Sparring With Hemingway: And Other Legends of the Fight Game

by Budd Schulberg

  If there’s a rematch, let it go fifteen. Maybe then the better man will emerge victorious. But for the moment, the king is dead, long live the king.

  [April 1987]

  Historic Night in the Ring: Holmes-Spinks

  IT WAS A NIGHT TO give heart to the underdogs of this world to dream the impossible dreams.

  It’s a once upon a time fairy tale of a light-heavyweight champion not considered with the great ones—Conn, Moore, Foster—who accomplished Saturday night what no light-heavyweight champion had ever been able to accomplish: lift the crown from the heavyweight champ.

  Going up against that undefeated heavyweight champion, even one clearly on the skids, Michael Spinks was not only a 5-to-l underdog to Larry Holmes but given no chance by any of the boxing writers I checked with through the day—with one exception. Our fearless leader, Jerry Lisker, called it in advance loud and clear: Spinks!

  As far as Holmes had obviously slipped from the form that made him a credible successor to Ali, I thought he’d have enough left—the straight jab and the hard right—to handle the strong and actively unorthodox Spinks. In the early rounds that seemed the smart pick, with Holmes moving forward and jabbing, no longer brilliantly or punishingly, but doing enough to establish control.

  Then things began to happen. Spinks things.

  Larry was looking slow and puffy and Michael was taking heart. At times Michael’s style was to walk away. At times he backed off and dropped his arms. At times he cried out that Holmes was giving him the elbow. But there were also times when he startled Holmes by suddenly moving forward and throwing punches in bunches. They didn’t hurt Holmes, but they made him unhappy.

  That became the pattern of the fight: Holmes puffy-faced, jabbing tentatively and unable to throw the right hand that had pumped defeat and retirement into the face of Gerry Cooney.

  Except for the well-timed flurries when Spinks shifted gears and drove the old champion backward, it was no Louis-Conn, not exactly pregnant with dramatic movements. As both contestants admitted in the postfight press conference, neither one was hurt or in trouble at any time.

  What was most spectacular about this fight was its historicity: unanimous decision for Spinks, two of the cards by a single point—which tallied precisely with what this writer scored, ditto Dick Young and other boxing mavens.

  It’s been boxing tradition that the close ones go to the champion, as Louis was helped in the first Walcott fight and later Ali and Holmes. This fight did live up to its History Hype in this respect: Holmes was grounded in his quest to match Marciano’s record of 49-0. With all his riches, his “$99 million in the bank,” he will now live in the record books as 48-1.

  How the triumphant Michael Spinks will fare in the confusing world of the fragmented heavyweight championship should give a welcome zest to the game this year. Meanwhile, the disingenuous and appealing conqueror laughed off the hard questions at the press conference: “Look, don’t ask me about tomorrow. Let me enjoy tonight!”

  It was a night to remember, not round by round but for the historic passing of an old champion and the crowning of a new. And for one Ripley element: of all the brother acts in boxing, only the brothers Spinks (Leon and Michael) have become heavyweight champions of the world.

  So Leon’s was a fluke and short-lived. More power to the little brother who stood in his shadow. Michael brings a welcome new energy to the lackluster heavyweight division—the long-shot breaker of the jinx that has frustrated light-heavyweight champions from slick Philadelphian Jack O’Brien to power puncher Bob Foster.

  Sad to see a final champion come up empty. Good to see a hard-working young champion bang his way into the golden circle.

  Boxing as metaphor for life, its surprises and its inevitability, moves on.

  [September 1985]

  They Fall Harder When They’re Old: Tyson-Holmes

  WE PICK UP EXACTLY where we left off in our appraisal of the Mike Tyson-Larry Holmes “fight” on the day of their encounter for the heavyweight championship of the world that was hyped by the black Don (King) and the white Don (Trump) as “heavyweight history.”

  It would be, we feared, not so much an athletic contest between the new champion and the old champion dreaming those comeback dreams. Instead, it would be a ritual, a sacrifice of the old, tired ex-champion with nothing left against a new, powerful, relentless, remorseless twenty-one-year-old who has everything left. Tyson thundered right hands that drove Holmes back into the ropes and, finally, into that inevitable retirement beyond that first, iffy, semiretirement never-never land in which Larry Holmes drifted for almost two years, coming back for the farewell pay night that brought him $3 million and brought us to the conclusion, once again, that age thirty-eight is the dividing line beyond which lies boxing senility.

