Atlas by Teddy Atlas Page B

sticks.
    We ended up going on this long hike to the top of this mountain. It was beautiful. You have to understand, I was living a bad life, and this was the cleanest, nicest thing I’d done in a while. There was noquestion that if I hadn’t been there, I would have been robbing places with Billy.
    On the hike back, a branch hit me in the neck, and a moment later I felt my neck and realized the ring was gone.
    â€œThe ring!” I yelled.
    â€œOh no, not the ring again!”
    These guys all knew what it meant. We looked all over the place, retracing our steps, turning over rocks, sifting through leaves. We couldn’t find it. “It’s gotta be here,” I said. It was getting dark by then.
    â€œTeddy,” Spicer said. “We’ll come back. We’ll bring metal detectors. We’ll find it.” At last, I relented and we gave up the search. We marked the trees in the area with the hatchets, and made our way back to the car. It’s hard to explain, but in some way I felt that Sean had taken the ring away from me. I know it sounds crazy, but I began to think that he was trying to tell me that he didn’t approve of the way I was living. I’ll never know if that was true (I never went back to look for the ring), but not long after that trip something did actually happen that wound up pushing me in a positive direction: I was approached by these two kids who asked me to train them, Joe “the Blade” Slattery and Freddie Koop.
    They just came up to me one day while I was standing on the corner and said they needed someone to train them, could I do it? I thought, Did Cus send these guys to me?
    I knew Cus had never lost hope that he was going to get me to go back to Catskill to work with him. I knew he had tried with the Ohio State Fair. At the same time, I also knew it wasn’t Cus actually sending these kids; that would have been a bit farfetched, even for him.
    Joe and Freddie were fifteen or sixteen years old. They were both thin, but Joe, especially, was on the skinny side. He was tall, about six feet three, maybe 175 pounds, with dark hair, olive skin, and dark, melancholy eyes. The reason they called him “the Blade” had less to do with how skinny he was than with his proficiency at using the 007 flick knife—the same kind that I’d gotten cut with. He came from a messed-up family—one brother was a methadone addict and had stabbed him, another brother had hit him with a baseball bat—I mean, he was lucky to have survived. Freddie had his own problems, though not nearly as bad. They were both looking for something, I guess, some kind of structure and discipline. The fact that they came to me blew my mind. But I said yes.
    I took them over to a gym in the basement of the church that was run by my old mentor from the PAL, Ray Rivera. He was the same as ever, still having the kids put their mouthpieces in the communal jar by the door. I’d been one of his toughest kids, and he had a soft spot for me. He helped me out, let us use some of his equipment, gloves and wraps, jump ropes and other stuff. This was in the springtime. A month later, the church closed the basement for the summer. I didn’t consider stopping; I asked Ray if we could borrow some equipment for a few months. He had an extra pair of gloves he could spare, a pair of hand pads, and a few other things he let us have.
    We trained outdoors, in Silverlake Park, near the reservoir, every day from two to five in the afternoon. Ray had been able to spare only one pair of boxing gloves, but we were okay so long as we were just working on conditioning, footwork, and technique. Once we started sparring, though, I needed another pair of gloves. Hanging on my bedroom wall, I had these gold-colored gloves that my friend Johnny “the Heat” Verderosa had worn the night he won the New York Golden Gloves. The reason he’d given them to me was that I’d helped him out when