Free Atlas by Teddy Atlas

them with me.”
    â€œBring them with you. Come up now.”
    â€œI’ll come tomorrow.”
    And that was it. We packed our stuff, and the three of us went up there the next day.

SMOKERS
    J OE AND F REDDIE COULDN’T BELIEVE THE SIZE OF the house in Catskill. It had nine bedrooms and was on ten acres of land. Here were these two kids who’d grown up poor in Staten Island, and now they were moving to this country estate. I felt like I’d accomplished something, bringing them there. There was structure to their lives now, stability, a family of sorts. Camille nourished them with delicious home-cooked meals, and Cus gave lessons in life in and out of the ring. To earn their keep, Joe did chores around the house for Camille, and Freddie got work in town as a house painter.
    For me, it was a totally different experience being back. Before, I had been a fighter, with limited responsibilities—most of them to myself. Now I was running things. In the space of a few short months, the gym over the police station went from being empty most of the time to being packed morning till night. Two things led to that: one, the fact that I was in the gym every day from ten in the morning till nine or ten at night (whereas Cus had only been showing up three or four times a week for a couple of hours at a stretch); two, the arrival of Gerry Cooney, his trainer, Victor Valle, and a group of his sparring partners. Cooney was undefeated in seven fights at that point, and an up-and-coming heavyweight. His arrival on the scene, along with mine, helpedcreate a kind of critical mass that drew others. Word got around that I was a good teacher, and that our gym was a haven for troubled kids. Suddenly, kids started showing up from all over, wanting to learn how to box.
    Before you knew it I had ten fighters. Then fifteen. Then twenty. Then thirty. It was something, it really was. I was obsessed, and the energy I brought to what I was doing rubbed off on everyone else. Cus was smart. He really was a clever old bastard, and he had understood that I was someone who would be able to breathe life into him and his gym. The fact that I was doing it free of charge was icing on the cake. In fact, it was better than that, because I was actually paying for the privilege—or, to be more accurate, my father was paying. Cus was collecting the same fifty bucks a week off me that he had been when I was getting trained, not doing the training. “It’s less money than college, Atlas,” he would say. “And you’re getting a better education.”
    It was true. More important, I was committed to something. I was responsible to something larger than myself. Every day, first thing in the morning, I was in the gym. I’d work with the pros until late afternoon, then with the amateurs in the evening. Often, after training was finished, I’d sit around with the kids, talking to them about whatever problems they might be having at home, trying to help them figure out how to deal with what were often difficult situations.
    There was one young kid named Mane Moore, who came by the gym one day, then didn’t show up for weeks, then came by again and disappeared again. He was a skinny kid, about eleven years old, with a shy manner, and an engaging, toothy smile that didn’t show itself nearly enough—at least in the beginning. I asked some of the other kids about him. They told me his father was gone, and he and his younger brother and sister lived alone with their mother, who was very religious. They also told me that there was a bully in his school named Goo who was beating him up every day and taking his lunch money. A lot of the kids who came to me had similar home situations. It was interesting how many of them had mothers who tried to cope by leaning on religion. There’s nothing wrong with it, really, but on the other hand, it wasn’t helping a kid like Mane much. The fact that Mane’s mother went