NEW YORK — When Manny Pacquiao and Timothy Bradley Jr. step into the ring at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on April 9 in Las Vegas, there will be a lot at stake for the two fighters.
For Pacquiao, who said this will be his last fight, there is the chance to end his career on a high note after the disappointment of his loss to Floyd Mayweather last May. He also hopes a win in the ring will help propel him to victory in the election one month later for a Senate seat in his native Philippines.
For Bradley, it will be an opportunity to win the rubber match and go down in history as the last fighter to beat one of boxing’s all-time greats. He and Pacquiao have split two fights, as Bradley won a split decision in 2012 and Pacquiao handed him his only professional loss in the rematch in 2014..
And then there is the money — $20 million for Pacquiao, $4 million for Bradley — with the promise of much more should he win.
But aside from the physical danger always intrinsic to boxing, neither have more at stake than Bradley’s trainer, Teddy Atlas.
“If we lose,” Teddy said, “Everything my father did for me means nothing. Winning is the only way I keep him alive.”
Dr. Theodore Atlas was a legendary humanitarian in Staten Island, New York, an old-fashioned general practitioner who continued making house calls up to his retirement at age 80 in 1986, who accepted payment in the form of trade from needy families, and performed weekly free tonsillectomies for children whose families were uninsured and could not afford to pay. Teddy Atlas, right, guided new protege Timothy Bradley Jr. to a TKO victory over Brandon Rios during their first fight together in November. Chris Farina/Top Rank
He is the inspiration for the Dr. Theodore A. Atlas Foundation, a charitable organization run by Teddy that raises money and puts it directly into the hands of the people who need it, without being funneled through the hands of highly paid fundraisers and publicists. In its 20 years of existence, the annual Teddy Dinner has grown from an intimate gathering of boxing people in a small hotel ballroom to an event that now draws more than 1,500 guests a year, including some of the biggest names in local sports.
But what Teddy means is that it was through his father’s largesse that he became a boxing trainer in the first place — Dr. Atlas paid to send the troubled teenage Teddy up to Catskill, New York, to live with the great fight trainer Cus D’Amato, who served as the boy’s mentor — and training fighters to win important fights is the only way the son has of repaying the father.
“He never got to see what I wanted him to see,” Teddy said. “For him, there was no payoff, no graduation.”
Dr. Atlas died, at age 88, just weeks before Teddy’s finest achievement, when he trained, cajoled and essentially willed Michael Moorer through the 1994 fight in which he won the heavyweight title from Evander Holyfield.
When Teddy returned to Staten Island from Las Vegas after the fight, one of the first things he did was visit his father’s grave bearing five dozen roses, a commemorative coin from the bout, and a small card that said, among other things, “Thanks, Dad.”
At the time, Teddy thought Moorer’s upset win would exorcise the demons of his tumultuous past and settle the score with his father, who he calls, “A one-in-a-million man.”
But over time, Teddy found that the debt to his dad could never be repaid with just one victory, even one as momentous as Moorer’s win against Holyfield. For Teddy, it was a debt that renewed itself each time he took a fighter into the ring, whether he was fighting for a title or to pay the rent.
Which is why Teddy stepped away from training fighters six years after Alexander Povetkin, another fighter he took to a version of the heavyweight title, broke a commitment to him. Teddy Atlas, flanked by broadcast colleague Joe Tessitore, was the resident analyst on ESPN’s “Friday Night Fights” series for 17 years. Joe Faraoni/ESPN
Teddy, who has always loved the nobility of the sport while hating the tawdriness of the business, decided it was less heartbreaking to call fights for ESPN — for the better part of 20 years he had been the color commentator for “Friday Night Fights” and now serves the same function for ESPN’s Premier Boxing Championship coverage — than it was to climb those four steps to the corner and risk letting down the memory of his father.
That was until last July. Bradley — who had just won an unexpectedly tough fight against Jessie Vargas — was a guest on a boxing radio show co-hosted by Teddy (and, in the interest of full disclosure, the writer of this column). In the course of the interview, Teddy — who had never met Bradley — broke down his effort against Vargas and analyzed why Bradley had gotten hit by a right hand that momentarily stunned him in the closing seconds of the final round.
Bradley listened intently, thought about it and a month later called Teddy at home and asked him to become his trainer.
It was not an easy decision. He agonized over whether he wanted to put himself back in a situation that had always caused him nearly as much, if not more, stress than it did the fighter. But after travelling to Bradley’s home in Palm Springs, California, meeting his wife and children, and taking the full measure of the man, Teddy decided to dive into the pressure-cooker again after getting a Teddy-esque pep talk from his daughter Nicole.
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“She told me what I had been telling my kids all their lives,” Teddy said. “And that basically is never to take the easy way out.”
You would think that taking a job that will pay him $400,000 for seven weeks of work would be the easy way out, but as Teddy’s wife Elaine said, “You wouldn’t believe what it does to him.”
Teddy is famously obsessive about his training camps — Bradley called their first camp together, before his TKO of Brandon Rios in November, “a living hell” — and just as obsessive about his role as trainer, which does not end when he pushes the fighter out of the corner at the opening bell.
He takes full responsibility for everything that happens in training camp but is well aware of the immense difficulty of bringing a highly-trained athlete to a physical peak precisely on fight night, and of the random nature of an existence in which everything can be perfect — and still go terribly wrong.
Still, he said, “I’m not just going to be a passenger” on fight night. If something goes wrong, it is Teddy’s fault. If Bradley loses, Teddy loses. And if Teddy can’t get Bradley to the finish line, then in his mind, Teddy has failed.
That is a work ethic instilled by his father, who worked in pain for 30 years due to an untreated abdominal hernia — the teenage Teddy was shocked one day to discover his dad strapping on a harness to hold in his protruding intestines — and never shirked his duty, making a house call to treat a sick baby on the day he buried his own five-year-old son.
“Maybe he just didn’t want to see someone else’s child die,” Teddy said. Teddy Atlas lost his father just weeks before his greatest triumph as a trainer when he cornered Michael Moorer to the heavyweight championship in 1994. Holly Stein/Getty Images
And it is why, on the day he buried his father, Teddy came to the gym as always to train Moorer for the Holyfield fight, and became incensed when the fighter — who did not know Teddy’s father had died — tried to take a day off claiming fatigue.
“Are you a fighter or aren’t you?” Teddy demanded. “This is your job. You go to work.”
He was demanding no more of Moorer than he had already demanded of himself.
On April 9, Teddy will ask the same of Bradley, who he calls “the most trusting, compassionate, intelligent fighter I’ve ever been around.”
Still, fight night is looming, and even now, nearly three months out, Teddy said, “I dread every day in camp, I really do. The only thing that matters is we win. This kid trusts me, and I don’t want to let him down.”
He was talking about Bradley, of course, but Teddy might just as well have been talking about the man for whom he fights every fight for, just as if he were in the ring himself.
