Atlas (12 page)

“He doesn't need to be strong,” Cus countered. “That's not how this fight will be won. You've given him a plan that doesn't require strength.”

That was true to a point, and it enabled me to rationalize. Still, I
shouldn't have given in. Three days later, in Atlantic City, Arguello knocked out Rooney in two rounds. In the training room afterward, I watched my father examine Rooney. It felt like I had beaten him up myself. I knew I could have done something more. I'm not going to tell you that Rooney would have won if he'd been physically fit, but he would have done a lot better.

It was unfortunate that a loss like that was also the occasion of my first real payday as a trainer. My father was even more surprised than I was when I got the check for four thousand dollars. He never thought I'd make a dime. He'd been paying for me to stay at Cus's all these years, but I'm not sure he realized I was actually building a career for myself. From his point of view, the main compensation was that I was staying out of trouble. The money made him so happy that he said, “Give me the four thousand and I'll put it in the stock market and match it for you.”

After I gave him the four thousand, he immediately gave me back two thousand so Elaine and I could go spend a few days in his condo in Florida. It was the first vacation I'd had in years, but I'll never forget it. Elaine had been feeling strange for a couple of days. Her clothes were tight on her and she was light-headed. She didn't tell me, but she went out and got one of those home pregnancy tests. The day she told me the results had been positive, we'd just finished breakfast. I was sitting at the table, reading the newspaper.

She said, “Teddy, I think I'm pregnant.”

I looked up, not sure I had heard her right.

“I don't expect you to do anything about it,” she said. “That's not why I'm telling you.”

“No, no. I'm just—what do you want to do?” I knew that was a stupid thing to say, but I was still processing the whole concept, trying to take it in.

“Look, Teddy, whether you stand by me or not, I'm going to have this baby. I—”

“No, Elaine, that's not what I'm saying. I'm glad you feel that way,” I said. “That's what I wanted to hear you say. I mean, that baby is a part of us and…and I want you to marry me. Elaine, will you marry me?”

Now she was the one who looked shocked. “Are you just asking me because of the baby?”

“You mean, would I have asked you today? Probably not today—if I
had to be completely honest about it. On the other hand, I was going to ask you at some point.” I looked in her eyes. “Don't you know that?”

She laughed and said, “Are you sure, Teddy?”

“More than sure.”

I was, too. It's not hard making a decision to do a thing you want to do. Sometimes fate just lends a helping hand and gets you a little faster to a place you were going all along.

When I think back now about all the things that were happening in this period, it amazes me. I was already responsible to Rooney and Tyson and all the kids. Now I was getting married and had a child on the way.

Apparently, that wasn't enough. I needed more on my plate. When we returned from Florida, I heard about a nineteen-year-old Catskill kid named Jeff Amen who had driven his car off a cliff into a ravine one night and had been paralyzed from the waist down.

In a small town like Catskill, news of something like that spreads fast and hits people hard. I didn't know Jeff, but his brother J. B. had trained in the gym, and the story really affected me. Apart from the personal connection to his brother, I had all those years of watching my father take care of people. I decided to go visit him.

The morning I walked into Jeff's room at the Albany Medical Center, I found him propped up in a hospital bed, wearing a halo. I had never seen a halo before and hadn't realized that the screws actually go into the person's skull. I introduced myself. Jeff and I had never met, but he knew who I was. He had curly brown hair, a round face, and glasses, and he talked in a voice so soft I could barely hear him. From the waist down, he couldn't move.

“How you feeling? You doing okay?”

“I guess, considering I'll never walk again.”

“You don't know that.”

He looked at me. “The doctors don't think I will.”

A nurse was passing by, and I asked her if I could take him outside. She said yes and helped me get him into a wheelchair and wrap him up in blankets.

I wheeled him out and the two of us talked a bit more as we went.

“Doctors aren't always right,” I said.

“I guess sometimes they're not,” he said.

