Atlas (33 page)

F
OR 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.

I
N A WAY, MY EXPERIENCE WITH
M
ICHAEL, 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 cover 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?”

“We're giving you a check,” Kathy said.

He started crying all over again. “I don't understand. How are you doing this?”

“We already have your name on a list. We did all the work. And we're giving you a check.”

At that point, he turned toward the front of the room, where all the politicians were, and he started yelling, “How come they can do this? Why can they do this and you can't?”

Other families started coming over to us. I think we wrote out thirty thousand dollars in checks that night. I wish we could have done more, but the point is, we've been able to do things that a lot of foundations have trouble doing. Part of the reason we've been able to do that is because we're small. As my father used to say, “Bigger hospital, bigger problems.”

People can face huge problems way beyond their control, but certain things aren't impossible to solve. There was a five-year-old boy with lymphoma cancer. His parents ran out of money and couldn't pay their health insurance. They started paying with their credit cards but soon
maxed them out. They'd heard about the foundation and gave us a call. We picked up the cost of the insurance, and a few weeks later, to lift the kid's spirits, we took him to a Yankee game and made arrangements for him to meet Derek Jeter, A-Rod, and other players down on the field before the game.

Another example: A house burned down. Mother and father with four children. They were renters, but they didn't have any renters' insurance. Thank God they got out. But they lost everything. They got out with the clothes on their backs, didn't even have time to put on their shoes. We got a check for three thousand dollars in their hands the next day. Drove to where they were in the motel and handed it to them. The person who delivered the check from the committee—I can't remember if it was Kathy or Tom—spent an hour with them while they cried together. What did it give them? It gave them a little stability. The kids could get shoes and not miss another day of school. It's not a long-term solution, but it makes a difference. It serves as a bridge, and a bridge is important.

When I look at some of these big foundations—the United Way, the March of Dimes, and others—I don't see much of the money they raise actually finding its way to the people or causes they're supposed to be helping. Does that mean I would turn down corporate sponsorship if we could get it? Absolutely not. If we got corporate sponsorship and then had to hire somebody to bring it to the next level—where we were raising a million a year—I would do it. I would still keep a couple of my guys and keep that grassroots, human part of it. But I realize that we need to keep growing each year. That's just the nature of these things. No matter what, though, I'll never let this foundation lose sight of its purpose, which is to help people.

George Foreman came to the dinner one time, and he said to me, “I go to these thousand-dollar-a-plate dinners where we all wear tuxes and pat each other on the back and we don't know what the hell we did there that night. Here, we know what we did. We hear about it, and we actually see the people we've helped.”

There was one dinner where some of the money we raised almost had to go toward paying the funeral expenses for our emcee, the comedian Jeff Pirrami. I'm not kidding, the guy nearly got himself killed. What happened was that Pirrami, who's from the Don Rickles school of comedy and calls everyone “a fat rat bastard,” insulted the wrong guy. This
was one of our last years at the Statten, and we were filled to the rafters. Now our crowd is as diverse as you can possibly imagine. We've got lawyers and bar owners and cops and construction guys and Wall Street guys. The whole world comes. At one table in the back was a gangster we'll call “Benny” and his crew. A lot of guys are thought of as gangsters, but this guy was the real thing. He'd killed people. Even though he wasn't a big guy, he was a rough customer. Most of them are just rough with a gun, but this guy would kill you with his bare hands. He never went to these charity events normally, but he knew me and he knew it was for a good cause and he wanted to help me out. “I want to support Teddy.” So he bought a table.

He was sitting there with his wiseguys and wannabe wiseguys, and of all of them, he was the one to win a raffle prize of a couple of Knicks tickets. Benny got up and said, “This is great. I'm gonna take my grandson to the game.”

The rest of his crew, they were all trying to kiss his ass, so they said, “Hey, Benny, siddown, we'll go up and get it for you.”

“Nah,” he said. “I'll get it.” He'd had a little wine, he was having a good time, why not take a little stroll up to the front? What a fucking mistake. He started walking up, and it was chaotic, stuff was being auctioned off to raise money. I was focused on that and not really paying attention.

Pirrami was doing his thing, running the auction and keeping people entertained. Suddenly, as Benny crossed the room in front of him, he said, “Hey, get a load of this little no-neck wannabe gangster with the two-dollar rug.” And here was the thing: Benny really did wear a hairpiece!

“Hey, pal,” Pirrami continued, “what's that thing on your head? A Chia pet?”

Now the audience was laughing. Benny stopped dead in his tracks. Like I said, I was distracted and didn't notice, but my son told me right afterward—and even though he was only eleven or twelve years old, he noticed everything—“Dad, there's a man who just got really mad.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. It was the guy who won the Knicks tickets. He was walking up to the stage and Jeff made fun of him.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He stopped right in front of the stage and he cursed. He said something in—I think it was Italian.
‘Morte.'
”

Death.

“And then he ripped the tickets to pieces. They were good tickets, Dad! He ripped 'em to pieces, threw them on the floor, and spit on them. And yelled
‘Morte!'
”

I was listening to this, trying to make sense of it, but also distracted by a million different things. Somebody always needed me for something.

The dinner ended, and everybody was gathering up their coats and saying their good-byes. The place was a madhouse. People were coming up to me, slapping me on the back, shaking my hand. I became aware that there was somebody standing near me, waiting to talk to me. It was Jeff Pirrami. As soon as I took a look at him, I thought,
Boy, he looks pale. I don't remember him looking that pale at the beginning of the night.
I also noticed that he seemed quiet. This was a guy who you usually couldn't shut up. He was always loud and funny.