Atlas soon became acquainted with a young Mike Tyson<\/a>, who later continued his destructive surge under the guidance of Kevin Rooney, another D\u2019Amato disciple, following the passing of his long-term mentor.<\/p>\nPrior to that, though, Atlas had been heavily involved in the early development of \u2018Iron Mike\u2019, before establishing himself as an esteemed coach in his own right.<\/p>\n
His greatest achievement arguably came when Michael Moorer, who had previously campaigned at 175lbs, claimed the world heavyweight title with a victory over Evander Holyfield in 1994.<\/p>\n
Along with Moorer, Atlas also trained the likes of Barry McGuigan and Timothy Bradley, who called upon the American coach\u2019s services for the last two fights of his decorated career.<\/p>\n
In those two outings, Bradley was well past his best but nonetheless stopped Brandon Rios in the ninth round, before losing his lucrative trilogy showdown with Manny Pacquiao.<\/p>\n
But while Bradley and Moorer were certainly among the best he trained, Atlas has previously revealed in an interview with Ring Magazine that Wilfred Benitez was almost in a class of his own.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes you go to the Academy Awards and one movie wins all the awards. What are you gonna do? That would be Benitez.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnyone who could beat Roberto Duran, amongst many other great fighters, that\u2019s a pretty good resume. I would say Benitez overall was the package. He was a special fighter.\u201d<\/p>\n
Atlas worked with Benitez for a relatively short spell of his career, which saw the former two-weight world champion face both Sugar Ray Leonard and Thomas Hearns.<\/p>\n
Benitez became the youngest world champion in history at 17 and went on to won titles in three weight divisions, renowned for his exceptional defensive skill and ring intelligence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Teddy Atlas has worked with several elite operators, often preparing them for the harshest of battles, but only…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360191,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[703,49,48,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-360190","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}