One Punch from the Promised Land

by John Florio

  “Where’s Mommy?” the two-year-old asked her father.

  “I was just so stunned to see my baby,” Michael later told Sports Illustrated. “I couldn’t hang on. I couldn’t say nothing. I couldn’t take it. What can you say to her when she asks that?”

  Ten minutes after Michelle’s visit, Michael was climbing into the ring, wearing a white robe and white trunks with black trim. A pair of white socks with three fat horizontal black stripes wrapped his calves. He threw a few punches into the air as Qawi made his way through the ropes. The thirty-year-old Qawi, looking rock-solid and fit in a red robe and red trunks, shifted from side to side and repeatedly glanced over at Michael.

  When the opening bell sounded, two questions surely ran through Eddie Futch’s mind. Would his grieving fighter stay focused? Could Michael pull off the fight plan they had devised?

  In the first round, Michael abandoned the plan and stung Qawi with an overhand right—the “Spinks Jinx.”

  “I think what that shot did was get Michael some respect,” Rock Newman says. “I won’t say [Dwight] was cautious, but it may have taken away a smidgeon of his aggressiveness.”

  After the right landed, Michael immediately went back to Futch’s plan, and used his reach advantage to win six of the first seven rounds with his left. Jab, jab, jab. Few of those punches landed, and most had so little mustard that Qawi simply swatted them away. But Michael was on the move and neutralizing Qawi’s punching power. His floating clearly irked his opponent. Qawi tried everything—including making faces and sticking out his tongue—to get Michael to stand in one place and duke it out.

  Qawi explains, “I wanted to get him to slow down, to come at me, to mix it up more. The referee wasn’t letting me fight my fight. Every time I got close inside, he would say, ‘Break.’ He favored Spinks.”

  Leon, watching from ringside, couldn’t sit still. He continually ran around the press section, shouting, and according to Richard Hoffer of the Los Angeles Times, looked like a madman. Few fight fans followed the cruiserweights, a nascent division shoehorned in between the heavies and light heavies, but those that did knew that Leon had taken its meaningless North American Boxing Federation title by scoring a decision over Jesse Burnett five months earlier. They also knew that Burnett had won only eight of his previous twenty fights, and that Leon had gone on to suffer a beating at the hands of the younger, faster, and more skilled Carlos de Leon twelve days before Michael met up with Qawi.

  When Michael took to his stool after the sixth, Leon rushed over to him, an oversize black cowboy hat sitting awkwardly on his head. It didn’t take a shrink to see that the dynamic between the brothers had changed.

  “Double jab, then the right!” Leon yelled up at him.

  Michael shouted back, “Straighten your hat, Lee!”

  A flash of recognition crossed Leon’s face.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said and adjusted it before returning to his seat.

  Michael didn’t need Leon’s help. He had taken six of the first seven rounds on all three judges’ cards. But in the eighth Qawi woke up and changed the tone of the fight.

  Sensing he’d lost too much ground, he charged out of his corner a different fighter. He flicked away Michael’s jabs and fired missiles with every ounce of leverage his 174-pound frame could muster. Michael hit the deck not once, not twice, but three times. The first and third times, he’d slipped. But the second was ruled a knockdown, even though Qawi appeared to step on his foot.

  Referee Larry Hazzard admits he got it wrong. “I blew that call,” he says now. “Qawi got credited for a knockdown when I saw on the replay clearly that Michael tripped. Certainly when he got up, you could see that there was absolutely no sign physically that he had been hit with a solid punch.”

  More significant to Qawi, however, was that each time Michael went down, he’d been retreating.

  “All three should’ve been knockdowns. If somebody goes down because they’re running, that’s a knockdown,” Qawi says.

  “Make that jab sharper,” Futch told Michael after the eighth. “You’re laying it out there. You can’t do that with this guy.”

  Qawi stayed on the attack in the ninth but had trouble maintaining his momentum. From then on the fight was a seesaw, a back-and-forth drama that had the crowd on its feet.

  “Not once during this fight, which rubbed the nerve-endings raw,” wrote the Newark Star-Ledger’s Jerry Izenberg, “was there a single instant when anyone—the fighters, their corners, or the highly divided partisan crowd—would say for sure how it would end.”

  When the two fighters touched gloves to start the fifteenth, they were both venturing into relatively uncharted territory: Michael had gone the distance only once—when taking the crown from Mustafa Muhammad—and Qawi had never gone past eleven.

