One Punch from the Promised Land

by John Florio

  Michael, now a light-heavyweight, made his pro debut three months after Leon’s. On April 17, 1977, he knocked out Eddie Benson in the first round; within four months he’d outpointed Luis Rodriguez and kayoed Joe Borden and Jasper Brisbane. Over that short span he earned forty thousand dollars, and since he’d never signed with a manager, he kept everything he earned. Leon was still forking over 30 percent to Barnes.

  “I guess [Leon started questioning his manager] the first time they came in together to get paid. Mike got a hundred percent of his money,” Butch Lewis told Sports Illustrated. “But when we paid Leon, Barnes’s thirty percent had been deducted. He looked at Mike’s pile, and then he looked at his pile, and then he said, ‘Why the hell am I giving this guy all my money? He doesn’t do anything.’”

  Michael did eventually need a manager, though. His fifth fight was in Los Angeles; his sixth and seventh were in Las Vegas. Both California and Nevada required fighters to have managerial representation. Michael hired his old friend the theatrical agent Nick Miranda, and the two struck an agreement—their business relationship would dissolve after the fights were made and Michael would continue to handle his own career.

  Nobody, however, was looking after Leon’s career—not even Leon. The little money that he’d kept after Top Rank and Mitt Barnes took their cuts was either poured straight into a highball glass or piled onto a coke spoon. Not a penny went to fund a savings account or training camp. The bad habits were blossoming, and Leon’s biggest paydays were right around the corner.

  5

  FEBRUARY 1978. LEON DIDN’T STAND A CHANCE. THIS WASN’T SIXTO Soria. This was the world heavyweight championship. This was Muhammad Ali.

  By now Ali had done it all. In 1964 he’d freed boxing from the clenches of the mob by beating the last connected titleholder, Sonny Liston, and used the heavyweight title as a stage from which to champion the Black Power movement. He joined the Nation of Islam, gained followers worldwide, and changed his name from the one listed on his birth record, Cassius Clay, to the one emblematic of his new religion. In 1967 he had polarized much of white America by refusing induction into the US Army, a news-quaking act of rebellion that resulted in his exile from boxing.

  According to Douglas Hartmann, author of Race, Culture and the Revolt of the Black Athlete, “At that period Ali was especially influential for coming-of-age black athletes. That was the story of athlete consciousness in the sixties: that they needed to be more than athletes to take pride in their accomplishments, to represent their race. A lot of people really hated [Ali] because he was trying to call attention to discrimination and prejudice on racial and religious grounds, and Americans weren’t ready to hear that.”

  Ali had returned to the national stage in 1971 after a three-and-a-half-year exile and took on the new champ, Joe Frazier. The event, billed as “The Fight of the Century,” was the Holy Grail: It marked the first time two undefeated world champions were meeting in the ring. After fifteen mesmerizing rounds Frazier retained the title with a unanimous decision, dealing Ali the first loss of his career. Ali regained the title in 1974 by knocking out George Foreman in Zaire, and successfully defended it the following year against Frazier in Manila. By 1978 America had changed and Ali was one of the biggest benefactors of its newly revised history. The new generation didn’t see him as an arrogant draft-dodger, but as a visionary who had guts enough to stand up for his beliefs.

  In his second reign as champion, Ali had achieved nearly godlike status. He had come to be an ambassador of sorts—bringing title fights to countries around the world and meeting with foreign heads of state. He had become the voice of a generation—Leon’s generation. And like others before him, he had used the heavyweight title to vault himself into nobility.

  Leon was the first to say he had spent his life worshipping at the altar of Ali. Back in Pruitt-Igoe he and his friends would watch the champ fight on Wide World of Sports and then spend hours in the gym imitating his moves.

  “Ali was the guy we always talked about,” James Caldwell remembers. “We wished we could be him. It was amazing that a guy his size was so fast and could do the shuffle. He was fast enough to hit a guy, do the shuffle, and hit him again. That’s a bad son of a gun.”

  Luther Boyd recalls, “Ali was the man. He was a beautiful man. He didn’t look like a boxer. He ran his mouth but he could back up his words. What we loved about him most was he told the government where to go in so many words. He stood up for what he believed in and it paid off.”