  We have mentioned, in our retrospective on the comeback attempts of ex-champions, that it was no fun to watch an ancient Joe Louis outboxed, outpunched, and outpunished by his successor, Ezzard Charles. And there was agony rather than exhilaration in the ten-round pounding of our black prince, Muhammad Ali, at the hands of the finely tuned Larry Holmes eight years ago.

  Last evening, at the posh Imperial Ballroom at the Trump Plaza, where five hundred celebrities from Barbra Streisand and Kirk Douglas to John McEnroe and Tatum O’Neal had gathered, the only celebrity I felt an urge to embrace was Ali. His face looked a little puffy, he was walking slowly, and you had to lean forward to hear the whisper that once had been a roar of defiance, triumph, and irrepressible humor. As we hugged each other in a way that concentrated twenty-five years into a moment of shared highs and lows, Ali whispered: “Too old, just gettin’ too old. …”

  We could describe the abbreviated Tyson-Holmes fiasco blow by blow, but that would be as much an exercise in futility as was Holmes’s aimless attempt to challenge Tyson’s claim to the first undisputed heavyweight championship of the world since Larry himself held that proud title.

  Ali, the super champion become the super victim, said it for all of them. “We’re gettin’ too old. …” Larry Holmes, finally coming out for the first round after McEnroe and mother Tatum had to be introduced to an impatient crowd of sixteen thousand for the third time, faced the young tyro Tyson with a look in his eye that sent an unmistakable message to his brain: “Gettin’ too old.”

  Young, confident, unforgiving, Tyson came out fighting, and old, anxious, tentative Holmes came out retreating. Where once there had been the stinging jab, there was now a long left hand that pushed out in anxiety. Something in Larry’s demeanor was saying: “Please don’t hurt me.” My notes for Round 1 read: “Holmes has nothing. He runs, but not on legs with any plan. Simply falling back in disorder. No jab, no right, no legs, nothing.”

  The Larry Holmes of the Ken Norton fight and the Earnie Shavers fight and who defended the title twenty times with skills that brought him to the threshold of greatness, that Larry Holmes was simply not in the ring with Tyson last night. He looked like Larry Holmes, or maybe his slower, thicker brother. He answered to the name of Larry Holmes, but the performer, or rather the nonperformer, who showed up to fill the bill was an imposter who had no business being in the same ring with a black angel/monster of aggression who may still lack the finesse of a Joe Louis but who restores to the heavyweight division a sense of unity, dignity, and finality that’s been lacking ever since Holmes put down the mysterious Gerry Cooney six years ago, and then started his slow, tortuous descent to the pathetic disarray he brought to his less-than-four-round farewell to boxing.

  [January 1988]

  Spinks’s Magic Act Is Not Enough

  THIS MORNING, WAITING for the bell that finally brings together the undisputed but beleaguered heavyweight champion of the world, Mike Tyson, and the also undefeated, unpredictable and mischievous challenger, Michael Spinks, there’s a sense of relief in the press room that at last you can write about the impending contest, the long-awaited confrontation between the two best heavyweights in the world, with a combined
record of sixty-five wins, most by KO, and losses none.

  So many major fights have fizzled as major disappointments—a Holmes or an Ali revealed behind the screen of hype, a Cooney suddenly coming apart under pressure—that one hesitates to say what we’re about to say: Let’s try to forget for one hour tonight, to put aside the emotional and economic melodrama of The Tyson Story, the complex battle for the mind and heart (and bank account) of the twenty-one-year-old throwback to the old days of fistfighting brutes—and focus on what may happen tonight!

  Brute force, a power-puncher goes after the kind of opponent he’s never met before, a guile guy, an artful dodger, a thirty-one-year-old who has been through light-heavyweight wars with Yaqui Lopez and Dwight Braxton and Eddie Davis and then mysteriously moved up from 175 pounds to 200, Saturday afternoon weighing in at 212¼ with his trousers on, though we didn’t get to check his pockets—maybe weights, more likely just money.

  Anyway, he is the only growing boy of thirty-one, and he’s not growing bigger. He’s growing smarter, with the invaluable Eddie Futch as full professor in charge of Fistic Strategy, though Spinks has a knack for thinking on his feet, an Actors Studio type who may not know the whole script but has an instinctive gift for improv.

