till you go up to them and tell 'em who the hell they're dealing with.”

“I ain't going.”

“You gotta go.”

“I'm not going.”

“You gotta.”

We went back and forth like that idiotically. In the end I realized that it was a losing battle, that with Michael this was part of the deal, and if I didn't give in he would make me pay some other way. I put on my T-shirt.

Michael said, “Teddy, what are you going to do if he says, ‘Fuck you, nigger, I ain't giving you your money back.'”

“I'm not gonna do a thing,” I said, “because it will be obvious at that point that he isn't talking to me.”

“Come on. Come on. You're gonna go crazy. I know you will.”

I could only shake my head as I laced up my sneakers. We got in his
truck and drove downtown. Before we got there, I laid down the law. “Listen to me. I'm telling you right now, Michael, when we go in, you keep your mouth shut. Let me do all the talking. Do not say a damn word.”

He wasn't listening; he was rubbing his hands together, saying to Flem, “Wait till Teddy takes care of this guy.”

We drove over to the place, a Korean variety and electronics store, and Michael jumped out of the truck. He told Flem to give him the glass of water, and when Flem handed it to him, he held it out in front of him at a distance from his body, like it was a urine sample.

“Remember,” I warned him. “Keep your mouth shut. I'm not playing with you.”

I opened the door of the store. There was a guy to one side, behind a counter. “Is that him?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“All right, now be quiet.”

I walked over to the counter, with Michael and Flem behind me. The guy behind the counter was in his twenties and had a wide, flat face and a full head of jet-black hair. I looked at him in a certain way, very cold, and put the clippers down on the counter. I opened up the box.

“These are used,” I said. “I want my money back.”

He looked at me, and started to say something, but I stared at him so cold and so hard that he changed his mind. I kept staring at him, and finally he rung open the cash register. He used his two forefingers to slide six twenty-dollar bills out from under the spring arm, then he handed them to me.

I turned around and said, “Let's go.”

Michael started in with the guy. “Man, you nasty,” he said. He couldn't let it be. “You
nasty.
”

“Michael.” I tugged his arm.

“You thought you was gonna get away with it, didn't you?”

“Michael. Shut up. We got our money. Let's go.”

I had to drag him out the door. He was growling and cursing the whole way.

 

M
EANTIME, WHILE WE WERE IN TRAINING,
F
OREMAN FOUGHT
Axel Schulz, who was the number-one contender. We watched the fight
on the TV in the hotel bar. It was tough. We were the ones who should've been fighting Foreman. We would have been if he and his managers hadn't screwed us. Even so, we were cheering for him. If he won he'd have to give us a rematch. But Schulz was not being cooperative. A crew-cut German, not great in any one area, but pretty good technically, with a good chin and some confidence, Schulz was making the fight close. We were on the edge of our seats, watching. At the final bell, it was too close to call. A lot of people thought Schulz actually won, but the judges gave it to Foreman. In my mind, it was a fair decision.

At the last second, the guy we were supposed to fight in our comeback bout fell out. They got another fighter to fill in, Melvin Foster, who was trained by Victor Valle. I didn't like the change and balked. They begged me to go forward. They flew guys out to Sacramento to talk to me. It was like the Camp David Summit. Eventually, I relented, but then I had only two days to get Michael prepped for Foster. Two days! I brought film in. We had to cram to adjust to a completely different style. But we did it. We won a unanimous decision.

The toughest part, really, was the first round. Anytime you have a fighter coming off a knockout, the first round is tricky. When Michael came back to the corner after the opening three minutes, I didn't criticize him at all. I just allowed him to sit. I said, “Welcome back. Now you know you're okay. Let's just fight a regular fight.” George Foreman was the commentator again, and he said something nice. He said, “That Teddy Atlas is a pretty smart guy. He knows what a fighter's thinking. He knows just what to say.” Everyone was startled by that. People said to me, “He gave you that compliment even though you went after him?” But George was a smart son of a bitch. He was like the Godfather. It was always business with him. It was never personal.

