Teddy Atlas’ and Mike Tyson’s lives intersected in a fortuitous and explosive manner. If you know the lore, Atlas was Tyson’s trainer prior to Kevin Rooney, all under the supervision of the great boxing guru Cus D’Amato. 

However, when Atlas learned that Tyson had touched the butt of his ten-year-old nephew, Atlas felt he had to take matters into his own hands. So Atlas put a gun to Tyson’s head and said that he better not do that again.  From there, Cus quite reasonably exiled Atlas from his boxing organization, and that is where Atlas and Tyson parted ways. (SEE ALSO: Mike Tyson’s The Hangover Cameo: A Little Context)

Tyson admits to touching the butt of Atlas’ 12 year old sister-in-law (Tyson himself was a teenager at the time).  Here’s how he describes the aftermath and the run-in with Atlas in his autobiography, Undisputed Truth: 

I got out of the car and Teddy was waiting for me outside. He looked angry.
“Mike, come here. I want to talk to you,” he said. 
I went over to him and he pulled out a gun and held it to my head. 
“Motherfucker, don’t you ever touch my sister-in-law.” 
He shot the gun into the air, right next to my ear. (87) 

Tyson goes on to explain that it was not the first time he had a gun put to his head, having been raised in the streets of Brooklyn. 

Meanwhile, Atlas expressed on the Lex Fridman podcast recently that he felt betrayed by Cus’s siding with Tyson following this ugly altercation, though Atlas understood Cus’s decision from a pragmatic perspective: It was him or the “future heavyweight champ.” The experience falling out with both Tyson and Cus seems to have been traumatic for Atlas. 

The break was permanent–but Tyson famously apologized to Atlas decades later, while Atlas was commentating on a fight.  Tyson took the initiative to apologize, and he insists in his autobiography that it was sincere.

However, Atlas doesn’t wholly accept Tyson’s apology, and that has people wondering whether the boxing pundit might be a little petty.  Atlas seems to doubt Tyson’s sincerity.  He said as much on the Lex Fridman podcast: 

“If he really did it for himself, he really felt that…it was true. I know I’m taking it too deep, but what am I going to do? He was in the middle of 12 steps–with drugs, alcohol, 12 steps. Which is a commendable thing. Part of the steps is to apologize to people you’ve offended in life. Ok. But are you doing it for the 12 steps or are you doing it because you’ve really, truly come to terms with believing that what you did was that hurtful to me.” 

Although Tyson did make the apology in the context of an AA program, he explicitly calls his apology “sincere” in his autobiography. Furthermore, in Undisputed Truth, Tyson says of Atlas:

“He taught me how to fight, he was right there from the beginning.”

(87)

It doesn’t seem fair that a recovering addict’s apology is not accepted by virtue of the fact that the person is a recovering addict.  

When a man humbles himself like that, admits his weakness with drugs and addiction, admits he was wrong, it seems the decent thing to accept the apology. If they could bury the hatchet, one would even like to see Tyson and Atlas do a podcast together.  

Instead, Atlas seems to be holding onto this grudge that he has against his former mentee. Hopefully he will think better of that mindset. 

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