Tim Bradley and Teddy Atlas have clicked as a team. Photo / Naoki Fukuda

TIM BRADLEY AND TEDDY ATLAS ARE HELPING EACH OTHER ANSWER THEIR CALLING

Note: This feature originally appeared in the May 2016 issue of THE RING Magazine

After his first trial workout with Teddy Atlas ended, Tim Bradley came to a curious conclusion. It was nothing like what the five-time junior welterweight and welterweight champion had expected, so now the question was what to do.

At the time, Bradley was 32-1-1 and on a two-fight winning streak since losing a rematch by decision to Manny Pacquiao. He was again WBO welterweight champion but this latest title came not with glory but rather a sense of unease suddenly amplified by Atlas’ questions. They were questions to which Bradley had no answers.

“It all started between us from an interview after the Jessie Vargas fight,” Bradley said while recalling how he came to convince Atlas to come out of retirement to train him after Atlas had walked away from that aspect of boxing three years earlier, wearied by the disappointment and betrayal so common in the business of boxing.

“I’d never been interviewed by Teddy Atlas but I’d always watched him on ESPN (where Atlas has long been the analyst of Friday Night Fights and now their more high-profile series featuring Al Haymon’s Premier Boxing Champions). “I was excited to do it. When we were about to get off the phone he said, ‘Do you know why you got hit with that right hand?’

“I said, ‘Yeah. I was tired and he dropped in front of me and I tried to throw an uppercut.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but what did you do wrong mechanically?’ He asked me, ‘What do you do when a guy drops down in front of you? You drop down with him. You didn’t.’ Then he told me the rounds to go look at. He said, ‘You thought he was going into your pocket but he wasn’t. He was going for your head. He set you up.’

“I went and looked and he was right. I told my wife (Monica, who also manages Bradley) that night for a guy who’s not my trainer to have that kind of depth of knowledge about me I wanted him to train me.”

Bradley had been trained for years by Joel Diaz but like many long-running unions in boxing it had run its course. In Bradley’s mind he was growing stale and felt a sense of contentment had drifted in over his crew like night fog over the ocean, blinding them to what he’d begun to feel.

“I went to him like a man,” Bradley said of a meeting with Diaz that did not end well. “I felt I was declining. I’m supposed to be going up not down. Joel had so many other guys he was working with now. We were supposed to be getting ready for Pacquiao and he had to leave to go with a four-round fighter. When we’re getting ready for Pacquiao? I understood he was trying to grow his business but what are we doing?

“Joel did a great job with me. He built me. I give Joel Diaz a lot of credit. I had skills. I was a top amateur. He made me a better fighter. We won world titles together. He taught me all he knew. I accomplished a lot with those things but it had just become a monotonous routine. Habits had been created. We were so comfortable and had so much success I think we got complacent and it was no longer good. I was getting hit a lot more.

“Was I going to correct those mistakes or just go back and do the same things again? Unanimous decisions were becoming split decisions. You’ve got to have a certain amount of respect for what you’re doing. You lose that and problems start to develop.”

Having decided change was necessary, Bradley began to ponder where to turn. Unexpectedly, he turned to a guy asking him questions because, well, it seemed like the guy had the answers.

“I told my wife to get his number and ask him to train me,” Bradley said of Atlas. “He said no. He said he wasn’t doing that any more. He told me about the Russian (former heavyweight champion Alexander Povetkin, who Atlas turned into a world champion and then walked away when Povetkin refused to abide by the training contract between them). He ranted about that a little bit.

“I told him, ‘I’m not that guy, coach. Come and see the way I live. I respect my family. I respect the sport of boxing. Don’t let a few guys take away what you’re on the planet to do.”‘

Atlas spoke to his wife, who was opposed to a return to the side of boxing that had so often left her husband disappointed despite having had extensive success with fighters like Michael Moorer, Mike Tyson, Simon Brown, Povetkin and a string of others. But his two children argued Bradley’s point.

They reminded him he was a teacher first and that opportunity does not keep coming to someone who spurns too often its advances. Slowly Atlas was convinced. Not to train Bradley but to go to Palm Springs, California, where Bradley lives, and see who he was.

“I saw his enthusiasm and his need,” Atlas said of his first encounter with Bradley. “We’d just finished watching film and seen him getting hit with right hands. I came prepared with eight pages of notes. ‘Go to 53 seconds of the sixth round.’ I had it down cold. This is what you did and this is what it led to and why. He was surprised by that.”

That’s not all Bradley was surprised by, however.

Upon his arrival, Atlas insisted Bradley stop at a shop so he could bring flowers to Bradley’s wife to go along with some small gifts he’d brought for his children. Bradley never heard of such a thing.

After greeting Monica, Atlas didn’t launch into a boxing discussion or a contract negotiation. Rather, he asked to hold Bradley’s young son, who smiled at this stranger in a way that made Bradley feel “like this is meant to be.”

Soon, however, it was time to work and Atlas was prepared. After six hours of film study where Atlas kept pointing out specific mistakes at precise moments in various fight tapes, they headed off for their first gym workout  and for what Atlas thought might be their last.

“I liked Tim but I still wasn’t going to do it,” Atlas said.

What happened there, however, was a revelation for Tim Bradley.