by John Florio
Tony Santana, the wide-eyed kid from the Brooklyn projects, soon became Leon’s roommate. “Everybody wanted to be like Leon,” he says, recalling the years they boxed together. “He had the character and the heart and the attitude that a boxer needed. Leon took me under his wing. He came to my corner every time I fought. And he always invited me to go running with him. He talked to all the team members and always kept them up. We had the best boxing team and Leon gave us that. He was the leader of the team.”
Teammate Buster Drayton remembers Leon as having the role of de facto coach. “When I signed up to join the team, [the guys] said you can’t make the team unless Leon approves it. You have to box Leon and if he wants you to stay, you can stay. I said, ‘What?!’ They said, ‘That’s the way it is.’ So he approved me. He’s the one who said I could make the team.”
It was 1975, and after a couple of years in the Marines, Leon had finally found what had eluded him for twenty years in the ghetto. For the first time in his life, he was proud of himself.
Boxers are dumb. That’s what Michael Spinks told himself as he walked out of Vashon High School with no intention of returning.
He was proud to be a boxer but not so proud that he’d lost sight of what the sport took from those who pursued it. He knew all about the vultures that picked the pockets of the poor souls who risked their lives in the ring. Look at what had happened to Joe Louis. His story was reason enough to avoid the sport.
No, Michael didn’t quit high school to box. He left Vashon because he had little interest in academics—and an admirable itch to help his mother pay the bills. The Spinks clan had been relocated into a two-bedroom apartment in the Darst-Webbe projects south of downtown. The new housing situation was no more than a replay of the one at Pruitt-Igoe. Kay still needed all the financial help she could get.
“My mom couldn’t support me,” Michael told Tom Wheatley of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch years later. “I knew I should be contributing to the home instead of taking away. So all my guys, we’d kind of meet up down on Market Street and Olive, somewhere down there, at this labor pool.”
At six o’clock in the morning, Michael would take the bus downtown and line up with the winos and derelicts hoping to get picked for eight hours of off-the-books labor.
“The best job I had there was at a salt factory, a rock-salt factory,” Michael said to the Post-Dispatch. “It was a good-paying job. Yeah, it was a nice-paying job. The rock salt was the kind they put on roads. We’d cover the salt mounds up for the winter. We had to put, like, a canvas tarp over the mounds. I just so happened to have some Boy Scout work when I was younger. And I knew how to tie knots, slipknots and all that. I was always happy to have a job. I was grateful for it. My attitude was, ‘Hey, work me. I’m here to work.’”
It wasn’t just talk. Michael put in long hours, getting to the job early in the morning, leaving at six, and working out at the gym later that night. But in the projects, tragedy could strike anyone at any time, as it did to one of Michael’s close friends.
“That was a very terrible day in my life…,” Michael said. “It was like a dark cloud over the building I lived in. He got shot in the head. He was in a dice game, a crap game. They got arguing, and it turned into a fight, and two people got shot, actually.”
Michael was doing his best at seventeen years old to build a life away from the projects. When word got out that the Holiday Inn, twenty miles away, was looking for a dishwasher, he didn’t think twice. He traded in his boxing gloves for a pair of Rubbermaids.
In an interview with Mark Kriegel of the New York Daily News, Michael said, “I was already happy. I had my mom and best friend, Kay Francis Spinks. I had my lord and savior, Jesus Christ. And I had a job, potwasher at the Holiday Inn, made $100 every two weeks. They promoted me from dishwasher.”
But despite his new title, Michael couldn’t quite shake the sport that he loved—and that loved him back. His strong punch and awkward style were leaving opponents on their backs, baffled by the riddle named Michael Spinks. He’d quickly risen to the top of the St. Louis amateur circuit: In 1974 he won a Golden Gloves title; in 1975 he made it to the AAU finals and took the silver medal.
“Michael was a slickster,” says DeSoto teammate Mike Cross. “You couldn’t tell where his strength came from. Out of the two brothers, I think Mike was the better fighter, but he didn’t like boxing as much as Leon. In those days Leon was a fighter, a killer. Leon loved to fight. Michael didn’t.”
