A Fight Is Not a Fight Until There Is Something to Overcome

Teddy Atlas is a boxing trainer, an ESPN commentator, and, as Lex Fridman warns at the top, a man whose story is larger than styles and scorecards. Fridman came ready to talk Tyson, Usyk, Ali, and Hagler. He stayed for what he calls a Shakespearean human story: loyalty, betrayal, fear, and greatness, in which nobody is perfect. The conversation proper begins with Atlas's father, a diagnostic doctor who built two hospitals on Staten Island before the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge existed, so people who could not afford care could still get it.

Dr. Atlas did house calls into his eighties for three dollars. Around the holidays he would stop the car, fill it with homeless men, and drop them at the hospital. Ten-year-old Teddy asked if they were sick. Not in the way you put someone in a hospital, his father said. He was not trying to dry them out. The holidays, he explained, are good for people who have family and a reminder of what they lack for people who do not. He never used the word suicide. The boy understood: two or three days of food, heat, and other people, a bridge so they would not hurt themselves.

Looking back, Atlas says his father was his first connection to a hero — not Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, or Muhammad Ali, whom he loved without ever filing them under that word. Love itself was not allowed in the house. The one memory of it is an airport in Florida: the boy wanted to stay with his mother, the doctor conceded, then turned and kissed him on the forehead. It felt weird. After the doctor died, Atlas realized the childhood deal he used to make with God — let me die before my father — was not a deal you keep once you have children of your own. "Thank you for not taking me up on it."

On those house-call drives there was no music. The doctor read nonfiction until blood vessels broke in his eyes: science, wars, generals. Teddy once cheated a book report on Stalingrad by writing down what his father told him about winter, strategy, and picking the wrong opponent — already boxing, he jokes, without knowing it. In the car the old man would fall into a trance. Asked what he saw there, he said, "I see what could be." Atlas would later use that sentence as a key to Cus D'Amato.

Atlas fell in love with boxing when it saved him. He was a stupid, violent, angry kid who did not know why he was angry — he says he would fit right into today's society. He grew up on the hill, the doctor's son. Down the hill was Stapleton, a tough neighborhood whose kids wanted up; he wanted down, because he wanted a family. His father was too great at being a doctor to have time for anything else. "You don't have to be poor to be poor." The only thing he was missing was him.

He went down the hill into robberies and fights. The most dangerous part, he later figured out, was the story he told himself. The people who had his father's attention were injured, fractured, damaged. If he got damaged, he would get his father. He thought he was on a righteous path, that he had permission. It almost crashed at Rikers Island. Then came a street fight: two of them, five or six of the others, in front of a Spanish bodega. He saw a man go into a pocket and come out with a cheap folding knife the neighborhood called a 007, the kind you flick with a wrist.

Time slowed. He could do nothing, or he could get there before the blade opened. Running away was not an option he could live with afterward — not bravery, he says, just the knowledge that the moment ends and the memory of being a coward does not. Reputation was the only worth he felt he had. He walked into the counter. The other guy had practiced more. The blade went into his face: warm, gooey. "I don't know what this means, but I don't wanna know. But I think I know." About 400 stitches, 200 inside and 200 out; a centimeter from the jugular, close to the eye.

On the bodega floor he did not think about dying at first. He thought about a line D'Amato used to tell a 17-year-old who bragged about a hundred kids on a street corner: you have a lot of friends? Most likely you don't have any. Everyone gets tested. A man once came to D'Amato heartbroken that a 20-year friendship had just ended. D'Amato asked what made him think they had ever been friends. In 20 years of chasing girls and drinking, when had it been dangerous or uncomfortable to be his friend? The man said: today.

Today kept coming for Atlas. In that fight his best friend Billy was on the roof. Billy did come down, drag him inside, and pack towels that filled like a shower. The bodega owner screamed; everyone froze. Atlas was calm, studying the fear around him, already taking a crash PhD in the business he would work in. Billy jumped the counter, called 911, and said a cop had been shot. In the ambulance Atlas felt everyone's anxiety and none of his own. Cops said they might lose him. He laughed inwardly: lose him? Dr. Atlas was his father.

"There's no fear when the fear's been removed. It's the only time you're really free in life." Stripped of the usual influences — fear, anxiety, even joy — he was in what he calls a purely free place. They took him to the Marine Hospital in Stapleton because there was no time. A curtain, a shadow, a bandaged hand that felt warm and safe: his father. The line, remembered to this day, was not a speech. "They did a good job. You're gonna have a scar the rest of your life." And he left.