  To this day sportswriter Robert Lipsyte sees in Ali an athlete of supreme conviction. “Ali sacrificed for his principles. He was the most important person in sports who ever did that,” Lipsyte says. “He sacrificed money, influence, and prestige for his religion. To white kids of that era, he said you’re not a coward or a faggot, no matter what people call you, for refusing to fight in this war. For blacks, he was the man who told the establishment to go to hell.”

  According to Ali biographer Thomas Hauser, “Ali at that point was almost universally beloved in this country. He had gone through his rehabilitation. Gerald Ford invited him to the White House. He was the king. He was royalty.”

  Michael Conforti, clinical psychologist and pop culture analyst, views Ali as an athlete who rose above his circumstances. “Ali incorporated aspects of a much bigger world, and he wasn’t a thug. He was elegant, well-dressed in Armani suits, praying, religious,” he says.

  Professor and boxing writer Gerald Early echoes the others’ sentiments. “At his height Ali was not just the most famous boxer of his time, he was the most famous boxer in history. He was the most famous American athlete on the planet. Because of Ali, people were interested in boxing.”

  Culturally, Leon was the antithesis of Ali. He wasn’t pretty; he didn’t care that he’d lost his front teeth. He wasn’t articulate, and he hadn’t shown any awareness of political or social issues. His service in the Marines scored him some points with old-timers, but the armed forces had become a nonissue to the younger generation. Leon was seen simply as an opponent, a payday, a wide-eyed ghetto kid walking into the lion’s cage with nothing in his pocket but a slingshot.

  The Ali-Spinks fight defied all sense of fair play. At the age of twenty-four, Leon had amassed all of seven professional fights. Standing six-one, he weighed only 197½ pounds—barely a heavyweight. Ali outweighed him by twenty-seven pounds and held a four-inch advantage in reach. The Vegas casinos had the odds at 10–1, but most bookmakers wouldn’t even take the bet.

  Even Ali had thought the match was a crazy idea.

  “I can’t fight this kid,” he told Butch Lewis when Top Rank had first suggested putting the fight together. “It would make me the laughingstock of the world.”

  But Ali realized he needed a laugher. His recent fights had taken their toll on his thirty-six-year-old body. After dispatching Richard Dunn in five rounds, he’d met Japanese wrestling star Antonio Inoki in a mixed-martial-arts exhibition. The farcical event took place in Tokyo in June 1976 and was so overhyped that wrestling promoter Vince McMahon Sr. was able to sell 32,000 ten-dollar tickets to a closed-circuit telecast at Shea Stadium.

  The contest had near-tragic results. Because the agreed-upon rules had outlawed basic wrestling moves, Inoki spent the entire fight on the floor, kicking at Ali’s shins, ultimately sending him to the hospital with blood clots in his legs. Ali’s personal physician, Ferdie Pacheco, insisted that Ali’s mobility never fully recovered.

  Bob Arum, who promoted the match, called the encounter “terrible” and “embarrassing,” and years later described it to TheSweetScience.com this way: “Ali is bleeding from the legs. He gets an infection in his legs; almost has to have an amputation. Ali could’ve been a cripple for the rest of his life.”

  In September 1976, three months after the Inoki fiasco, the exhausted champion was back on his battered feet, eking out a decision against Ken Norton. He then sleepwalked to a unanimous decision against Alfredo “The Spanish Omelet” Ev
angelista, followed by fifteen bone-crushing rounds with Earnie Shavers. So when the champion saw that Leon could only muster up a draw against the mediocre Scott LeDoux, his wheels started turning. Fighting Leon would be the rough equivalent of taking a weeklong vacation in Vegas—Ali just needed a way to justify the bout. After weeks of deliberation, he found his answer hanging around Leon’s neck: Olympic gold. Ali, a gold medalist in 1960, had beaten Olympic stars Floyd Patterson, Joe Frazier, and George Foreman. With a little salesmanship, he could pitch Leon as the next in line. Should anybody accuse him of handpicking the ripest tomato can in trunks, he had a precedent. In 1957 Floyd Patterson’s manager, Cus D’Amato, had agreed to give the previous year’s Olympic gold medalist Pete Rademacher a title shot against Patterson in his first pro fight. Rademacher hit the deck seven times before the fight was stopped in the sixth round.

