One Punch from the Promised Land

by John Florio

  After a few minutes ring announcer Chuck Hull took hold of the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, here is the decision of the judges: Judge Dave Moretti scores 143–142, Judge Harold Lederman scores 143–142, and Judge Larry Wallace scores 145–142, for the winner by unanimous decision, and new heavyweight champion of the world, Michael Spinks.”

  On the word new, a whoop erupted from Michael’s circle as his handlers, friends, and family broke into delirium. Michael could be seen in the center of the mob. He was hugging a heavyset guy wearing a hooded sweatshirt under a pith helmet.

  The shocking victory registered a ten on boxing’s Richter scale. Once again Michael commanded the covers of Sports Illustrated and The Ring. His story was a natural. He’d taken the heavyweight title from Larry Holmes in the biggest upset since Leon had wrested the belt from Ali.

  Bernie Lincicome wrote in the Chicago Tribune, “Holmes was too old and Spinks was too weird. Spinks fought like a man with a bad rash, dipping and flopping around the ring while Holmes posed like a statue, waiting for the chance to pound an opponent who was never there. He pawed at Holmes more than punished him. He slapped and slipped and used his youth to outlast Holmes. On two of the judges’ cards, had Holmes been able to win the 15th round, he would have kept his title by split decision. It would have been a greater larceny than roulette. Spinks landed more punches than Holmes, though none will leave scars. He dashed in and out of Holmes’ arms like a shameless flirt.”

  Muhammad Ali was full of praise for Michael’s historic feat and told Jet magazine, “All light heavyweights can lift their heads up now, no more second-class citizenship.”

  Michael said to reporters afterward, “Muhammad Ali told me during Jersey Joe Walcott’s retirement party to stay with Holmes for six rounds, and then he’d have no legs after that. I took Ali’s advice, and I kept giving Holmes head movements to mess with his mind. I had him hypnotized and mesmerized.”

  When Michael appeared on CBS’s NFL Today with Brent Musburger the morning after the fight, he was a far cry from hypnotizer or mesmerizer. He showed up for the interview in a large white hat, red warm-up suit, and bare feet, and delicately lowered himself into his chair. After the interview he slid out of his seat and crawled to a nearby couch.

  “My feet hurt, my arms hurt, my head hurts,” he told Terence Moore of the Atlanta Constitution. “I’m just so tired that I don’t even have time to think about what happened last night. But I’ll be all right before I get to my first title defense. Oh, no. My first title defense. I don’t even want to think about that.”

  Then he groaned.

  But the ache in Michael’s bones didn’t match the distress in Holmes’s head. The now ex-champion, who had often accused the media of shortchanging him during his reign, didn’t disappoint at the postfight press conference. He stepped to the podium wearing dark-brown prescription sunglasses that masked the swelling under his eyes. Then he tried his best to undo any shred of goodwill he still had left.

  “I’m thirty-five fighting young men, and [Marciano] was twenty-five fighting old men,” he said. “To be technical, Rocky Marciano couldn’t carry my jockstrap.”

  Peter Marciano had tried to interject, but Holmes shut him down with a pointed finger. “This is my press conference and you can just shut up.”

  He then called Marciano a “freeloader” for attending the fight on Caesars’s dime and said, “If it wasn’t for me, Peter, you wouldn’t never have been invited to Caesars Palace, where all your expenses are paid. If I hurt your feelings, so fuckin’ what.”

  Butch Lewis and Don King, lifelong enemies, found common ground as they cringed in the back of the room. But Holmes was just getting started. He accused the media of being racist and hindering his reign as champion. He called Boston a racist city and dug into Boston Globe reporter Steve Marantz, presumably for an unflattering article he had written years earlier.

  After his tirade he choked out a rambling apology. “If I hurt anybody’s feelings, I’m very sorry. But I was giving my people something to look forward to in our lifetime.”

  Dave Anderson recognized that Holmes had irrevocably damaged his reputation. “Seldom, if ever, has a champion been such a bad loser,” he wrote in the New York Times. “It is one thing to grouse about styles, it’s quite another to attack verbally not only a departed champion, but also the surviving members of that departed champion’s family. Larry Holmes assured himself of being disliked by many boxing buffs, if not dismissed as worthy of being ranked with the great champions.”