Fridman reads D'Amato's court testimony for a young Atlas who had been arrested: this boy has character and loyalty; he will hurt himself before he lets down a friend; if we lose him we lose someone who could help a lot of people. Atlas says the quote D'Amato drilled into his head is the one that matters, and the rest is BS: no matter what a man says, it is what he does in the end that he intended to do all along. Give people a minute to show you what they meant.

D'Amato's other line: anyone in a situation where fear is necessary who says they are not afraid is either a liar or should see a doctor. The culture treats the word as taboo because it sounds like weakness. People reach for anxiety, butterflies, apprehension — cousins of fear, Atlas says. Fear causes problems and solves them. You could not be great without it, because fear allows you to be brave. Bravery, in his account, is a moment of being less selfish: attention pulled off yourself, even briefly, in the presence of fear.

His greatest teacher, he insists, was not D'Amato but the father who never talked. The work is to submit less. People submit every day; if you compromise yourself a little less, you get to a better place. The boogeyman word attached to the hurt is *convenience*. People disappoint you, let you down, betray you, not because they want to, but because it is more convenient than the other thing. An old man once cut off his excuses: there is no such thing as a little pregnant. You are in or you are out. That, Atlas says, includes loyalty.

If humanity has veins, what runs through them to keep it alive is loyalty. Without it we are ghost ships — empty vessels. People lack it because it is hard. It sounds great until the coach says you are going to get hurt to be loyal to someone. Then everyone wants a timeout and more practice. It hurts to be loyal. Without it, he says, we have no strength and nothing.

The second betrayal in Atlas's life is the one people know. The first was at 17: detectives separated the older guys, told him his friends had already changed their stories, and invited him to do the same. He did not. He did not even understand pride; he did not think there was an option. His father had never had one. He and D'Amato, he says, were partners. D'Amato was retired, the gym empty, above a police station. Atlas still wanted to fight. D'Amato had another plan: boxing changed lives, and to make a champion you had to make a better person first. He had never married because of the sport. He needed an heir so the thing would not die with him.

Knowledge means nothing, D'Amato said, pointing at a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica: it sits on a shelf unless someone can convey it. Atlas, he claimed, was born a teacher; being only a champion would take care of one person. Atlas could not leave without being disloyal, and D'Amato knew it. The kid bought in. In three and a half or four years the dead gym became the Catskill Boxing Club, 40 or 45 children. Atlas wore holes in his jeans on his knees with eight-year-olds, then drove them to the South Bronx for smokers. D'Amato came once a week and paid in praise: look what Atlas is doing, he's creating champions.

Then a call from Tryon. A corrections officer named Bobby Stewart, a former fighter D'Amato had helped, had a 12-year-old, 190 pounds, a mess, who would not listen to anyone except the man with the boxing carrot. They wanted D'Amato and Atlas to take a look. Atlas wanted to see a birth certificate. He also wanted a test. The heavy bag, he said, tells you nothing. Put him in, responsibly, with Stewart: 28 years old, 175 when he fought, 14 pro fights.

Tyson recognized the moment as an audition that might change a life that was already worse than whatever came next. He wanted them to see ferociousness, toughness, character, desire, and ability. They saw power and speed, unbridled and untaught. After two rounds Atlas called it: he does not normally put a fighter in against live shots for months. Tyson had a bloody nose because he got hit. After that day, Atlas says, he never got another, because he learned. He was still strong. He was smarter.

Atlas got on the apron — his gym, his rules, a self-described dictator because the responsibility is not shared — and told Tyson to get out. Tyson asked for another round. Atlas made him climb down. D'Amato asked the "young master" what that was. An act, Atlas said: he did not really want to go, but he knew they wanted him to, and he made himself ready. That is just as good. D'Amato: all that matters is not how he got there, but that he got there, to the place to act like a fighter, past the comfort level, another round.

Then the prophecy. Teach him not to get hit, D'Amato said, and get him to that place on his own, because the tricks he used today will not be available one day — because he will be your first heavyweight champ. Atlas still hears himself: he is 12, arrested 30 times, just out of juvenile detention, a mess, and you just said what? D'Amato asked the boy if he wanted to come live with them and be a fighter. "Yes, sir." Atlas told D'Amato it would not stay that polite. D'Amato already knew the politeness was a presentation.