  Ali got Lewis on the phone. “Butch, I want him,” he said. “I want your boy bad.”

  To Lewis and Arum, Top Rank’s contracts made the fight a win-win. If Ali kept the title, Top Rank would retain control over the world’s most popular athlete. If Leon somehow came out the winner, Top Rank would have contractual rights to Leon’s first three defenses, with an option for the next three.

  The only glitch was a World Boxing Council (WBC) rule requiring the challenger to be a top-ten contender—a practice presumably adopted to stop champions from wreaking havoc on untested opponents. Leon hadn’t yet cracked the top ten—he hadn’t cracked the ratings system at all—so Lewis and Arum held a closed-door meeting with WBC president Jose Sulaiman. When the door reopened, Leon had his shot. He would fight Italian heavyweight champion Alfio Righetti and the winner would then challenge Ali. Nobody questioned that Righetti wasn’t ranked any higher than Leon (although his name did magically pop up as the number-nine contender after the Sulaiman meeting). Righetti was so obviously handpicked that if anybody had bothered digging, they might well have found Arum’s fingerprints all over the WBC files. Righetti, a traffic cop in Rimini, Italy, had not been defeated in twenty-seven bouts, but those opponents had a collective record of 444–283, which averages out to 16–10. Not exactly world-class contenders.

  Lewis later recalled in Thomas Hauser’s Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times, “Leon beat Righetti in a [10-round decision]; they both looked awful. But I figured Leon, if he trained right, would be respectable against Ali, because Ali was slipping; he was slipping a lot.”

  Slipping enough to lose to Leon? Leon’s own mother was skeptical.

  “You’re small potatoes compared with Ali,” Kay had warned her son. “You’re crazy, Leon. You’ll get wiped out.”

  Nobody disagreed. Not even Leon.

  Leon sat a few rows back of ringside. He was shrouded inside a hooded sweatshirt and yelling up at Michael, who was trading blows with Tom “The Bomb” Bethea, a meaty slugger from New York.

  “Wiggle!” Leon yelled, urging his kid brother to move his head. “Wiggle!”

  Michael wiggled on cue.

  Leon jumped and shouted for all eight rounds of the fight, whooping especially loud when Michael rested his lethal right hand and pelted Bethea with left hooks.

  Once the decision was announced and Michael had claimed his seventh victory in as many fights, Leon scampered back to his dressing room. It was time to have his hands wrapped for the biggest fight of his young career.

  At the Hilton Pavilion the chants had been sparking all evening. When Leon crossed the ropes to the Marine Corps anthem “Semper Fi” they spread like a forest fire.

  “Ali! Ali! Ali!”

  In the ring Leon shadowboxed on the balls of his feet, letting off enough nervous energy to power the overhead lights. Of the 5,298 spectators surrounding the ring, at least three were pulling for Leon: his mother Kay, who clutched the worn leather-bound red Bible that sat on her lap; his brother Michael, who sat near Leon’s corner; and his wife, Nova, who claimed that the ABC producers, much like the Spinks family and Top Rank, shunned her because she was over six feet tall, had a bleached blonde Afro, and tipped the scales at two hundred pounds.

  The music switched to “Pomp and Circumstance” and the crowd roared, knowing it was about to see the self-proclaimed “Greatest.”

  Ali emerged from his dressing room surrounded by a parade of cornermen, hangers-on, and sidekicks. He made his way to the ring, a somber face peeking out from behind a white hooded robe. The noise inside the Pavilion reached fever pitch as spectators rose to their feet, cheering, shouting, clapping, chanting. Even Leon applauded as the champion crossed the ropes and entered the ring.

  Leading up to the fight, the major dailies had already begun running stories on how Ali had gone from invincible champion to aging fighter. Ferdie Pacheco had quit Ali’s corner a year earlier, insisting that the champ was risking neurological damage by continuing to take punches to the head. According to Pacheco, Ali should have called it quits after defeating Frazier in Manila three years earlier. While many fight fans were arguing whether the sport should let Leon into the ring with Ali, Pacheco was convinced it shouldn’t have let Ali into the ring at all.

  While the champ had been diagnosing himself fit to fight, Leon had been in the Catskills following his usual training regimen of hard work and harder partying. Michael had joined him in camp and buoyed his spirits, but there was little he could do to keep his brother in check.