  “Final three minutes,” announcer Barry Tompkins told the HBO audience. “The crowd on its feet chanting ‘Michael, Michael, Michael.’ They feel their man has won the fight. Dwight Braxton [Qawi] literally has three minutes to knock his man out.”

  Tompkins’s announcement was news to nobody. Yet Qawi got no closer to his man than he had throughout the evening. The round was Qawi’s, but it didn’t seem to be enough to close the gap that Michael had built in the early rounds.

  Izenberg wrote, “Even as they were still rechecking the official cards, [Michael] raised a right hand, still encased in its sweat-soaked boxing glove, toward the ceiling of the room that made Miss America famous and shouted at the top of his lungs, ‘I did it! I did it!’”

  A beaming Butch Lewis decked out in full Lewis regalia—white shirt, white necktie, and white suit—made his way through the ropes and put his arm around Michael. Kay, her face hidden by oversize sunglasses, entered the ring and stood beside her son as they listened to the scores of the judges, all three of whom awarded Michael the victory: Tony Perez and Frank Cappuccino had scored it 144–141; Tony Castellano had it 144–140. Michael shouldered his way to the man he had just dethroned. He put his arms around his neck and said, “We’ll do it again.”

  Charles Leerhsen wrote in Newsweek, “Spinks raised his hands in the air and called for his daughter. ‘Michelle,’ he said as the child was pressed against his sweaty cheek, ‘we did it!’ On the way back to the dressing room, [Qawi] grabbed angrily at Spinks, but the undisputed champ calmly turned his hand away. ‘What you’ve got to realize, Dwight,’ he said, ‘is that fighting is just the game that we play.’”

  Through the years, Qawi has offered a number of reasons for his loss. At ringside he claimed his cold hadn’t cleared up and that he’d been drained of energy throughout the fight. Later he mentioned pneumonia. He even accused Butch Lewis of paying off Larry Hazzard.

  Now he says that he’d suffered a broken nose and a deviated septum during a sparring session with his younger brother a year before the fight. “I never had it checked out. I thought it would go away. But it really inhibited me. I couldn’t breathe through my left nostril. I should’ve postponed the fight.”

  But Qawi does have one beef that he has repeated time and again since the bell rang to end the bout. “Spinks really ran like a chicken. I wanted him to mix it up with me, but he just didn’t. It was like he had a lot of dog in him.”

  His manager agrees. “Dwight is right,” Rock Newman says. “Michael ran and, as we said during the fight, he ran like a little bitch. I hated the tactic. I told Eddie Futch, ‘[Michael] didn’t beat Qawi. Your black ass did.’”

  Michael told William Nack of Sports Illustrated, “I wanted to be like that guy on the TV program, Elliott Ness. Untouchable. When he tried to swarm me, I was catching him with jabs and hooks. My left hand is awfully sore now, but I was going to work it until it fell off. I beat him with one hand.”

  Sports Illustrated ran a photo of the fight on its cover. In it Michael is about to wallop Qawi with a left. The caption read, His Left Was All Riiight!

  Qawi says the photo is a misrepresentation of the fight and it haunts him to this day
.

  “The cover should have told the story of the fight: how Spinks ran like a thief, how I knocked him down. The fact is my nose was broken,” he told the magazine in 2006. “He got a decision, but lots of people thought I’d won, including me. That cover shot hurts more than my nose did.”

  When all was said and done, “The Brawl for It All” was not quite the battle the boxing world had envisioned, nor was it the fight that would catapult the light-heavyweight division to the grand stage. That didn’t matter to Michael. He and Leon partied all night on Butch Lewis’s dime at Resorts International.

  Later that day, when William Nack of Sports Illustrated knocked on Michael’s door at the Claridge, the champ said, “I was still dancin’ going out the door. My waistline is sore from the dancin’ and my neck is tired and sore from the fight. I was hiding my head and [Qawi] was hitting me in the neck with those roundhouse punches. I’m achin’. I laughed all night…. Leon fell asleep at the table, so I drank his Crown Royal.

  “I was laying in bed, and I was thinking, I won more than $1 million last night. And I won the prize. I kept saying it to myself, over and over again. I got him. I got him! I beat that bum. I beat him! I looked at the headlines in the papers and I kept saying, I won, I won!”