Atlas did not see a heavyweight champion. He knew the rudiments and the steps; D'Amato knew too much and got blurred. The job was get him in the gym, make him mentally stronger, make him face things, teach him to slip punches, create holes, and fill them with punches with bad intentions — the phrase that became Tyson's moniker. Mentally tougher means making him face where he is lying to himself and where he is submitting. Submit less, every day. Convenience, Atlas repeats, is how people fail you. The old man's line still holds: you are committed or you are not.

When Tyson became the project, the light came back on in D'Amato. Atlas felt proud and connected — which is why it cut when D'Amato took "the only side he could take, the side of the next heavyweight champ of the world" and left his partner, the young master. For a while Atlas thought everything D'Amato had taught him was a lie. Maturity later meant something harder: someone you perceived as great in every area can still be weak in certain ones, and still be what they were to you. Forgiveness of that kind is difficult.

D'Amato had loved him for not giving anyone up, even at the risk of a decade in jail. Atlas assumed the same traits would show. Instead, he says, D'Amato took a deal. Fridman states the facts for listeners who do not know them: Tyson was sexually inappropriate with a young girl, and Atlas pulled a gun. Atlas's account is that Tyson did this with his 11-year-old niece. He put a .38 to Tyson's ear and told him never to touch his family again. Asked if he regrets it, he is precise: he regrets that he had to. He hated Tyson for putting him there. How dare anyone treat an 11-year-old girl's sense of herself — and his own — as trivial enough that he should not be ready to die and to kill for it.

Why cut Atlas off? He had served his purpose, he says without asking for pity. If he had not built the gym, there would have been nowhere to bring Tyson and no one training him 24/7, which D'Amato at that age could not do. Atlas also got a career, knowledge, a life, and, in his bitter joke, the benefit of being betrayed again: you can learn to forgive weakness when you realize how easy it is to be weak. Forgiveness got easier while he was still trying to forgive himself — for inherent weaknesses, for betrayals of his father, for things memory helpfully drops because forgetting is a way of surviving. The damage was not malice. It was not being prepared to be stronger.

D'Amato never married because it would have been selfish to a woman. He had no money; others paid the bills. The payoff of that sacrifice, Atlas decided, was a champion who would keep the name alive. Legacy is sometimes just a word and sometimes a pension on the way out: the only thing you take with you is what you left behind. Atlas connects it to a night he was nine, waiting up until midnight. A patient was dying. The boy said that was impossible — you are his doctor — and then, angry, asked why he was there instead of home. "'Cause you don't give up on life. Go to bed." Years later Atlas realized he had been asking D'Amato to give up on life. D'Amato's only reason for tomorrow was another heavyweight champion.

Years later Tyson walked up behind Atlas during a broadcast, apologized, shook his hand, hugged him, said "I love you." Atlas would like to be the gracious man who says a man's man enough to say sorry and that is it. He is not sure. Tyson was in 12-step recovery; one step is apologizing to people you have offended. Atlas cannot stop asking whether it was for the step or because Tyson had come to terms with how hurtful it was. He knows he is taking it too deep. D'Amato's echo returns: what a man does in the end is what he intended. He took the hug. He still does not know where Tyson was, underneath, that day.

Word came back that D'Amato said Atlas was right — but taking Atlas's side would have destroyed a potentially great fighter. Atlas's later reading is fear of a kind D'Amato had not used to feel. Training a Ukrainian for a title against Adonis Stevenson, Atlas felt like he was on death row every day: if I fail, I betray the fighter's trust and what I am supposed to be. He used to be stronger. Then it hit him. He had always been working to get up. Once he was up, he was looking down. There was nothing to lose on the way up. That, he says, is where D'Amato was: two world champions already made, no more road forward, only the job of not falling. Tyson was the last chance to live forever, the youngest heavyweight champion ever, after which it would be okay to die. Loyalty to someone named Teddy Atlas against that was a tidal wave. There is a wall high enough, Atlas adds. Who is he to say he could build it?

Does he forgive D'Amato? He does, because D'Amato gave him more than he took. He also gave D'Amato a laboratory when the old man still needed test tubes. The North Star through the whole conversation: he is still trying to forgive himself. If he can have hope of that, it has to start with the power to forgive someone else. "How can I ever forgive myself for all my failings... if I can't start and practice it by forgiving someone else for some shortcomings?" D'Amato used to get lost in the Bronx and blame Atlas, then claim that with a compass he could get out of the woods. Atlas still feels the old man in his head with a stopwatch when he is about to submit.

