Playboy Magazine South Africa November 2013 November 2013 | Page 81

When the shooting began
the perpetrators had no idea
that Macho was sitting in that
car. Macho took the very first shot.
He was just in the wrong place at
the wrong time.

challenged, his being hit, in that sense it was a
defeat. He had never gone into the ring where
he couldn’t just dazzle with his dominance. So
when you run up against a fighter like Rosario
who just hits you like that, sometimes it seems
like you lost, even if you didn’t lose.”
Marley you don’t telephone; Marley you
meet for drinks. Jimmy’s Corner, Times Square.
Maybe the last boxing bar in New York City, not
counting the taquerias north of 110th Street.
Fight posters and publicity shots, ragged-edged
newspaper stories framed in smoky glass, sepiatinged boxers staring back at you from every inch
of paint-peeled wall.
Marley, fast talking, smart. Now a successful
Manhattan defense attorney. Goes back with
Macho. To the amateurs. Remembers the trainers
Billy Giles and Bobby Lee Velez, “old-school,” he
calls them. They molded the kid who had been in
and out of Rikers. Guided him from the Golden
Gloves to a professional career. Made him a
name, a hero, a champion. Then the bitter break.
Giles claiming Macho was “drowning in drugs.”
“New York is famous for its neighborhood
fighters.” Marley lifts a Beck’s, takes a long swig.
“Rocky Graziano from the Lower East Side. Mike
Tyson coming from Brownsville. Mark Breland
from Bed-Stuy. The old Jewish fighters, Benny
Leonard, Bummy Davis. Camacho came up
after that time. But he would have fit perfectly
on Eastern Parkway or the Sunnyside Gardens

or the old St Nick’s arena over on the west side.
Quintessential New York fighter.”
Like Machito, like Merchant, like just about
everyone around the fight game, Marley talks
about the two Machos. Pre-Rosario and postRosario. “He was a changed guy after that.
Decided not to take the risks.
“Now when people remember Macho they
think of the carnival,” Marley says. “The gladiator
outfits and the tiger-striped loincloths. The spit
curl. The pretty-boy face and the naked weighins. And it was true. Nobody enjoyed being the
Macho Man more than Macho. Impossible not to
like. But people forget. He was so well schooled
in the fundamentals. He was unhittable.”
Until Rosario hit him.
Couple nights later. Across the Hudson in
Staten Island. Teddy Atlas’s kitchen. Voice like a
crow, singing a broken song. “You know I paid
for the guy’s burial?”
I did not.
Atlas, maybe the best trainer left in the
game. Runs a charity, the Dr Theodore A Atlas
Foundation, in honor of his late father. Has
helped, literally, thousands of underprivileged
New York City kids. Lately hundreds of Staten
Island families rocked by Hurricane Sandy. The
night I meet him, he’s just returned from putting
up new roofs in one of the borough’s most stormshattered neighborhoods.
“Got a call the night before the funeral,” he says.
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NOEMBER 2013

“Old friend, a fighter. I’m in a nice restaurant
with my wife.” Elaine Atlas nods. She is at the
stove, ladling chili over rice and slicing a ball
of mozzarella. Her look says, My Teddy, the
soft touch.
“I never trained Macho, never worked with
him,” Atlas shrugs. “Everybody knows I have the
charity foundation. Anyway, the guy tells me the
Camacho family needs $3,000 or the cemetery
won’t bury him. I’m like, $3,000! This after I see
on the television they got a glass carriage for a
hearse and whit e horses pulling him through
Spanish Harlem. How much did that cost? Why
don’t you skip that and pay the cemetery?
“Next morning, Saturday morning, day of the
funeral, I have my assistant in the foundation call
to make sure. Nope, won’t put him in the ground
without the money. I guaranteed ’em a check.
You believe that bullshit?”
“Eat your dinner,” Elaine says. Puts down a
plate of chili and cheese. “What’s done is done.”
Like Macho, Atlas was a rough kid. High school
dropout. Street fighter. The half-moon scar that
arcs down the left side of his face comes from
a knife wound that took 400 stitches to close.
Did time in Rikers on an armed robbery beef.
So he can relate. But Macho never grew up.
Atlas did. Now, at 56, he possesses a deep and
innate intelligence masked by the dese, dems
and dose of his Bowery Boy delivery. When he
pulls back the curtain, whether breaking down