One Punch from the Promised Land

by John Florio

  Some suggest that Leon, in his own way, felt as if he never deserved the title, that he’d borrowed it from Ali and was ready to give it back. If so, it might explain, at least partially, the seven-month joyride he had taken from Las Vegas to New Orleans.

  “Behavior reflects intent,” explains clinical psychologist Michael Conforti. “He may have partied the title away because on an unconscious level, he knew he was not able to live up to the myth: He was not going to transcend his circumstances. He recognized Ali as the champ because Ali had transcended his.”

  Robert Lipsyte suggests that Leon’s gesture may have been “the fulfillment of his childhood hero worship. All was right with the world now: ‘Muhammad Ali beat me. That’s how it should be.’”

  In Leon’s dressing room after the fight, as Mr. T bawled his eyes out and Leon apologized for losing, Kay told her son, “We still love Ali because he gave us the title for a while so we gave it back to him. Today Ali was the better man. We want to thank Ali for allowing us to be here tonight.”

  At the postfight press conference, Leon shook off the notion that he’d thrown away the title on coke, booze, and whores.

  “Intoxicated? Never,” Leon said. “I was in great physical shape; it’s just that my mind wasn’t in it. During the fight there was so much stuff that went through my mind I thought all I can do now is survive and keep the fight going. If Ali did win, I wasn’t going to let him win by knockout.

  “There’s a lot on your mind when you’re heavyweight champion. Maybe it ruined me. Maybe I didn’t know how to deal with it,” Leon added.

  To this day, nobody disagrees.

  “After the first fight, all the pressure was on [Leon],” says 1980s heavyweight contender Gerry Cooney. “You start to think with fear. He was a tough guy for a while but he didn’t live well. He started drinking and having a good time, and that catches up with you. He was reckless, didn’t think about tomorrow.”

  Leon’s friend Roger Stafford doesn’t think victory was ever Leon’s goal in the Ali rematch. “Leon didn’t do nothing compared to the first fight,” he says. “Everyone in Leon’s corner was screaming to Leon, do this, do that, ’cause he had Ali in situations that he could take Ali out. But he wasn’t doing nothing. Leon respected Ali so much that all he was thinking about was the money, the millions of dollars that he was getting. His mind was somewhere else. He didn’t want to beat Ali.”

  Emanuel Steward said in 2011, “If [Leon] had been the same fighter in the second fight that he was in the first one, he could’ve beat [Ali]. But he didn’t have that same intensity. Once he got the money, everybody was flocking around him everywhere. I didn’t expect him to win.”

  The day after Leon’s loss to Ali, Bob Arum told the press, “You have seen, in my opinion, one of the great tragedies of boxing, of America, and of a human being. Some of it I gotta take the blame for. Perhaps I was wrong to put the kid in a title shot when he wasn’t ready. He obviously hadn’t matured enough to accept the responsibility of being the heavyweight champion of the world. The message here is that a fighter has to have strong leadership, instead of a lot of sharks hovering around picking his bones.”

  Leon’s magic carpet ride was over. Here’s how quickly it ended: After the fight, when Leon returned to the Hilton, his entourage of seventy people had already disappeared. Boxing’s father-son team Lou and Dan Duva were standing in front of the Hilton when Leon got out of his limo, alone, his head down, his hands in his pockets.

  “It was the saddest thing I ever saw,” Lou Duva told Sports Illustrated.

  Instead of wallowing in self-pity, Leon did what any party-crazed night crawler would do: He kept on celebrating. He started in a downtown hotel, where he danced the night away, forgetting about his loss to Ali and any other problems that had supposedly been cluttering his mind.

  One issue that clearly wasn’t weighing on Leon was that the mother of his children, Zadie Mae Calvin, was chronically unemployed and financially strapped. Five days after Leon had defeated Ali, Zadie Mae gave birth to her and Leon’s third son, Cory. By then, Little Leon was seven and Darrell was five. Any amount of money would have helped. All four were living with Zadie Mae’s mother, Aline, and assorted other relatives in an overcrowded two-family brick house in north St. Louis—a neighborhood plagued by the same diseases that had afflicted Pruitt-Igoe—poverty, crime, and despair.