Despite our hopes for the rematch with George, it never happened. He wanted to go his own way, and as a result he was stripped of his title. Then King and Bob Lee tried to do an end-around, and have Schulz and François Botha, who was a King fighter, fight for the vacated title. They told us maybe we would be next, but who knew? So we took them to court. We had lots of ammo, evidence of payoffs and graft, things like that. Pat English, our lawyer, put a very good lawsuit together. (It prompted a federal investigation that eventually led to an indictment of Bob Lee, who is currently in jail as a result.) Ultimately, a settlement was
reached, in which we dropped the lawsuit in return for a title shot against the winner of the Schulz-Botha fight. But when Botha tested positive for steroids, King and Lee tried to void the agreement, so we had to bring a second lawsuit, which we won, and which resulted in Michael getting his shot against Schulz.

The Schulz fight was a challenge, more because of the circumstances than because of his abilities as a fighter. The biggest obstacle was that we had to go fight in an outdoor stadium in Dortmund, Germany, and try not to get robbed. That might sound like an exaggeration, but it's not. We had to exert all our muscle and influence to get the right judges. That was the key to that fight. We won because we won the fight before the fight. We wound up getting two honest judges, and that was the difference in a split decision. That's what boxing is about sometimes, I'm sorry to say.

My method in the corner on that fight was the opposite of the Holyfield fight, where I was always going to the whip. Michael needed something else. In one round, I said, “All right, Michael, I know you've been wanting to hear it and you never hear it—I care about you. Okay? I care about you. You're important to me.”

He looked at me, because he had always told Elaine, “You know, I love him, but he's too tough, he'll never say he loves me. How come he can never say he loves me? I know he does. How come he can never say it?”

Now, in the middle of this fight, when I needed him to care, I said, “All right, I care about you.” I couldn't say the other word, but I said, “I care. Now it's time for you to care. You've got to be able to say, ‘I care. I care about winning that title. I care about putting myself out there and daring to be champion again. I care.'”

He looked at me and he said, “All right.”

After that, Michael picked up his pace and did what he had to do. He won back the title. Outdoors. In Germany. In someone else's backyard, with thirty-five thousand fans rooting for his opponent. Following a loss in which he had been devastated by a forty-four-year-old fighter who had God on his side. I allowed myself to feel pretty good about that. In some ways I appreciated it more than winning the title from Holyfield.

 

W
HEN WE DEFENDED OUR
IBF
CHAMPIONSHIP FOR THE FIRST
time, against François Botha, it was part of a night of champions that also featured Holyfield defending his WBA title against Mike Tyson. It marked the first time that I would be involved in a Tyson fight since I'd left Catskill. To make it even more interesting, if we beat Botha, we were going to fight the winner of that fight for ten million dollars.

I came to the press conference at the Rainbow Room prepared for anything. I brought a few guys with me that I trusted would be with me if I needed them. Tyson was known for trying to disrespect people in these situations, trying to break people, trying to intimidate people—even doing more than that, like he did with Lennox Lewis later on. He used to go up to people and tell them that he'd “rape” them. I wasn't going to put up with any of that. If we got into it as a result, so be it. If I went down, I wasn't going down without inflicting some damage. So I was there with my friends, Bobby, Louie, and Eddie. We were well dressed and well behaved, quiet, not looking at anybody. King recognized the situation. He came right over on the stage and put his hands out and said, “Teddy, nice to meet you.” I didn't say a word. I shook his hand. You could see he understood the playing field.

Tyson had this guy Crocodile who had just gotten out of prison. He used him to intimidate people. Crocodile was talking all this shit, jawing at Holyfield, and at one point he stopped and looked at me. I thought he might be wanting to start in with me. I stared right back at him—and if there's such a thing as sending mind messages out, I sent them. The telepathic message he received was roughly: “Don't continue looking at me, and don't even think about saying anything, because if you say anything to us, I will be up and I will be on my way to you.” Apparently, it worked. He looked away. And Tyson took note.

