Atlas Puts the Weight on His Shoulders : Boxing: Moorer’s trainer sees defeat looming--and takes an unusual step to turn the fight’s tide.

Teddy Atlas decided he couldn’t stand for what was happening, so he decided to sit down.

He sat on his fighter’s stool, between rounds of a heavyweight title fight, with Michael Moorer gaping down at his trainer as if Atlas were crazy. Atlas concedes that is possible.

“You’re going to cry tomorrow!” Atlas screamed at Moorer. “Do you want to cry tomorrow?”

Moorer, shocked into obedience, could only reply: “No.” Atlas shrugged. Eventually, Atlas let him have his stool back, and Moorer went on to win the heavyweight championship.

In one more sign that Moorer and Atlas have a heavyweight title relationship that moves to an immeasurably different beat, one of the key moments of Moorer’s majority-decision victory over Evander Holyfield on Friday night occurred after the eighth round, when Atlas sensed that Moorer was losing momentum.

As Moorer returned to his corner, he was greeted by a grumpy Atlas, demanding answers, perched on Moorer’s stool.

“I did it because I thought the fight was getting to the mode where Michael was satisfied just to be there and he was doing enough to lose some rounds, just trying to survive,” Atlas said Saturday. “And I wasn’t going to cooperate with that.

“It just came to me. I had to do something I thought very dramatic. I know Michael, so whereas it might be extra dramatic to someone else, it was necessary and urgent to me.”

Moorer, who dominated the early-to-middle rounds with an aggressive right jab that had Holyfield out of kilter and bleeding heavily over his left eye despite having knocked Moorer down in the second, started slowing down in the seventh. Holyfield, though badly damaged, was edging back into control.

“If it continued to go that way, it would just be a matter of time before Holyfield realized it and didn’t allow him to survive,” Atlas said.

“I just sat on the stool and said, ‘You don’t want to fight. You don’t want to win this damn thing, so I’ll fight. Get outside, give me the water and I’ll take your place.’ And I made him say to me that he wanted to fight before I would get up. I said, ‘You don’t want to fight.’ He said, ‘No, I do.’ Thank God.”

Moorer laughed when he was asked what he was thinking while Atlas looked up at him.

“I thought he was the craziest cornerman in the world,” Moorer said Saturday. “But Teddy doesn’t care if you think he’s crazy, he doesn’t care what people think.”

Atlas’ antics in between the seventh and eighth were a highlight of his motivational techniques from the first day he met the moody Moorer about a year ago to the final round of his victory.

Said Moorer’s manager, John Davimos: “I don’t know if Michael could have done this without Teddy Atlas.”

Looking as if he had fought 12 rounds himself on Saturday, Atlas said he had never had to be on top of a fighter as much as he had to with Moorer, a talented fighter with an inconsistent nature.

So even as Moorer, who has never hidden his disdain for much of the boxing world, hesitated to say how long he wanted to defend his title, Atlas said he didn’t know if he could ever go through the emotional wringer of working with Moorer again.

“Winning the title usually helps your confidence and you feel secure about yourself . . . you get to where you respect the title and it just improves you,” Atlas said. “That should help. But somebody’s probably going to have to stay on him--I don’t know if it’ll be me.

“It was very . . . testing.”

But in the end, Atlas’ original game plan--smash Holyfield with the right jab, watch him wear down at the end of the fight--worked perfectly.

Don Turner, Holyfield’s trainer who doubled as a cutman Friday, said he understood that he will receive a lot of blame for the defeat after taking over from Emanuel Steward.

“I can swim with sharks, and I won’t get bit,” Turner said. “I knew what I was getting into.”

Both Moorer and Holyfield ended up in the hospital after the fight with sore left arms, but nobody was saying the fight was decided by arm troubles.

“I thought the timing was right from the first time we made the fight,” Atlas said. “Evander had moved past a certain plateau. I thought he’d fought a lot of tough fights. . . . He’s 31 years old. . . . I thought those tough fights were going to take a toll.

“I went against what everyone thought--that we had to knock him out early or something. I felt if we got confidence and we were there in the later rounds, we would only get better. (Moorer would) start saying, ‘I could do this, I could do this.’ ”

What’s next for the new International Boxing Federation and World Boxing Assn. champion? Moorer didn’t say, other than he wanted a lot of rest and that he would appear on “The Late Show With David Letterman” Tuesday night. Davimos, however, suggested that a rematch with Holyfield, if the former champion doesn’t retire, is not out of the question.

Shelly Finkel, Holyfield’s manager, said he would file a protest over the scoring in the second round in order to maintain Holyfield’s rights--rematches are encouraged by the sanctioning bodies if there is controversy involved in the first fight--if he decides to return to the ring.

Although Holyfield knocked Moorer down at the end of the second round, which generally results in a 10-8 round score, judge Jerry Roth scored the round even, 10-10, giving Moorer credit for controlling the first part of the round.

If Roth scores the round 10-9 for Holyfield, his overall score changes to 114-114, matching judge Dalby Shirley’s even score, which would have made the fight a draw.

But no protest, Finkel said, would take away the fact that Moorer won the title.

“He’ll be better with the title,” Davimos said. “In my mind, Michael’s an insecure kid. The title will help him become a man. He’s not a bad kid, he just has insecurities that have caused him trouble.

“You’ve got to think winning the championship will help you alleviate some of those insecurities.”

With World Boxing Council champion Lennox Lewis and Riddick Bowe as the two names drawing the most big-money attention, Davimos indicated that Lewis would be a more likely choice.

And will Atlas be there for Moorer’s next fight?

“Either he’ll be there with Michael,” Davimos said, “or I’ll kill Teddy myself.”

Boxing Notes

A replay of the Michael Moorer-Evander Holyfield heavyweight championship fight will be shown Wednesday night at 10 on HBO, the pay-cable service announced.