  In an eerie replay of his own father’s behavior, Leon had no presence in his children’s lives. Three weeks after the Ali rematch, Zadie Mae filed a paternity suit in St. Louis Circuit Court. In it she asked the court to declare Leon the father of her three sons and order him to pay her a just sum periodically. She wound up dropping the suit when Leon agreed to fork over monthly child-support payments. But the money rarely came—either because Leon didn’t have the wherewithal to send it or because he was already running out of cash.

  “He partied and partied, he drank and drank, he smoked and smoked, he snorted cocaine and boy did he get high,” Mr. T wrote in his autobiography. “I mean he would be so high that he would be foaming at the mouth and he was a sight to behold.”

  While Leon was busy burning through the last of his millions, Ed Bell and Lester Hudson were suing Bob Arum and Top Rank for “breaching their contract in almost every material aspect.” They claimed that Top Rank failed to supply Leon’s guests with agreed-upon transportation from the airport to the hotel; that Top Rank never gave Leon the fifty ringside seats he had been promised; and, the jewel of the suit, that Arum had publicly stated Leon was drunk every night leading up to the rematch.

  In the midst of the paper storm, Bell and Hudson took their business to the only other game in town. They offered their client’s upcoming fights to Don King, and King, having been shut out of the two Ali-Spinks bonanzas, was all too willing to oblige. But Ali was retiring, taking the lineal championship with him, and vacating the WBA title. A rubber match between Leon and Ali wasn’t in the cards. The biggest money available to Leon would be in a title fight against Larry Holmes.

  The only question was whether they could set up the fight before Leon shut the window on his own career.

  8

  OCTOBER 2, 1980. A CAPACITY CROWD OF 24,790 JAMMED THE outdoor arena at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Frank Sinatra, Tom Jones, and Paul Anka took their places in celebrity row. So did a couple of thousand high rollers whose credit lines started at twenty thousand dollars. The event was the stuff of legend. Muhammad Ali was back. After a two-year layoff, the retired champ was returning to the ring to take on WBC king Larry Holmes.

  Holmes was undefeated in thirty-five fights, and since taking the title from Ken Norton two years earlier, had successfully defended it seven times. Yet, despite assuming the role of the people’s champ and boasting an impeccable record, he still felt upstaged by Ali. He had good reason: Ali’s shadow rivaled that of Paul Bunyan.

  “Ali said he was the greatest and everyone said ‘Yeah.’ I said I was the greatest and everyone said ‘Yeah, right,’” Larry Holmes said in the ESPN film Muhammad and Larry.

  Before the fight Holmes bitterly reminded the press that, as champ, he deserved top billing—the fight should be referred to as Holmes-Ali, not Ali-Holmes as most papers had been calling it. Tradition said he was right. The box office didn’t agree.

  The star here was Ali. The ex-champ had been coaxed out of retirement by an eight-million-dollar payday plus the chance to win the WBC crown for the fourth time. Holmes was to earn $2.3 million, with the added bonus of having the opportunity to slay his personal Goliath. Boxing purists viewed the fight as Holmes’s shot at the lineal title. And virtually everybody involved saw it as Ali’s final hurrah.

  In the two years since Ali had left the ring, speculation about his health had spread rapidly. Friends worried about his increasingly slurred and slowed speech and his deteriorating reflexes. Insiders spoke of pugilistic dementia and other ring-related conditions. His estranged physician, Ferdie Pacheco, had even gone public with a claim th
at he had seen a CAT scan showing small lesions on Ali’s brain.

  Three months before the Holmes fight, the Nevada Athletic Commission insisted that Ali undergo a physical. The two-day series of tests took place at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

  Ali assured the boxing world, “They put their best machines on me and said I’m one hundred percent. My kidneys are perfect, my brain is perfect, my blood, my heart, everything. They gave me their stamp of approval.”

  The Nevada Commission released highlights of the report to the public. Dr. Donald Romeo accepted it on behalf of the commission and said the brain scan revealed “no trace of tumor or old clots” and dismissed the brain-damage rumors as “a bunch of bunk.”

  Thomas Hauser obtained a copy of the doctors’ findings and disclosed them in his 1991 book, Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times. These are excerpts from the findings:

  Other than occasional tingling of the hands in the morning when he awakens, which clears promptly with movement of the hands, he denied any other neurologic symptoms…. On neurological examination, he seems to have a mild ataxic dysarthria [the inability to control speech resulting from damage to the cerebellum]…. The remainder of his examination is normal except that he does not quite hop with the agility that one might anticipate and on finger-to-nose testing there is a slight degree of missing the target. Both of these tests could be significantly influenced by fatigue…. There is minimal evidence of some difficulty with his speech and memory and perhaps to a very slight degree with his coordination. All of these are more noticeable when he is fatigued.

