Teddy Atlas: commitment

Transcript context

…Now you’re the scientist with the test tubes. Yeah, I guess so. And I just hope that… what I said earlier is really my thread through this whole thing. When you say, “Could you forgive Cus? ” I’m still trying to forgive myself. And if I can have hope that I can forgive myself, I think that hope has to start with the power to forgive someone else. How can I ever forgive myself for all my failings and figure it out if I can’t start and practice it by forgiving someone else for some shortcomings? And for me, that’s the only sense of sometimes a very hard thing to make sense of. That’s my North Star, that’s my compass. Cus used to make me laugh. Me and him did everything together. And we’d get lost in the city, we get lost in the Bronx, and he’d get all frustrated. And he said, “Atlas, you’re a great trainer but you turn you around, you spin you around and you’re lost.” And I said, “Me or we?” Because I was the only one who would argue with him, and it was really funny sometimes. And I said, “We or me? We or?” He goes, “[inaudible 01:30:46].” “Cus, you’re lost. I’m lost. What are you talking about?” And then all of a sudden Cus couldn’t give in. He just couldn’t admit. He couldn’t give in. You know what he said to me? All of a sudden he goes, “When I was in the Army, if I had a compass I could get out of the woods.” I said, “We’re not in the woods, we’re not in the Army. We don’t have a compass. Cus! Cus!” “Just don’t argue with me!” One time we’re driving. I want to get back to Catskill. We just finished at the Bronx. It’s been a long day visiting the Murderers Inc. houses and everything else that he took me through for the 1,800th time. And he would fall asleep. He was getting older and he would just fall asleep in the car. So what do you think? I went a little faster, because before he went to sleep he said, “Don’t speed.” I don’t consider myself… I try to be an honest guy and I try to be a freaking… Was it five or six guys?…

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