Michael was convinced the public had little regard for boxers. The evidence was all around him in St. Louis, which showered accolades on baseball heroes like Lou Brock and Bob Gibson but did no such thing for boxing champions. From what Michael could see, the international stage at the Olympics leveled the playing field, commanding a respect that wasn’t gained by simply slugging your way out of the sweat-stained DeSoto. So with his résumé of Golden Gloves and AAU accomplishments inspiring self-confidence, Michael devoted himself to making the 1976 US team, vowing to leave the game afterward, whether or not his bid was successful.
He stepped up his training at the DeSoto. When he wasn’t at the gym, he thought about his opponents. He thought about his punches. He thought about everything. He continued training with Kenny Loehr and also worked with Charles Hamm, a part-time trainer, full-time plumber, and around-the-clock guardian to the fatherless kids in the area.
“I thought Michael would go further than Leon because he was disciplined,” Hamm says now. “When Michael came to the gym, he came to work. And if he didn’t come to the gym, he wasn’t gonna fight. You couldn’t get him no fight if he wasn’t training. Leon never trained, and he’d fight anyway. Michael would be real cautious about who he’d fight. He wouldn’t get into the ring against someone he didn’t think he could beat.”
When Leon left for the Marines, Michael became tighter with their childhood friend Jesse Davison. Looking back, Davison can still picture Michael showing up at the gym late at night after work, lugging a boom box. Michael would wait for the gym to empty out—then he’d crank up the music, lace up his boots, and slip on his gloves.
Even though the place was deserted, he never felt as if he were going it alone.
“He always had a Bible in his hand,” Davison says. “When we’d go fight out of town, to New York, to California, to Boston, he always got us in the room and read the Bible to us. And he’d say, ‘Let’s pray.’ We were eighteen, nineteen, we thought it was funny. We thought it was weird. But I think that Bible took him a long way. It gave him courage, faith. And Michael wouldn’t date girls. Wouldn’t hang out with me sometimes. He just stayed with his boxing. I said, ‘Mike, turn pro. You might make it.’”
But Michael had only one goal—making the Olympic team—and he focused obsessively on it. When working out with his friends, he was usually part of a group being pushed and prodded by Kenny Loehr. One story puts the boys in the DeSoto Center on a frigid day in January. The gym’s heating system had broken again; this time the pipes burst. The floor was a sheet of ice.
“Keep jumping that rope,” Loehr ordered them.
“Kenny, the floor’s frozen,” Davison pleaded. “It’s too cold in here to work out.”
“Are you kidding, you little chickenshit?” Loehr said. He had a twinkle in his eye, but there was no budging him. “Keep on jumping.”
The boys trusted Loehr, so they followed orders, dutifully jumping rope on the ice, hitting the bags on the ice, and sparring on the ice.
“We’re gonna tell our mamas,” Davison said.
Loehr pushed them even harder. And when the workout was over, he took them all for pizza.
Michael got more than free dinners from Loehr. He plowed through the amateur ranks like a finely tuned battering ram, knocking down any hopeful that stood in his path.
In March of 1976 Michael found himself at the Golden Gloves in Miami competing to make the Olympic team in the 165-pound weight class. The qualifying match paired him with Lamont Kirkland, a pro
mising amateur who would eventually post a solid pro career. Watching Michael overpower Kirkland, the TV commentators praised Michael’s raw ability—especially his powerful overhand right—the punch that would later become known as the Spinks Jinx.
“Be careful of that right hand,” the announcers shouted for the world to hear.
Kirkland wasn’t listening. Michael landed his right hand at will. The good news for Kirkland’s corner was that their fighter walked out of the ring with barely a mark on him. The bad news was that he walked out before the fight was over. He quit in the second round, giving Michael the fight, and in the process, handing him the middleweight title.
Jim Howell, a longtime coach and trainer in and around St. Louis amateur boxing, worked Michael’s corner for the fight. “Michael was totally dominating everybody he fought,” he says. “He clearly won every fight. He showed tremendous confidence and was so sure he was going to win it. So were all of us. When you go to a national tournament, you’re fighting five times in one week. So you better be in shape. And Michael was in tip-top shape.”