Asked what on the positive side made Tyson great, Atlas will not grant the word. He was sensational: maybe the greatest mix of speed and power, one of the rare punchers who could end a night from either hand, in a class with Joe Louis and a few others, beyond one-handed bombers like Earnie Shavers, Deontay Wilder, and Max Baer. For one night, against Michael Spinks, taken apart in 90 seconds, Atlas thinks he saw a great fighter — a night Tyson might have been ready to be tested even though he was not. You cannot be great, Atlas says, unless you have all the requirements.

A great fighter does not rely on someone else's weakness to be strong. Too often Tyson did: opponents intimidated, or so overmatched it was a monster truck against a Volkswagen. He did not find a way when his talent was not enough. Exhibit A is Buster Douglas. Douglas had always had size, punch, and technique, and had quit in fights because he had no reason to be strong enough. His mother had died a few months earlier. Nothing Tyson could do would hurt as much as that. That night Douglas did not submit. Tyson was in a fight where he had to be more than a puncher with scintillating speed, and he was not.

Then Holyfield: less talented, smaller, less of a puncher, strong in the ways Tyson was not, willing to go to the cliff and truly die before he submitted. Atlas's definition, not Webster's: a fight is not a fight until there is something to overcome. Until then it is an athletic exhibition. By that measure Tyson was only in five fights in his life, the five with something to overcome, and he did not overcome them. He knows people, including Tyson, will call him a hater who is bitter about money and exile. He hopes he is better than that. For 25 years on ESPN he praised trainers he did not like when they did a good job and ended friendships when friends in the corner messed up. It was the job. We will all be dust. What remains is reputation, the thing your children inherit. He wants it as clean as it can be.

Fridman asks the million-dollar question: if Atlas had kept coaching Tyson, could he have been truly great? Atlas cuts him off, then borrows D'Amato's wisdom. D'Amato told someone that if Atlas had got his way, Tyson might have been a better person, but they would have risked him not being a great fighter. Atlas had bought, for life, the idea that the fight to be a better person is the only way to be a great fighter. He no longer thinks that is what D'Amato meant. D'Amato knew the world that was coming — people who would steal the last thing he lived for — and knew he could put forward a man with the ability to be the greatest without finishing the character mission, because he would not be around to witness the shortfall.

Atlas hates saying it: D'Amato was going to get off easy, not have to face where he came up short. He had done his job. If it went wrong, you guys screwed it up — including Tyson, who loved him and was also loved alongside other things. Did D'Amato know this about himself? He sent a man to the Catskill apartment after the gun, with Atlas's wife pregnant. Tyson was still a ward of the state; a report that his trainer had put a gun to his head could have taken him away. The offer: disappear, leave, and D'Amato's word on 5 percent of Tyson's earnings for the rest of his career. Atlas told the messenger where to put it. He does not want a medal. The money, he says, was never going to exist. It was an insurance policy, an escape clause. What disappointed him was that D'Amato thought he needed pieces of silver — that he had forgotten why he had gone to court for Atlas in the first place, the blocks of being a man he had preached from the mountaintops.

At the end of the day he forgives him and feels bad that a man who taught loyalty had to fail himself, and hopes D'Amato never fully knew it. Four grandchildren now get a short instruction: do everything you can, to the best of your ability, every day, so that you like yourself, so that you would actually want to be friends with that person. Loyalty, unequivocal and not convenient, is what you would drink if you could bottle the thing that makes you ready for life — a parent, a husband, a grandfather, a role model, someone who can be relied on. After betrayal, he says, think of what you learned. Map how you got there and how the other person did. It has not made him cynical, because he is still trying to forgive himself. If he has not figured that out, maybe they have not either. The first stab of betrayal is anger, revenge, hatred; he still feels those sometimes, and he is not proud of it. Then he remembers forgetfulness: we forget what we are not proud of. That, too, is human.

Is he afraid of death? He never used to think about it. An old neighborhood line still makes him laugh: I am not worried, I have friends in both places. He has been given credit for being brave in spots. He hopes he can be brave when it is time to leave. So far, when he has been scared to death, he has found a way. He figures he will figure that out too. More than D'Amato, more than the compass in the Bronx, he wants to make his father feel good up there.