  Perhaps the only saving grace to Holmes’s outburst was that at some point during the histrionics, he mentioned that he was retiring, that he had business to attend to in Easton.

  It appeared as though boxing fans had seen the last of a dominant, underappreciated, overconfident, admirable, and cantankerous champion.

  12

  MICHAEL STRETCHED OUT ON THE COUCH, RESTING HIS ACHING body in the oversized living room of his country estate. Having moved to one of Delaware’s priciest enclaves, he was now a resident of “Chateau Country,” the home of the Vicmead Hunt Club and the exclusive Wilmington and Greenville Country Clubs. The best way to get there by car was to leave north St. Louis, gun it, and never look back.

  It took two months for Michael’s bruises to heal, but his newfound fame showed no signs of subsiding. As boxing’s new king, he was being bombarded by sports fanatics and groupies; he was deluged with interview requests and sponsorship opportunities. As he told Ebony magazine, people saw him through a different lens now that he had become heavyweight champion. “The crowds around me are bigger,” he said. “And there seems to be a certain kind of affection for me. I guess that’s what happens when you’re involved in a historic event.”

  The problem for Michael was that he didn’t crave the limelight, and in fact, had always tried to avoid it. He’d bought the 6,700-square-foot home earlier in the year with the guaranteed purse from the Holmes fight. He was drawn as much to its setting as he was to its colonial charm. The two-story stucco, built in 1850, was set on three acres and tucked out of sight by lush landscaping. It was the ideal place in which to hide from autograph seekers. Better still, it was a mere five miles from Butch Lewis’s home, a sprawling eleven-room ranch that Lewis had built on an equally exclusive plot two years earlier.

  Michael rarely left his house, choosing instead to let his metallic gray Mercedes-Benz 380SEL sit idly in the driveway. He shared the five bedrooms with his sister Karen and her three young children; his daughter Michelle could also be found there when she wasn’t with her maternal grandmother in Philadelphia. His other siblings—Leland, Evan, Eddie, and Leon—came and went. Those who visited saw little evidence of Michael’s profession. No boxing trophies. No medals. No awards. And no sign of his freshly minted red-and-gold IBF belt.

  As for braggadocio, the new champ left all the trash talk to Butch Lewis. Many insiders admired his trust in Lewis. Others questioned whether Lewis was worthy of it.

  Michael’s longtime friend James Caldwell says, “It was quite a partnership. Butch was really a good guy to Michael. I don’t think he looked at Michael as a money ticket. Butch seemed a lot more genuine than some of the other people that had been around Michael. Other commercial people were pulling at him, people that wanted him to sponsor certain things. He was uncomfortable with that. So when Butch came along, he had somebody that he felt had his genuine interest in mind and would represent him properly.”

  Kenny Loehr has never trusted the relationship. “I don’t think Butch Lewis [was] good for Michael,” he says. “He kept a close watch on Michael’s money. Whenever I seen Michael, he had to ask Butch for money.”

  Amelia Patterson worked at Butch Lewis Productions on and off for more than seven years; she organized boxing matches, coordinated TV shows, and managed public relations. She knew all aspects of the complex, multifaceted Lewis: the funny man, the holy terror, the down-in-the-trenches workaholic. She also knew Lewis, money manager for Michael Sp
inks.

  “Michael’s mom didn’t like that Butch was handling [Michael’s] money,” Patterson remembers. “She was complaining, ‘You need to have someone else handling your money.’ But Michael trusted Butch. He had that kind of devotion to him. He could’ve had his own separate accountant, business manager. I mean, don’t mix apples and oranges. So he had one person controlling his whole life.”

  Ross Greenburg, former executive producer of HBO Sports, recalls, “You could tell there was a bond there and that [Michael] totally and wholeheartedly trusted Butch Lewis and everything he did for him. [But] Butch took a nice paycheck every time Michael fought. There was a lot of money to be had, so you could say he was doing a nice job of promoting [Michael]. But I had heard on many occasions that he was taking 50 percent of his purses for his fee.”

  Top Rank’s Bob Arum says, “It seemed to me that they had a very trusting relationship. It’s a relationship that everybody looked to as being a credit to the sport.”