I wheeled him along the sidewalk outside the main entrance. The air
was freezing, but his body's thermostat had been affected by his injury, and he couldn't feel cold or heat. If you held a match to his skin, he wouldn't know the difference. I realized I couldn't keep him outside too long.

“Other people have overcome very tough things when most people thought they couldn't. You're a lot stronger than you might realize. You don't know what you're capable of if you put your mind to it.”

He looked at me and I realized that his reticence was mostly self-protective. He was a small-town kid and it took him a while to get comfortable with people.

“What makes you think I'm strong?” he said.

“I can see it in your eyes. The fact that you survived to be here.”

After that first visit, I started going up there regularly to visit him. Of all the people he saw, his physical therapist, the doctors and nurses, I was the only one who talked to him consistently about the idea of his walking again. He liked hearing it, but he was reluctant to tell the hospital staff that I was saying it. He thought maybe if they knew, they would say I was being irresponsible. They were all telling him that at best maybe he'd be able to use his hands and arms and be able to dress himself using sticks with hooks to grab loops on his pants.

I went there one day and they were doing his physical therapy. With a paraplegic they can't really do much, because the patient's paralyzed, so the therapist just moves his limbs, putting his arms and legs through a range of motion, to keep them from getting atrophied. After physical therapy, his social worker came by to check up on Jeff and see how his spirits were. She was a sweet, red-haired woman, and I got friendly with her. She told me stuff about spinal injuries, drew up a diagram, and showed me the location of the C4 vertebra that Jeff had injured. I found out that there was a difference between a complete severing of the spinal cord and an incomplete. Jeff's was incomplete.

I called my father and got him to explain the difference. He said, “Well, with an incomplete, there's hope. That doesn't mean that it's not as damaging as a complete. It might be, but if it's not completely severed, there's a little hope.” He started explaining it to me, and then I said, “So it's like a dam in the middle of a river?” and he said, “Exactly. That's very good. It's like a dam in a river, and you don't know how long
it's going to be there. It might be there forever, or it might not be. That's a very good analogy.”

That was all I needed to hear. I got off the phone feeling like I had gone through twelve years of medical school and understood everything there was to understand about spinal injuries.
It's not severed. It's a dam. There's hope!

I went to visit Jeff the next day. The physical therapist was exercising him, what she called “ranging” him. She was young and sure of herself. She picked up one of his legs, talking to him as she did, then she dropped it, boom, the leg flopping back down on the mat. It bothered me, watching that. I didn't think it was hurting him, but still it bothered me. It was like watching a butcher throw a side of beef onto a cutting block.

I said, “Jeff, I know you can't exercise. I know you can't move your legs, but how about if you tried to keep them from falling?”

The physical therapist said, “What do you mean?”

I looked at Jeff. He was lying on his stomach, but I could see him smiling. He was getting a kick out of me. “How about I hold up your leg and you don't let it drop. I know you can't actually stop it, but by trying to stop it, maybe you'll feel something.”

“He can't feel anything,” the therapist said. “That would mean that there would be muscular connections.” This is what she'd learned in school and she was very certain of it.

I didn't know enough to argue with her. I just knew I thought what I was saying made sense to me. I knew about the dam. She was saying what she was saying, and I was thinking to myself,
It's a dam. Dam, dam, dam.

So I had Jeff 's leg in my hands, and she was talking to me, and I was holding his leg up, with my hand on his hamstring, and suddenly I thought I felt a little something. A tiny contraction. I said, “I think I felt something.”

She said, “You didn't feel anything.”

I said, “I don't know. I thought I did. Maybe not.”

The physical therapist was disgusted with me. You could see it. “I have to leave for the day,” she said. “But I don't think this is productive, talking this way. I think you should stick to things you know.”