  The commission gave Ali the go-ahead to lace up his gloves and go toe-to-toe with Holmes. Perhaps those in power believed that an icon such as Ali had limits beyond those of a mortal man. Or maybe they didn’t care if he got killed.

  Fans who came early saw the prelims, throughout which chants of “Ali!” rippled through the arena. The undercard featured Leon against the six-foot-four Colombian power-puncher Bernardo Mercado in a twelve-round title elimination bout. Mercado had won twenty-six of twenty-eight fights and in March had stopped Earnie Shavers with twenty-five unanswered blows in the seventh round. But even though he was facing a legitimate opponent, Leon was destined to spend the evening in the same manner as Holmes—eclipsed by the outsize shadow of Ali.

  Leon had spent the past two years bouncing around the heavyweight division with no apparent direction. He’d taken on Gerrie Coetzee in Monte Carlo for a shot at Ali’s vacated WBA belt, but he hit the canvas more often than he hit Coetzee—three times within the first two minutes of the fight. The bout was over before the bell rang for the second round. Nobody was surprised. Bob Arum recalls Leon partying away his training time before the fight and being so irresponsible that he’d shown up five hours late for the press conference emceed by Prince Rainier.

  Leon rebounded after the Coetzee fight and stopped Alfredo Evangelista in five rounds, but then could only muster up a draw against Eddie “The Animal” Lopez. (Had referee Mills Lane not taken a point from Lopez for head butting in the fifth, Leon would have lost a majority decision.) When Leon then TKOed the unknown Kevin Isaac in eight rounds, Don King matched him up with Mercado, the number-one challenger, and put the fight on the Holmes-Ali undercard. The winner of Leon-Mercado would get a shot at the winner of Holmes-Ali.

  Leon tried his best to blow the opportunity, this time by nearly missing the previous day’s weigh-in.

  “Leon Spinks, please report to the weigh-in,” ring announcer Chuck Hull said into the microphone. He read a similar announcement a few minutes later, and then a third after that. Still no Leon. Word began circulating that Leon’s car had been parked illegally and was towed.

  When Leon finally entered the Sports Pavilion at Caesars Palace and approached the scale, he was nearly a half hour late.

  “We couldn’t find a parking place,” he casually explained.

  Leon wriggled off the hook and was permitted to weigh in. Now training under Del Williams, he was at 204 pounds and in excellent shape. When the opening bell rang the following night, he looked fast and strong. But like most of Leon’s fights, it didn’t take long for the contest to spiral into a street brawl. Mercado blasted Leon’s head with haymakers, but Leon absorbed them, got inside, and stayed there, hammering Mercado with an onslaught of body blows. Mercado never had a chance to breathe. Leon won nearly every one of the first eight rounds, and then, in the ninth, stunned his opponent with a left hook to the head. He followed with a flurry of blows, and when Mercado didn’t respond, referee Ferd Hernandez did. He stopped the fight with eight seconds to go in the round.

  Leon earned $125,000, minus expenses. One of those deductions included a $5,000 fine imposed by the Nevada Athletic Commission because Leon’s cornermen had stood on the ring apron during the fight and cursed the officials.

  It’s unlikely that Leon cared. He had looked good, and in his next bout, only his fifteenth as a pro, he’d be fighting for the world title a third time. He just wasn’t sure who would be in the other corner—Ali or Holmes.

  The fans were hoping for Ali.

  New York Times columnist Red Smith watched the fight on closed-circuit television with a standing-room-only crowd in Boston Garden. “Nothing could illustrate Ali’s sentimental appeal, his popularity bordering on idolatry, better than that howling crowd in Boston,” Smith wrote a few days later. “Even before Leon Spinks left the ring after the semifinal windup, they started a chant, ‘Ali! Ali! Ali!’ When the great man showed up, a big, grimy old hall 3,000 miles away trembled. When Larry Holmes appeared, booing rattled the tiles.”