  Leon, meanwhile, had no such support. By 1986 he’d run through half a dozen promoters and even more managers. He was staying with his girlfriend Betty Green at her apartment in Detroit and scraping by on the $400 weekly allowance fronted him by his Kronk management team: Emanuel Steward, Sam Lafata, and Marv Haupt. His Rosedale Park home now belonged to the National Bank of Detroit. (Thomas Hearns would later buy it for a cut-rate $55,000.) His last five fights had brought in $26,400—the fifth contest producing an eight-round TKO over the unknown Kip Kane for the equally unknown WBC Continental Americas heavyweight championship. The victory was so meaningless that Leon had vacated the title and agreed to slim back down to cruiserweight and fight Dwight Qawi for the WBA championship. (After losing to Michael, Qawi had stepped up to cruiserweight and won six fights in the talent-starved division.) He and Leon were due to meet in Reno, Nevada, on March 22.

  But Leon had more immediate concerns, one of which was the losing battle he’d been waging against his bankbook. Less than a week before the bout, he’d filed for bankruptcy with no hope of paying the $301,303 due his various creditors. He owed $85,000 to Don King Productions, $18,000 to D’s Fur Works, $500 to Detroit Edison, and $500 to Michigan Consolidated. The case was closed four months later and Leon was absolved of his debts.

  In the meantime new creditors were lining up. Two days before the Qawi fight, Nevada District Judge Jerry Carr Whitehead signed an order earmarking $32,000 of Leon’s $70,000 purse for Jerry Sawyer, Leon’s former manager.

  Marv Haupt dismissed his client’s financial worries and assured the media that big money was in the offing for Leon. The winner of the Qawi fight would defend the title in a bigger-money match against Olympic bronze medalist and rising cruiserweight Evander Holyfield.

  As for Qawi, he’d been aching for another shot at Michael. He’d been negotiating a rematch, but when told by Lewis it had been canceled, Qawi erupted in a temper tantrum during which he kicked a spit bucket at Lewis. Neither one had forgotten.

  Qawi’s manager Rock Newman says, “Butch tried to get him suspended from the sport. So by this time there was a lot of bad blood between Dwight and the Spinkses. Dwight didn’t just want to beat Leon, he wanted to humiliate him.”

  Leon was oblivious to Qawi’s intentions. His toughest opponent didn’t come in the form of an ex-con with padded gloves. It came on the rocks, straight up, or with a twist.

  “We’re in Reno and both fighters were staying in the Peppermill Casino,” Newman remembers. “The fight was being shown on Saturday on Wide World of Sports. On Wednesday morning I go down at five because Dwight’s gonna have his last run of the training camp and I’m gonna warm up the car. I see Leon and a couple of his friends walk in the hotel. I think, ‘Damn, he’s already been out for a run, he’s training hard.’ He didn’t have jogging clothes on. He looked like he had spent the night in the casino or something. Then he walked past me and he was reeking of alcohol. Absolutely reeking of alcohol. So then he sat down at the blackjack table and he was flirting with the dealer. He told her that he was Leon Spinks. She said, ‘No, you’re not. Leon Spinks doesn’t have any teeth.’ He turned around from the table, pulled his teeth out, and grinned back at her with that big [Leon] grin and said, ‘How do you like me now?’

  “I was nervous about that fight because Dwight had so many things going on in his personal life and Leon still packed a heavy punch. But [when I saw Leon drinking at the casino], I told Dwight there’s no way in the world Leon can go a whole bunch of rounds. I said, ‘He’ll come out and shoot his load.’ Seventy-five percent of my nervousness went away.”

  Drinking does compromise stamina. It also beefs up the waistline. And unlike the heavyweight division, which had no weight limit, the WBA cruiserweight division dictated a ceiling of 190 pounds. As one might expect, Leon had trouble making weight. He spent the day before the fight at the Grand Central Sauna & Hot Tub Company trying to sweat off six pounds.

  That evening Steward and Lafata went to Leon’s hotel room to check in on him. When they got there, Leon was lying on the bed naked, cocked like a broomstick. He had a lady friend with him, and the place was littered with bottles of beer and containers of fried chicken.

  For Steward, it was a first. “He says, ‘Coach, it ain’t like it look.’ I said, ‘It looks like you’re having sex, it looks like you’ve been drinking, it looks like you’re living like a gigolo.’ I had never in my life experienced a fighter that did this stuff. Even today nobody tops Leon.”

