Teddy Atlas the control freak! An interview with Shannon Briggs!

http://www.boxingnewsonline.net/BN08/detail.asp?id=2591

I FIRST met Teddy Atlas in 1991 at the old 5th Street Gym when I was an amateur in the US Team. I had met Beau Jack and Angelo Dundee there and meeting such people was amazing to me because I was such a boxing enthusiast back then, it was truly incredible. It was a real boxing gym, a dilapidated building, but you could smell the history and taste the atmosphere.

I knew who Teddy was, I’d heard about it him from Mike Tyson, and I knew how highly regarded he was. About a year later I had broke my hand getting ready for the Olympic Trials and my manager at the time thought it would be a good idea if Teddy trained me. I was young, like 19 or 20, and I had been pretty much living on my own since I was 13. As a result of the solitude, I had no real discipline in terms of having someone in my life so I made a real decision to give it everything I had. I knew it was opportunity for me to get with a real trainer. I had previously been training myself, or moving from gym to gym. I had won the USA Boxing Championship on my own with no real trainer or nothing.

I realised it was an opportunity to change my life. At the time my father was in jail serving life and my mother was strung out on drugs. I wanted to really learn how to box, to do things right, to build my confidence. He was a real disciplinarian and I was young, and I submitted, I was ready to give Teddy my all. There were a lot of things, though, that I felt were wrong.

I was 6ft 4ins and he tried to get me fighting like Mike Tyson. He was overdoing the discipline stuff too. You know, I was a good kid, I was just training, I was doing everything he said.

He was the ultimate control freak. One of the craziest things he ever said to me was “When you’re in the ring, you’re the body and I’m the mind.” I’m just the body and he’s the mind? What’s that about?

He used to call me all day and night. He’d call me at 3 o’clock in the morning and I’d be like, “Hello,” and there would just be silence. He’d call again, “Hello?” I had Caller ID, I knew it was him. He’d ring again. “Hello? Teddy? What’s going on, are you okay?”

I didn’t know what was going on, I thought something might be wrong, somebody was robbing his house or something, or he’d called me by mistake. I called him back.

“Teddy, are you okay? You’ve just been calling me?” He didn’t say anything for a while, and then all of a sudden I hear his voice.

“Get to the gym tomorrow at 12.”

So, as instructed, I get to the gym at 12 the following day. Teddy strolls in at 1.30 or something. I said, “Teddy what’s up man?”

He said, “Where were you last night? I was calling you.”

I was confused. “I know you called Teddy, I spoke to you.”

“No you didn’t, you didn’t answer the phone, where were you?”

“Teddy,” I said, and I’m going crazy by now. “I was at home. I spoke to you, you told me to be here for 12.”

We argued like this, back and forth, for an hour-and-a-half. And then, after all that, he suddenly said calmly, “I was testing you. I was testing you to see if you would break under pressure.”

Things like that were hard to deal with but I respected him.

Things changed as soon as I lost my unbeaten record to Darroll Wilson. Afterwards, he went on national TV and gave me a hard time. I was hurt because at that point, despite everything that I thought he was doing wrong, he was my father figure. He hurt me and I’ve told him that. It took me a long time to recover mentally from all the things that he said and did. I felt anger because I had dedicated four years to him and I felt like I had been betrayed.

You have to understand, he had a lot of influence over the writers, a lot of the journalists were scared of him. When I was with Teddy, you wouldn’t hear anything bad about Shannon Briggs, I was God, I was the future heavyweight champion of the world. The day after Teddy and I split, every writer wrote that I was the worst fighter to ever walk on the planet.

In 2005, I ran into him in Connecticut and I told him how he’d betrayed me. I told him everything he’d instilled in me like loyalty, doing things right, being a man, were all contradictory coming from him. I told him, “If you’d have told me to rob a bank I would have done that for you.”

He said he didn’t realise I felt that that way, but again, I felt he wasn’t being honest with me. There are things he taught me that I appreciate, he taught me to be a good in-fighter and I was upset when we split up. But look what I went onto do without him. I was two-time heavyweight champion of the world.