  “Leon was a problem right from the beginning because he was so undisciplined,” Bob Arum says now. “We started making fights for Leon and he would get drunk before the fights. So we knew that he didn’t have a very long life as a top heavyweight because of how he was abusing himself.”

  Nobody was more frustrated than Sam Solomon, Leon’s sixty-two-year-old trainer, who had worked with the likes of Sonny Liston, Ernie Terrell, and, for a short time, Ali. Solomon was a disciplined, punctual man, a streetwise cornerman who’d spent the 1930s and 1940s barnstorming in tents and local social clubs as an amateur and semipro welterweight. He’d also spent a few seasons as a catcher in the Negro National League, pocketing $7.50 a game.

  Solomon told Sports Illustrated’s Pat Putnam, “To get [Leon] to the gym, I have to wake him at noon to get him there by three. For roadwork, I gotta get up at five to get him running by eight. He has no conception of time. And sleep? Man, does that boy sleep. He’ll fall asleep just sitting on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. Or he’ll walk in circles for a while and then sit down and fall asleep. When he goes to the bathroom and he don’t come out after a while, you know he’s fallen asleep. But when he does get awake, there’s no stopping him. Out all night. Loves to dance. Jumping from one thing to another. Even when he trains he goes overboard. Can’t get him to quit.”

  Roger Stafford, Leon’s Marine Corps buddy, remembers that nobody was able to stop Leon from being Leon. “Alcohol, marijuana, cocaine. You name it, Leon did it.”

  And, according to Stafford, Leon indulged right up until the bell rang.

  “I was the only one besides his brother that knew what Leon would do,” Stafford says. “But Michael couldn’t hold him back. I tried to keep him in line before the fight against Ali. These pimps in Las Vegas had these houses and lots of girls and a lot of drugs. They told Leon they were having a get-together and they invited him. I pleaded with him not to go.

  “Leon couldn’t pass the drugs by. He said, ‘If you ain’t going with me, I’m going by myself.’ So I had to go with him to watch out for him, to watch they wouldn’t steal nothing from him. And Leon got tore up, he was so intoxicated, and this was two days before he fought Ali. He didn’t get hooked up with no women. All he was thinking about was getting drunk and full of drugs. I was just sitting there watching him and they were fixing drugs on him.

  “It was early in the morning when we got back to the Hilton. It was time for us to put on our sweats and run. Leon was in the best shape of his life. This guy could run, I swear. He was an animal. That’s what they called him. Butch Lewis called him Leon the Lion.”r />
  The stories surrounding Leon’s exploits prior to the Ali fight don’t end there. As Ali was leaving the hotel to do his roadwork at four in the morning, Leon was coming in from an all-nighter, and, according to Ali’s business manager Gene Kilroy, was dressed to the nines right down to his “playboy alligator shoes.”

  “Hey, Muhammad Ali!” Leon called out. “Heavyweight champion of the world!”

  Ali didn’t answer, but instead of taking to the road, he went into the coffee shop, turned to Kilroy, and said, “What am I doing here? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world and this kid is nothing.”

  So when the bell rang, Leon the Lion, high from a party that had started in Pruitt-Igoe and still showed no signs of slowing down, ran to the center of the ring and met up with “The Greatest.”

  Leon went after Ali with a vengeance in round one, hitting the champ with everything but a two-by-four. This was not a surprise. Leon’s reputation preceded him.

  It was more surprising that Ali was out of shape—noticeably so. His punches were sloppy and lacked zip. He willingly handed Leon the first three rounds by relying on his self-styled “rope-a-dope,” which he had used so effectively against Norton, Shavers, and, most famously, Foreman. But Ali’s strategy of covering up against the ropes was quickly looking as worn out as the champion himself. Designed to exhaust Leon by seducing him into letting loose with relentless, energy-sucking punches, the “rope-a-dope” wound up doing the opposite: It weakened Ali. Leon’s cornermen deserved the credit. Solomon and assistant trainer George Benton, whom Butch Lewis had brought in before the Alfio Righetti fight, figured that Leon’s youthful body had a far deeper gas tank than any of Ali’s previous opponents. They instructed Leon to target his assault at Ali’s biceps, thereby tiring the champ’s aging arms, slowing his jab, and forcing his hands to drop.