  Lafata remembers, “I walked out when I seen the scene. It just bothered the heck out of me. You do so much to help him, and it just breaks your heart. I said, ‘What the hell am I doing here? What am I wasting my time for?’”

  Needless to say, one day in the sauna wasn’t enough for Leon to make weight. He wound up having to run for an hour in order to tip the scale at exactly 190. Qawi, on the other hand, was a fit and determined 189 despite battling personal demons, including a family tragedy that had culminated with his father’s murder.

  So when boxing fans tuned into ABC’s Wide World of Sports on March 22, 1986, they thought they were watching the man who’d beaten Muhammad Ali make an earnest effort to revive his career in a lighter weight division. What they actually saw was an out-of-shape, hungover ex-fighter go up against an angry and bitter cruiserweight champion who was out to disgrace him.

  Reno was not the kind of town photographers flocked to for beauty shots. In the eyes of Bernie Lincicome, sports columnist for the Chicago Tribune, the town “looks as if someone took a giant push broom and shoved all the debris of the high desert up against the Sierra Nevada mountains, which are the only redeeming feature of the place and are, to their credit, a safe distance from the mobile home, pickup truck, brown-grass capital of the Western world.”

  Promoting itself as “The Biggest Little City in the World,” Reno had built its reputation on gambling, divorce, and boxing. Jess Willard, Max Baer, and Sonny Liston all fought there; the town had played host to the notorious 1910 “Fight of the Century” between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries.

  When Leon Spinks and Dwight Qawi squared off at the University of Nevada’s Lawlor Events Center, boxing in Reno was in its heyday, grabbing big-name fights that weren’t quite big enough for Las Vegas. Leon hadn’t fought in a noteworthy venue since losing to Carlos de Leon in Atlantic City three years earlier. This was yet another shot for him to regain the national spotlight.

  In the dressing room before the fight, Leon gathered with his handlers. Predictably, Kay Spinks used the opportunity to hold an impromptu prayer meeting.

  Emanuel Steward never forgot the scene. “Before the fight Mama’s having a prayer about this young man who’s been working so hard and put so much into it, and my assistant vice president Prentiss Byrd couldn’t take it anymore. He just walked out. ‘I gotta leave,’ he said. ‘I can’t hear this part.’”

  Leon, sporting a neatly trimmed beard and mustache, entered the ring in gold Kronk gym shorts. He had seven-and-a-half-inches
on Qawi in height and five in reach. He also had the punching power of a true heavyweight.

  “Before I fought [Leon], I saw him fight against some guy,” Qawi says. “He looked pretty good. I was concerned. He could still fight. He had two or three losses before he fought me, but he was always dangerous. My strategy was to take it right to him and whip him like he stole something.”

  As soon as the bell rang, the two fighters came out slugging, giving the crowd its money’s worth. But then Leon went to the ropes and stayed there, counterpunching. His lack of training was already evident.

  ABC announcer Alex Wallau in the first round, “Leon has been less aggressive than is his normal style here…. Right now, you’d have to say that Leon is just dead at this weight. He has no legs to move away, he has very little zip in his punches at this point.”

  Leon absorbed many more blows than he dished out, and the ratio became more lopsided as the fight progressed. His friends and family shouted from ringside to box, move, get off the ropes, but it was clear that Leon didn’t have a game plan, nor did he have the wellspring of energy he had dipped into eight years earlier against Ali.

  In the fourth round Qawi taunted Leon, mugging at him, sticking out his tongue, hitting him at will, daring him to hit back. But Leon’s battery was dying. His punches were slow, late, and off the mark. Worse yet, every time he swung and missed, Qawi responded with a sharp, targeted combination.

  “I was just having fun,” Qawi says now. “That was about getting his brother to come out. I wanted to get a rematch with Michael. I put a whipping on Leon. I heard his people yelling, ‘Move, move, get off the ropes, Leon.’ I turned around and told ’em to shut up.”

  Steward worked Leon’s corner that night. “Qawi would get him over to the ropes and beat on him. Then he says to me [while hitting Leon], ‘Got any more of these guys over at the Kronk? I like beating on a big man with little gold Kronk britches on him.’ He’s really rubbing it into me.”