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Teddy Atlas is determined to keep on giving
 Teddy Atlas is determined to keep on givingBy Jay Price Staten Island Advance October 11th, 2009 The letters and the e-mails - dozens of them, hundreds, each one a punch to the heart - sit in an untidy pile on Teddy Atlas’s desk, four inches high, a paper-and-ink monument to all the heartbreak in the world. Here’s the woman whose granddaughter has Stage 4 cancer and an insurance company that won’t pay for more treatment, and the retired New York City cop with a sick kid, facing bankruptcy or foreclosure, or both. Here’s the grieving father who lost two sons when his house burned to the ground; the teacher who has an opportunity to take a class of autistic kids to the circus, but no way to get them there; the mother who had to leave her job while her daughter was undergoing chemotherapy, and can’t afford a wig for the little girl to wear when she goes back to school, or makes her first Holy Communion. Somehow they all find Atlas, the ESPN boxing analyst who started the Dr. Theodore Atlas Foundation to honor the legacy of his father, and watched it grow into a court of last resort for the downtrodden and the needy in the old neighborhood. Times like this, when the Yankees are in the playoffs and college and pro football are in full swing, it’s easy to forget there are people living in life’s margins who have more to worry about than whether Eli’s sore foot will keep him from playing against the Raiders, or if Joe Girardi was right to bench Jorge Posada on the days A.J. Burnett pitches. “When you see this pile of papers every day, you don’t forget,” Atlas says. “It shakes you sometimes,” he’s saying in the run-up to the Atlas Foundation dinner, the one that fills the big room at the Hilton Garden Inn in Bloomfield every year, and provides the bulk of the foundation’s donations. GROWING STACK “It gets tough. I get down sometimes, reading the letters. I don’t like to say it, but I do. “I’m thankful we can help, but when this time of year comes, I always worry. What if people stop coming to the dinner? “What if they stop giving?” He’s holding the letter from the retired cop with the sick kid, both of them facing an uncertain future. “I need help,” the cop writes, the desperation screaming off the page. “I have no one else to turn to.” Atlas puts the letter back on the pile, atop a hundred just like it. “They keep coming,” he says. “The phone keeps ringing, the mail keeps coming. “Sometimes I have to get away.” When that happens, he has a ready escape. For the first time in years, the guy who goaded Michael Moorer into winning the heavyweight champion against Evander Holyfield and helped train Mike Tyson when Tyson was a scared teenager, is back in the fight business. Atlas has another heavyweight, Russian contender Alexander Povetkin, who’s next in line for a title fight. Each morning, Atlas gets in the car and drives to the little gym behind the police station in Middletown, N.J., to teach Povetkin how to slip the jab, counter, and not be overwhelmed by the moment. But when he gets home, the stack of letters is still there waiting for him, a little higher than it was when he left. STAR POWER Here’s the breast cancer survivor who thought her hip hurt because she wore high heels to a funeral and found out it was cancer attacking another part of her body, apologizing for having to ask for assistance. “I know there are many people besides me who need help,” she wrote. The Atlas Foundation isn’t set up to handle this kind of volume, Atlas says, “But how are you gonna say no?” The dinner, the one they call The Teddy, will have plenty of star power, as usual. Giant tailback Brandon Jacobs. Some of the Jets who remember when Eric Mangini was the coach, and Atlas was Mangini’s motivational go-to guy. A ton of boxing people, actors, entertainers. Even so, Atlas can’t help worrying. He’s got a fighter waiting for him in New Jersey; a Russian heavyweight who doesn’t speak English, doesn’t know his way around his new neighborhood, only knows he’s waiting for Atlas to show him how to be heavyweight champion of the world. But Atlas can’t get his mind off the stack of letters on his desk, and the little girl who needs a wig to go to her own first communion. How’s he gonna say no to that? |
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