After she left, I went right back to telling Jeff about the dam. The
complete and the incomplete. I said, “It's like you've got a stream and there are these beavers and—” He was looking at me like I was nuts, but he was being entertained. Here was this kid who had to lie there twenty-four hours a day getting bedsores, and this was the best shit he'd heard in a long time. I said, “It's like you've got this stream that's jammed up, and you're just waiting, because there's no water, there's nothing running, so there's no sense in doing anything. But what if the exercise was just to
think
about moving your feet.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

I had learned this from my father. I said, “You know, electric stimuli gets sent from your brain to your toe, to move your toe….”

“Yes?”

“You've got veins that carry blood, and you've got these other things that carry this electric stimuli.” I really thought I was Ben Casey. I did. I said, “You've stopped sending those signals because you figure there's no reason to. Because Nurse Shithead tells you that you can't do it. And the doctors tell you you're never gonna do it. So you're not sending the things you're supposed to be sending. But how about if your exercise was just to send the impulse and keep hitting that mud every day, keep hitting the dam, and by sending these impulses, hitting the mud, hitting the mud, all of a sudden it gets through? See, because if you don't send impulses it won't ever get through and you might just be lying here your whole life.”

This was two days before I was supposed to leave with Tyson for the National Junior Olympics in Colorado. Suddenly I had an inspiration. “Listen, Jeff,” I said, “while I'm gone, you've got to try and make your toes move every day. Tell yourself, ‘I'm making my toes move,' keep sending those signals.”

“I'll try,” he said.

“Don't give me that ‘try' bullshit. Just do it. I'll make you a deal. You keep sending messages to your toes, I'll make sure Tyson wins all his fights and defends his title.” This was the second year I was taking Tyson to Denver. He'd won the national amateur title the year earlier.

“That's not nearly as hard as what you're asking me to do,” Jeff said. “He won every fight last time.”

“All right, what if he wins every fight by knockout this time?”

“He won every fight last year by knockout.”

“In the first round?”

“You're telling me he's gonna knock everyone out in the first round?”

“Are you gonna send those messages to your toes?”

So we went out there, and Tyson knocked out every guy he faced in the first round. I came back a week later, and I know this sounds too much like the movies, but I came back and Jeff was moving two toes. This guy who was supposed to be a paraplegic was moving two toes. None of the doctors could believe it.

Over the next few months, he continued to progress. Even with all the other stuff that was going on, my wedding included, I kept visiting him and pushing him. Elaine had to stay on me about taking care of wedding stuff. She did a lot of the organizing, but I had plenty of responsibility, too. In most cultures, the bride's father pays for everything; not so with the Albanians. They didn't have that tradition. All their traditions, and they couldn't have that one. I wound up cashing in some of my stocks to pay for things. I got five grand, which was basically seed money, and we found this resort ten miles outside of Catskill. It was beautiful. Elaine wound up with everything she wanted. They put up a tent, we had ice sculptures, swans, dolphins, a glass pond full of fresh shrimp. She wore a designer gown.

The people in that area had never seen anything like it around there. It was like a mob wedding. Wiseguys showed up in limos. Dennis and Brian Hamill came. Jose Torres was there. All my kids from the gym showed up. The only one who didn't make it was Tyson. His mother had died, and her funeral was the day of the wedding. So the day before, I drove him to the train station. He was wearing a new warm-up suit I'd bought him with my last fifty bucks.

We wound up having about 400 people at the wedding. It was the biggest thing they'd ever had in that area. Today, a wedding like that would cost two hundred grand. In the middle of it, I started opening some of the gift envelopes so I could pay for everything, and the guy who ran the resort said, “Don't do that. Pay me after your honeymoon.”

Lots of people gave toasts, including my brother Terryl, who was my best man. But the big moment came when Jeff Amen pushed forward in his wheelchair toward the microphone. He said he had a wedding present for me and Elaine, and then he slowly got up out of the wheelchair, stood up, and walked ten steps across the dance floor before collapsing in my arms. It was incredible, it really was. There wasn't a dry eye in the place after he did that.