By winning the Golden Gloves, Michael qualified for the Olympic trials. He had three months to get ready. And he’d need all of it—the competition was about to get a whole lot stiffer.
Art Redden wouldn’t tolerate drugs or tobacco, but Marine Private Leon Spinks didn’t seem to care. Leon often missed workouts—preferring to cruise the dive bars off base in Jacksonville. Few teammates accompanied him—not one of them could drink, dance, and party through the night and still show up for roadwork in the morning the way Leon did. But the parties didn’t seem to compromise his talent or his enthusiasm for the ring.
“A lot of times he didn’t come to the gym,” recalls Tony Santana. “We were in the Marines. I don’t know how he did it. He’d make little excuses. Leon was Leon. Once a month we had field day; you had to wear your uniform. I don’t remember him coming with his uniform. He was so good they made excuses for him. He did it his way. He was Leon Spinks. He didn’t care. This is who I am, a straight-up guy. This is me, I’m not gonna change. That was his attitude. And he never made weight. When we were fighting in the nationals, he would jump rope to make weight, then he would win the fight. Then he would jump rope to make weight for the next fight, and then he’d win again.
“Every time we went to another state, first thing he’d do, he’d take off. When he came back he knew all the spots, the people, where everything was at. He would find the clubs, meet a woman, then he would take us.”
While at Camp Lejeune, Leon could usually be found on Court Street hanging out on “the strip,” a civilian wasteland of abandoned buildings, strip clubs, pawnshops, tattoo parlors, and bars. The strip had so many drinking establishments that Leon’s teammates took to calling the bus that got them there the Vomit Comet.
As sheriff of Onslow County, North Carolina, Ed Brown had seen it all. “[The Marines] would come off the bus and the white [guys] would go on one side of the tracks and the blacks would go on the other side,” Brown remembers. “In those days you had marijuana, PCP, mescaline, LSD.
“First night on the beat, I’ve never seen anything like it in my life and never seen anything like it since. Knives, straight razors, Saturday night specials, old thirty-eight revolvers. You had a military base filled with young men with a lot of energy. You could rest assured there’d be three or four fights a night. And then topless dancing came in. When these military people were brought into town, from about eight o’clock in the evening to about two o’clock in the morning, especially on Friday and Saturday, it was so impacted that you couldn’t even drive down the street. Me being a country boy who’d never been to town, I said, ‘Lord, if you allow me to live to be thirty years old, I will have seen as much as the average man will have seen in a lifetime.’”
Marine Captain Bill Darrow, now retired, was largely responsible for putting together the boxing team at Camp Lejeune. “There was a black bar that was infamous, [Shaw’s Café]. It was surrounded by empty lots,” he says. “That street was dark, not a lot of streetlights. If you didn’t know what you were doing, you were taking your life in your hands [just walking into the place].”
Leon was drawn to underground holes-in-the-wall. Shaw’s was one. Another was the Bunkhouse, a forgettable establishment on the corner of Court Street and Chaney Avenue. Alma Gibson worked the bar.
“Leon was not one of my favorite people,” she says now. “He used to hang around with one of my girlfriends who was very much into drugs. She was doing heroin. I can’t say that he was, but he was always with her. He used to get drunk and [dance], and on a couple of occasions, I’m almost certain [the cops] took into consideration [that he was on the Marine boxing team] and let him slide with petty stuff.”
Roger Stafford talks about the time he and Leon donned civilian clothes and went to the strip for a bite to eat. Stafford ordered a hot dog and waited almost a half hour for the food to arrive.
“The guy in the restaurant was white and he was giving me a hard time ’cause I was black,” Stafford says.
By the time the counterman brought the hot dog, Stafford and Leon were out the door. The counterman called the police, and within minutes three local, white cops were grilling the two Marines. The cops ordered Stafford to pay for the hot dog.
“We were off the base,” Stafford says, “and those were Jacksonville police officers. But Leon didn’t care.”
Stafford tried to stop the scene from escalating. “C’mon, Leon, don’t worry about it,” he said. “Leave it alone. C’mon, let’s go.”