  To say that Ali fans were disappointed with the outcome of the fight is an understatement. What they witnessed was a lopsided disaster—the type of mismatch that causes commissions to be formed, or replaced. Ali looked every hour of his thirty-eight years, 259 days. He appeared lethargic, and compared to the healthy, lightning-quick Holmes, he seemed to be throwing his punches underwater, a slow-motion replay of his glory days. Even ardent fans could see that the rumors of his failing health had some validity. Worse yet, the thirty-year-old Holmes, cast as the villain by the Ali faithful, was in his prime. He threw steady jabs and right crosses with pinpoint accuracy. After Ali absorbed ten rounds of inhumane punishment, Angelo Dundee got word from Herbert Muhammad to put an end to it.

  Red Smith wrote, “If it had been any fighter except Muhammad Ali, he would have been thrown out of the ring and had his purse withheld. Only a deity or a myth could get away with the performance Ali gave against Larry Holmes. It should have been declared no contest.

  “There was a heaviness of disappointment, maybe a reluctant acceptance of the fact that the past was past and would not be recovered. There were some small hoots but no widespread derision of the demigod who was letting them down…. On the subway, a man said the next day, about half the riders agreed that Ali had faked the whole thing to set up a rematch for another $8 million. Better that than to believe everything was over.”

  But for boxing fans, it was over. The new champion lacked Ali’s charisma, political passion, and rapier tongue, but that couldn’t stop the calendar from moving forward, the baton from changing hands. Despite the public’s lingering idolatry of Ali, Larry Holmes held the heavyweight division in the palm of his gloved hand.

  And Leon was next in line for a shot.

  Three months later Leon was back in the papers. On January 15, 1981, he told Detroit police he’d been hit on the head while leaving a bar on the city’s north side. He claimed he hadn’t seen his assailants but woke up five miles away, naked, in the Crestwood Motel, minus $45,000 worth of clothes, jewelry, and gold front teeth.

  As is the case with most stories that come out of late-night bars and short-stay motels, Leon’s tale had some gaping holes.

  Al Low, who promoted and managed Leon in the mid-1980s, heard the story this way: “He’d been drinking at Spears Bar on Woodward just north of Six Mile, and next thing he knew he was waking up in the motel without hi
s stuff, including his gold teeth. But some eyewitnesses said he was drinking and playing pool at the Last Chance Bar on Woodward and Eight Mile, where he was known to hang out quite a bit, and left with one of the ladies who, ummm, quote unquote worked there.”

  Jackie Kallen, boxing manager and longtime friend of Leon, says, “I was under the impression that [Leon] went back to his hotel room with a girl, and while he was there he got rolled. I was never quite sure if it was her or if she had an accomplice.”

  Mr. T wrote in Mr. T: The Man with the Gold, “[Leon] kept on partying until one night some bitch set him up. He got high in a hotel room in January 1981 and she stole jewelry, his mink coat, money and drugs. He lied and told the police that he was robbed coming from a tavern. He said someone hit him on the back of the head and took his money and dragged him to a hotel, where they took all of his clothes. I tell you, Leon couldn’t even lie straight.”

  If one is to believe Mr. T’s story (and there’s no evidence to the contrary), Leon may have been bending the truth to protect himself from Nova, who was running out of patience with his vagabond ways.

  “One day I get a call from Leon,” Emanuel Steward recalled in 2011. “It’s the middle of the night and I answer the phone. ‘Steward! Steward!’ The voice is muffled but I knew it was Leon, so I say to my wife, ‘Something’s going on with Leon; I better go over there.’ I go across the street and he opens up the door. There’s some fighting going on, and an arm grabs him by the neck and pulls him back in. I look and there’s Nova. Nova’s about as big as Leon—six-one, six-two—and she’s the one pulling him back. She had a girlfriend there named Ayesha who was about six-two or six-three, and they grab Leon and drag him to the kitchen and they throw him on the floor and say, ‘Don’t your ass move.’ [Leon] looked at me and he said, ‘Steward, you gotta help me.’ And Nova said, ‘Don’t you dare. This motherfucker, we just caught him, he gave a car to some girlfriend. I was at the bank and I heard some shit and that bitch is driving around with my car. And we waited for him to come home and beat his ass.’ Then [Nova] told me, ‘Emanuel, get your ass on outta here. You got nothing to do with this. This ain’t no boxing business.’ And they were sitting at the table eating fried chicken, and I looked at them and said, ‘Fuck it,’ and went on back home.”