  It was true. Michael had gone from drowning in a black hole of despair to holding his daughter in victory after the biggest fight of his career.

  But what he had not realized was how much brighter his spotlight would shine.

  And how much farther his brother would fall.

  11

  DETROIT. WEST SIDE. 1985. AN ASSORTMENT OF FIGHTERS WHACKED heavy bags, speed bags, and trainers’ mitts as sweat dripped off the hems of their signature red-and-gold T-shirts. The heat was cranked to one hundred degrees so the fighters could get loose and stay that way. The dank, low-ceilinged room had the signature smell of ointment and leather; the background score was a percussive patter of gloves hitting canvas, jump ropes smacking linoleum. This was the Kronk Gym, and the brittle, yellowed newspaper clippings tacked to wall-mounted bulletin boards validated its pedigree. Hector Camacho. Julio César Chávez. Thomas Hearns.

  The gym occupied the basement of the Kronk Recreation Center, a well-worn graffiti-marred, two-story brick building at Fourteenth and McGraw. Across the street the McGraw Hotel, a fleabag with grime-covered walls and semen-stained mattresses, took in guests by the hour. The surrounding streets were dotted with broken bottles, used condoms, and discarded needles. Had you walked a block in any direction, odds were you would have found a liquor store with security gates or a check-cashing stand with barred windows. Had you walked the same route at night, odds were you would have run into a bullet. Even the boxers left the area before dusk, with the exception of Hearns, who’d built enough local cred that he could park his gold Mercedes on the street and know it wouldn’t be violated.

  On the second floor of the rec center, young men ran up and down the muggy basketball court while seniors played Ping-Pong or gin rummy. But it was in the basement, underneath the swimming pool, where the Kronk legend had been built. Its architect, Emanuel Steward, was a savvy boxing trainer who took over the gym in 1971, giving up a five-hundred-dollar-a-week paycheck as a master electrician to earn thirty dollars a week as director of the boxing program. Until his untimely death in 2012, Steward had groomed dozens of champions within the gym’s chipped red and gold walls. By his own count, the onetime Golden Gloves bantamweight champion had managed and trained more than forty world champions and six Olympic gold-medal winners.

  On a late winter day in 1985, Steward was overseeing a roomful of boxers, most of them Kronk regulars—young fighters dreaming of taking the title the way Leon Spinks had. One of those hopefuls was Leon himself, now a thirty-one-year-old has-been.

  A year earlier Leon had approached local Detroit car dealer Sam Lafata and asked for financial backing to help restart his career; Lafata brought him to meet his friend Steward.

  “[Leon] was in a desperate mode,” Lafata recalls. “He needed money and he was very, very serious at the time. He said he wanted to get his life back. I took him over to the Kronk.”

  Emanuel Steward said in 2011, “I got involved as a co-manager. Leon was the roughest guy in the ring; the biggest 178-pounder I ever saw. He was an animal. I remember he was fighting a guy at the Olympic trials, All-Army champ, and Leon was so strong that he made the guy almost run. He was so fuckin’ tough that nobody would deal with it. I never saw anybody who could overpower everybody. That was the Leon that I knew.”

  But by the time Lafata and Steward joined forces to back Leon, their fighter’s Olympic triumphs had become a distant memory.

  “[Leon] was a real long shot for me,” Lafata says. “I was doing him a favor really. We might have signed a little contract at that time, but that was nothing. I never took anything from him. To be honest with you, I didn’t see a future in him.”

  Leon promised his new managers he would take boxing more seriously this time around.

  “Being around the Kronk Gym is just like when I first started fighting,” Leon told a reporter from London’s Daily Telegraph. “A dedicated atmosphere. Young guys coming up, getting in condition. All the kinds of things I need to be around. It got to be play, play, play. I was drinking so heavy and worrying that I got bleeding ulcers. I had to go to the hospital. I could drink like a madhouse. Me and a friend would drink three or four fifths a day. A day! I mean, get drunk, go to sleep, and get drunk again.”