  In all the years I’ve been following this sweetly brutal science, I’ve never seen one quite like Spinks. Stick-and-move-move would seem the logical approach to neutralizing Tyson’s talents. But Spinks isn’t that kind of boxer. No Billy Conn. No early Ali. No Ezzard Charles moving with grace from side to side. Just a lot of zigging and zagging, refusing to accommodate you by simply presenting himself in front of you with jiggle steps, a kind of juggler of the ring who suddenly jabs and throws an uppercut from a funny angle that shouldn’t work, but sometimes does for exactly that reason. It’s so unexpected, so unorthodox.

  Michael Spinks is no take-out puncher, though he stiffened Cooney. He didn’t stop Braxton or Eddie Davis, and in thirty rounds with a depreciating Larry Holmes never had him in the kind of trouble that Mike Weaver and the other heavy hitters had him in when he was younger and faster.

  But for a guy who can’t punch and can’t box, at least in the classic style we call boxing, Spinks does something else: somehow, until now, he finds a way to win, in his own style. A survivor original. And if this sounds as if we’ve written a preamble to vote for a Spinks upset of Cus D’Amato’s little street kid grown up to a hard rock 218, you’re wrong.

  No matter how many different directions Spinks tries to move away from Tyson or toward him, no matter how many distractions, how many public airings of private dirty laundry have interrupted his training, how much he misses the guiding hand of surrogate father D’Amato and assistant surrogate, the late Jim Jacobs, no matter what angry “I’ve got a contract” Bill Cayton says about Don King, Robin Givens, and in-house, or rather in-castle mother-in-law Ruth Roper, no matter if he’s only 50 percent of the 100 percent he could have been if he had totally dedicated himself to preparation like the great champions he reveres, no matter.

  There has to come a time in this fight (say between rounds 4 and 7), when Spinks runs out of improvs, when the quickness of hand surprises old Michael, and when he realizes for the first time: “Oh mother, that’s how a real heavyweight really hits!” He will be hit as he’s never been hit before in all his amateur days and his dozen years of professional fighting, and he will go down and out fighting, unless a merciful Futch stops him from coming out for more, as he did with Joe Frazier in that fateful fourteenth of the Ali Thriller in Manila.

  So on goes Tyson, on to Evander Holyfield a year from now, on to more astronomical gates and astronomical troubles. One can’t help feeling that for this man-child in this gilded world, with his $4.5 million dollhouse, his Bentley, his Rolls, his woman, and his business controllers, the worst is yet to come. Anyone who comes from where he’s been and loves to raise pigeons can’t be all bad. We pray not.

  So on to the fight. Once and for all. Bless the loser, and may God help the winner.

  The biggest fight of all may still be Tyson vs. Tyson.

  [June 1988]

  The Second Coming of George Foreman

  OKAY, LAUGH AT ME, TELL me I’m a true child of the Hollywood studio where I was raised, that I’ve been to one movie set too many, prematurely convinced that all of life can be defined as one great movie.

  Well, if you’ve been following Big George Foreman as long as I have—from the Olympic Games in Mexico City twenty-three years ago, to his disastrous night with Ali in Zaire (the “Rumble in the Jungle”) six years later, to a pilgrimage to his Church of the Lord Jesus Christ in Houston and his horse-and-cattle ranch in rural northeast Marshall, Texas, just a few weeks ago—you can’t help feeling that the George Foreman Story is the sum of every fight movie ever made, from The Harder They Fall to Body and Soul to Wallace Beery in The Champ. And come Friday evening, April 19, the forty-two-year-old ex-heavyweight champion of the world, in his “Second Coming” after an unprecedented ten-year retirement, is casting himself as a black “Rocky”—if not a black Lazarus—ready to challenge the twenty-eight-year-old undefeated king of the heavyweights, Evander Holyfield.