Once we got to Vegas, other stuff happened, although not, for the most part, with Tyson. There was a writer who showed up at the Grand for the fight, a guy I'd done a lot for when he was a kid, who was now putting out a crummy boxing rag that Don King was funding. He wrote some nasty, slanted stuff about me. When I saw him, I lost it. I'm not proud to say that, but this guy was a real jackal, so I'm not sorry, either.
I also think I was in a slightly deranged state of mind with Tyson around. Anyway, I went after him. The funny part was that I was on my way to do a live interview with CNN at the time. My friend Mike Boorman was coordinating it. He was up on the podium they'd built, waiting for me to get over there from the weigh-in. The interview was all set up, Boorman was on a walkie-talkie, and a guy was walking me over. Suddenly, across the floor of the convention hall, I caught sight of this piece of shit “writer”—I hesitate to even use the word, because he wasn't a real writer.

The CNN guy said to Boorman, “You got Teddy Atlas, right?” Boorman was looking down at me as I walked across this vast carpeted floor. He knew the whole story about me and this guy, and he had begged me not to do anything. Begged me. “Please, Teddy! The guy's not worth it.” But he also knew me. So he was holding the walkie-talkie, saying to the producer, “Yeah, I see Teddy. He's on his way. He'll be here in sixty sec—” All of a sudden he stopped. “Uh…we might have a problem.”

“A problem? A problem? What kind of problem? We're on the air in two minutes.”

“He just made a left instead of a right.”

“What?”

“Look down on the casino floor, at one o'clock.”

The CNN producer looked down—and watched as I suddenly veered off in a direction that did not lead to the podium. I beelined toward this writer and cracked him one in the jaw. The CNN guy went, “Oh my God!” Meanwhile, security was racing over, the cameras were rolling, and as they pulled me off this piece of trash, some of my guys, who were trailing me, got into it. I tried to keep them out of it, because it was just about him and me, but I couldn't stop one of them, Bobby, from hitting the guy a few times. Boorman said to the CNN producer, “It doesn't look like Teddy's going to be available. You want me to see if I can get someone else?”

When I showed up for the glove selection twenty minutes later, my shirt was torn, I had blood on my hands, and I was still a little keyed up. Now, Frans Botha happened to be trained by Panama Lewis, a guy who was a real lowlife. They were probably not the best kind of people for me to be mixing with in the kind of mood I was in.

Lewis was infamous for having given Aaron Pryor water that was allegedly juiced during his fight against Alexis Arguello, enabling Pryor to win. Also, and more seriously, he had removed the padding from Luis
Resto's gloves in a fight where Resto nearly killed Billy Collins. The young and until then undefeated Collins saw his boxing career ended by this abominable act—and a year or so later, having become an alcoholic, he died in a car wreck. Lewis spent a year in Rikers for that and got thrown out of boxing for life—or at least boxing's version of banned for life. In actuality, the only thing he couldn't do was work his fighter's corner during a fight. Otherwise, his restrictions were few. So here we were, picking out gloves for the fight, Lewis and this wannabe wiseguy manager, and me and Lou Duva. A number of press guys had followed me in from the lobby, literally smelling blood.

Almost immediately, things got contentious; I don't even remember over what. In the middle of our heated exchange, Panama Lewis turned to Lou Duva and said, “Hey, Lou, you better calm down. You might have a heart attack.”

Something snapped in me when he said that. I grabbed the neck of his shirt.
“Oh yeah? You'll be the one fucking dropping dead! You'll be the one!
You apologize right now!
Right now!
We don't fucking talk this way
because we're fucking gentlemen here! We're gentlemen!”
Everybody was watching, their jaws hanging open but not a peep coming out. How they could keep a straight face with me yelling at the top of my lungs, “We're fucking gentlemen here!,” I don't know.

I picked out a pair of gloves and signed them. Usually, the other camp would get the first choice of the backup gloves, but I was so geared up I didn't wait. I picked out my backup gloves, too. Not one word was uttered in protest. Afterward, Lou Duva said to me, “You could have put a freakin' horseshoe in one of the gloves, and they would have said, ‘You want to put one in the other glove, too?'”