It was too late.
“[Leon] got to fighting and he was knocking them down. He was so strong. It took all three police and they still couldn’t handcuff Leon. He was something else with his hands. He kept on fighting. I was screaming, ‘No, no, stop, stop! Please, Leon, stop!’ He wouldn’t stop and they put him in the paddy wagon.”
Sheriff Brown doesn’t recall the incident but questions Stafford’s memory of it, nonetheless. “Leon may have been a good fighter, but it wouldn’t have taken three officers to put him down. We were country boys and just as tough. We didn’t have the boxing skills that Leon might have had, but we came up from the old bare-fist fighting. So I won’t say that he doesn’t have it right, but I don’t see Leon Spinks decking three police officers. But I’ll let the gentleman have his story.”
According to Stafford, when the police found out that Leon was a Marine, they let him walk. Leon would have been off the hook entirely had the cops not followed up with a phone call to the base. When Coach Redden got word of the incident, he doled out his own brand of punishment.
“The coach made Leon spar with everybody on the team,” Stafford remembers, “starting with the lightest fighter, 106 pounds, all the way up to heavyweight. It was supposed to tire Leon out, but Leon was so ferocious he wouldn’t get tired. He held nothing back. It was crazy. The little guy, he ran and ran around the ring to get away from Leon. When I got in the ring with him, I said, ‘Oh, god.’ He sparred with me like he was trying to kill me. I said, ‘Leon, I was with you!’ It didn’t make no difference. He fought everybody as if they were an opponent. I was jabbin’ him and moving around the ring, practically running, and he was chasing me down, swinging like a wild man, and he swung a left hook. I screamed ‘Coach! Coach!’ Everybody got whupped that day.”
Leon whupped more than his teammates. As an amateur, he went 178–7 with 133 knockouts. He had taken on the moniker “The Wild Bull of Camp Lejeune” and collected nearly every boxing title the military had to offer.
“I was in the gym, and when I heard my brother won the national Golden Gloves, I said, ‘What’s better than that?’ And they said the AAU [Amateur Athletic Union], so I won the AAU,” Leon told BoxingTalk.com.
Actually, Leon won the AAU light heavyweight championship three times—in 1974, ’75, and ’76. He also won an inter-services title, a bronze medal at the World Games in Cuba, and a silver medal at the Pan American games.
&nb
sp; According to a Marine legend and picked up by Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post, the only thing Leon lost in a military ring was his smile. Supposedly, his two front teeth came loose during a fight with Army boxer Tommy Johnson—an off-night for the “Wild Bull,” which he later avenged three times. But this story has been discounted, revised, or refuted by virtually everybody involved.
In an interview with Ed Pope of the Miami Herald, Leon himself gave an alternate story. He claimed he lost one tooth in a sparring session and a second in a boxing match—both while in the Marines. A third, he said, was later pulled by a dentist. But Leon’s account has many doubters, including Alan Richman of the Boston Globe, who reported that at least one of Leon’s teeth was extracted when Leon’s wife, Nova, sat on Leon’s chest as her son pulled it out with a string.
Most evidence, including reports from those who knew Leon best, seems to point to Leon’s losing his upper incisors as a young child.
Luther Boyd, Leon’s childhood friend, says, “Michael and Leon had the same smile. But Leon didn’t have any teeth. I don’t remember Leon ever having any front teeth.”
Tony Santana remembers Leon showing up at Camp Lejeune with a gap in his smile. According to Santana, Leon would plug the hole by “sucking his thumb right before a fight or when we traveled.”
One thing was certain, though: With or without his front teeth, Leon was a lady’s man. And of the ladies surrounding him during his military years, the most significant wasn’t in North Carolina but in Des Moines, Iowa. Leon had met Noble Bush, a twenty-three-year-old single mother, through his Marine buddy J. C. Wade. It was right around Christmas 1973 when Wade shoved a live phone in Leon’s hand and told him there was someone on the line he might want to meet.
“We cursed each other for ten minutes,” Leon told Jet magazine. “Then we started laughing. We actually started going together over the telephone.”