  When Jersey Joe Walcott won the heavyweight crown from Ezzard Charles at the age of thirty-seven, that feat was considered a geriatric miracle. And the venerable Jersey Joe had been in there with toughies year after year, including twenty-six memorable rounds with Joe Louis. When Jim Jeffries came out of five-year retirement as the “Great White Hope” in his futile attempt to remove the belt from the lithe black waist of Jack Johnson, he was an ancient and creaky thirty-five, “a mere shadow,” as we boxing guys say, “of his former self.” So if old George, who reigned in ’73-’74, can beat the socks off young Evander when they square off at Trump Plaza, he’ll not only earn a niche in the Guinness Book of Records, he’ll strike a blow for middle age that hasn’t been equaled since Life Begins at 40 became a runaway bestseller almost sixty years ago. Not to mention picking up a cool $10 million, not a bad paynight for a preacher who eschews the lifestyle of a Jim Bakker.

  If you buy the premise of “George Foreman: The Movie,” let’s flash all the way back to young George, the Teenage Terror, establishing his identity as a big-fisted Lord of the Jungle of Houston’s Fifth Ward, where the shy, overgrown drop-out found he could excel in the University of the Street: survive or die. A powerful hitter who found an outlet for pent-up energy in flattening anybody in sight, George somehow drifted into the Job Corps, where a fellow named Doc Broadus talked him into putting on the gloves with this blunt invitation: “You’re big enough and ugly enough.”

  The gym was a revelation. On Front Street, in what George still calls “the back of Houston,” it was a world of handguns, knives, drugs, muggings. As an accomplished street fighter, like his younger counterpart, Mike Tyson, whom he may eventually tangle with in the first $100-million fight (if he beats Holyfield), Big George was on the way to the slammer or the cemetery when amateur boxing gave him a reprieve.

  In a brief amateur career he had all the finesse of a slaughterhouse worker pounding a mallet on the unprotected skull of a steer. Down they fell and up went George. With hardly a dozen fights he’s in the Olympic tryouts. Four wins and he’s our heavyweight entry in Mexico City, four more and the big head-buster from the back of Houston beats up a Russian and has a gold medal around his neck, parading around the ring with a love-me, love-me smile on his big brown horse of a face, and a tiny American flag in a fist bigger than Sonny Liston’s.

  Sprawled comfortably on the commodious couch of his ranchhouse in Marshall this winter, as George was reminded of the controversy his impromptu flag-waving ceremony caused, he offered an answer in the relaxed and self-contented style of the new George Foreman. I had been present at the Tommie Smith-John Carlos protest at the track-and-field Games back in ’68, when these black Mercuries had defiantly given the Black Power salute during the playing of our national anthem celebrating their success in the 200-meter dash. Smith
(who won the gold medal) and Carlos (who won the bronze) had been unceremoniously dismissed from the American team and sent home in disgrace (to White America, but as heroes to militant young blacks).

  “Nope, it may have looked like that,” George was saying, “but I wasn’t even thinking about what Carlos and Smith were trying to do. I was just a big kid who couldn’t believe how lucky I was—instead of trouble in the Fifth Ward, here I was a world champion and my name up there and when they played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ I was thinking about the Job Corps and how America had given me a chance I never expected to have—it was the proudest moment of my life—even bigger than knocking out Joe Frazier five years later and becoming professional champion of the world.

  “I didn’t have no problem with John Carlos,” George went on, “I just wasn’t into that. I was waving that little flag for the Job Corps and thinking, where would I be without it and the chance it gave me to be somebody instead of a bum and running from the cops.”

  I remembered George strutting around that ring at Arena Mexico and worrying that the heavy-fisted winner would come across as a gold medal Uncle Tom—such was the spirit of ’68.

  “I went back to Front Street in the back of Houston, thinking I’d be a big man, shucks I was only nineteen, and before that I’d been a thug, a desperado, a wine-drinking brawler, and I was only waving the flag because I was happy—a fella called Sergeant Rogers gave it to me for good luck, and when I won I wanted them to know what country I’m from. But back on the street a dude I used to mug with, instead of giving me the handshake, he says, ‘What’s wrong with you, George, waving your silly-ass American flag? Carlos and Smith, they stood up to the Man.’

  “Well, that put a chip on my shoulder. And then I met Sonny Liston. You know, I was winning fights, knocking out almost everybody in two, three rounds, even George Chuvalo, who went the distance two times with Ali. But Ali was in style, all the young dudes, they shouting ‘Ali, Ali,’ and that irritated me, so when I knock Joe Frazier down six times I figure I can’t be like Ali, so maybe a champ should be like Sonny.”