  A seemingly rehabilitated Leon was sparring with Vernon Bridges, a wannabe who’d compiled a record of 4–11–1 and was known as “Burning Bridges” to the Kronk regulars. Leon, who had retired after his humiliating loss to Carlos de Leon, was 12–4–2. And rusty. Those closest to him thought he should have stayed away from the ring. After the de Leon slaughter, a teary-eyed Michael told Ring magazine that he had tried desperately to talk Leon out of the fight but that Leon’s mind had been made up. He also said that if it weren’t for Leon’s famous name, Don King would never have shown any interest in making the matchup. Michael’s biggest concern wasn’t so much Leon’s body, it was his brain. Even the godlike Ali had succumbed to Parkinson’s syndrome, a condition similar to, but milder than, Parkinson’s disease. By early 1985 Ali’s hands shook uncontrollably, and his speech was nearly inaudible.

  Back at the Kronk Leon lunged at the taller Bridges, but his punches were zipless, his footwork ill-timed, his offense awkward. Like the Leon of old, he kept charging, but that ferocity—once his biggest asset—had turned into a liability. Bridges toyed with Leon, turning him every which way but upside down. After four rounds Leon’s eyes were puffy, and his shirt—which advertised “Look Out, Leon Is Back”—was smeared with blood.

  A trainer watching the exchange turned away. “He’s shot,” he said to no one in particular.

  “It’s dog eat dog out there,” Leon told the Telegraph in the dressing room after the session. “Nobody cuts you any slack.”

  Leon sat on a bench and stared down at his shoes. If he was thinking about quitting, the notion didn’t stick. He continued down the comeback trail but brought little to the ring other than a calling card that read “Former World Heavyweight Champion.”

  His first two opponents, Lupe Guerra and Rick Kellar, were hardly household names, even in the Guerra and Kellar households. Leon sent Guerra to the canvas in the first and second rounds before flooring him for good in the fourth. For the first time in Leon’s career, Michael wasn’t ringside.

  “I’d rather see him be an exotic dancer than get abused in the ring,” Michael told the New York Times’ Michael Katz. “I couldn’t take it.”

  Six weeks later, on April 9, Leon stopped Kellar in two rounds when “King Kong” hit the deck six times, each time from a jab to the midsection.

  “This guy was a nobody, but he could’ve become a somebody if he beat me,” Leon said about Kellar, an assessment that could have just as easily applied to Guerra. “I want to be back on top aga
in,” he told UPI. “I want it bad—real bad—and I’m going to do anything I can to win.”

  On June 29, 1985, three weeks after Michael defeated Jim MacDonald to retain his undisputed light-heavyweight title, Leon stepped into a temporary ring at the Sonoma County Fairground in Santa Rosa, California. His opponent was Tommy Franco Thomas, a policeman from Shinnston, West Virginia. Thomas’s record of 34–6 may have been slightly misleading, given that he’d compiled it against fighters even more obscure than himself. The promoter of the bout, Randy Haupt, was hoping that Leon’s name would bring in a big crowd. But when the bell rang and the 4,000-seat arena was only half-filled, it was apparent that the former heavyweight champ was no longer much of a draw.

  The gate brought in $41,000, a quarter of which went to Leon. The fight went the full ten rounds and Leon won a unanimous decision. But make no mistake: Going the distance with a man who chased criminals in Shinnston wasn’t much of an achievement for Leon Spinks.

  A few extra watts of electricity charged the Las Vegas air as Michael Spinks approached the scale at the Riviera Hotel and Casino.

  Larry Holmes tipped the scales at a hair over 221, which came as little surprise to the three hundred fans, reporters, and photographers who had jammed past the glass doors to witness the weigh-in. All eyes were on Michael, who in twenty-four hours would be challenging Holmes for the International Boxing Federation (IBF) heavyweight championship. Michael had to hit 190 to qualify. He had weighed only 175 three months earlier when defending his light-heavyweight title against Jim MacDonald. The crowd was eager to see if he’d managed to gain fifteen pounds. And if he had, they wondered, how the hell would he be strong enough to beat Holmes? The matchup was as competitive as a hammer versus a nail.

  Michael had more to worry about than his waistline: He was also fighting history. No reigning light-heavyweight champion had ever come to the bigs and taken the title. It wasn’t from lack of trying. Nine champions had stepped up; they’d failed thirteen times. Bob Foster missed twice, in part because he’d given up twenty-one pounds against Frazier and forty-two against Ali. Billy Conn tried twice and failed both times; he’d given up thirty pounds in each of his two losses to Joe Louis. Even Archie Moore, who’d matched Rocky Marciano’s weight in 1955 and outweighed Floyd Patterson in 1956, lacked the punching power of a natural heavyweight.