If you follow boxing, you know Teddy Atlas.
He’s a protégé of old-school training sage Cus D’Amato, worked with a teenage Mike Tyson, delivered some of history’s most memorable corner speeches and provided an occasionally grumpy soundtrack for a generation of fans on ESPN’s since-retired Friday Night Fights series.
These days, at age 66, he’s evolved into another role: The sport’s senior-most social conscience.
A scarred-up Yoda, if you will, with a heavy Staten Island accent and a quick left hook.
The combative guru’s angst has been stirred to boiling point by a series of recent issues, including a title bout at 140 stopped in favor of the A-side fighter after zero decisive blows, and a pay-per-view headliner at 135 whose round-by-round judging was deemed shoddy at best and criminal at worst.
He took to the podcast air 72 hours after the PPV event’s close, leading his The Fight with Teddy Atlas show with renewed calls for a federal boxing commission. An online petition picked up thousands of signatures within a day and the podcast had more than 138,000 views by Wednesday morning.
The instant response has got Atlas thinking, or at least hoping, that this effort will have the sort of staying power other controversy-spurred crusades—including a partnership with then-senator and later Republican presidential nominee John McCain—did not.
“People’s memories are still long enough, fresh enough to know that this is just the latest,” Atlas told Bleacher Report. “It’s not a new syndrome. It’s not a new happening. This is just a reminder that it’s always there and it’s never going to change unless we do something. It goes back to the thing where you say, ‘You can either be part of the problem or part of the solution.'”
The latter choice, he said, melds Howard Beale with a jolt of modern technology.
Beale was the fictional news anchor in 1976 film Network who implored frustrated viewers to throw open their windows and yell “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
The role earned Peter Finch an Oscar. Atlas is hoping his reprisal will move listeners, followers and otherwise perturbed fans to rescue the sport from yet another would-be “breaking point.”
“Let’s see if we can actually do something instead of just complaining about it over and over and over again,” he said. “Because like that old saying, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting something to change. It feels that way.
“Instead of yelling out the window, sign this petition. Lo and behold, people are signing the petition. They’re yelling, ‘I’m fed up and I can’t take it no more’ in their own way.”
Most of the volume this time comes courtesy of referee Tony Weeks and judge Dave Moretti.
Weeks pulled the plug on a barely damaged Ismael Barroso before he completed a schooling of PBC favorite Rolly Romero on May 13, while Moretti scored Round 10 of Devin Haney’s fight with Vasiliy Lomachenko for the American a week later, though nearly every independent card suggested it was the Ukrainian’s clearest and most dominant three minutes.
Moretti, in fact, gave five of the final six rounds to Haney, countering a consensus that the four-belt champion had controlled the fight’s first half before his opponent rallied down the stretch.
