by John Florio
On March 7, 1987, Tyson won the WBA belt in a lopsided twelve-round decision over Bonecrusher Smith. On May 30 he defended his WBC and WBA titles by knocking out Pinklon Thomas in the sixth round. That same night Tony Tucker took Michael’s vacated IBF belt by stopping Buster Douglas in the tenth, thus setting up a Tyson-Tucker match for the undisputed championship.
Michael, beltless for the first time in six years, was still the lineal champ—and about to become a millionaire seven times over by passing through the ropes at the Atlantic City Convention Center and taking on Gerry Cooney.
Beginning in the 1940s the Catskills attracted Jewish families from New York City who yearned for the fresh air and cool breezes of upstate New York. The area, two hours north of the city, offered a paradise of grand resorts, bungalow colonies, summer camps, stand-up comedy, and big bands. It was also where heavyweight champions set up camp. Rocky Marciano trained at Grossinger’s, Sonny Liston at the Pines.
By 1987 the lure of the Catskills had given way to the sunny climes of California and Florida. But the Concord was still going strong as upstate New York’s largest resort, stretching out over two thousand acres, offering fifteen hundred rooms, and featuring a dining hall that sat three thousand guests.
One of those guests was Michael Spinks. There, he hunkered down with Butch Lewis, Eddie Futch, and Mackie Shilstone to prepare for “The War at the Shore” on June 15. Most of the guests didn’t recognize him. Despite his historic victories over Holmes and his current status as lineal champion, Michael had been eclipsed in the public imagination by Tyson. To those who did approach him—mostly gaga teenagers and their mothers who mistakenly called him Leon—he was genuine, playful, and accommodating.
In terms of size, Cooney was Michael’s biggest challenge to date. Standing six-six and weighing 238, the hulking Long Islander had four inches and thirty pounds on Michael. His left hook was the stuff of legend. On his way to a 28–1 record, he had knocked out twenty-four opponents, nine of them in the first round. On the flip side he had fought only three times since losing his 1982 mega-fight with Larry Holmes.
Reporters flocked to the Concord in search of training-camp dirt they could bring back to their editors. But Michael was no Leon—there were no late-night through-the-window escapes to the local watering hole, no disappearing acts for weeks at a time, and no drugged-out debauchery. The best they could dig up was another unorthodox training regimen devised by Mackie Shilstone. What came out of Michael’s camp was the picture of a single-minded fighter, free of a champion’s bravado. Michael, the writers reported, offered frank answers and spoke openly of being scared of supersize heavyweights like Cooney. As the Los Angeles Times put it, Michael’s “ego lagged woefully behind his achievements.” The paper even quoted Michael as saying, “I’m in no hurry to get in the ring with that man. I could start crying. Training is fun, but thinking about the actual fight is scary. Man, those three steps up to the ring…”
Before the fight Michael told reporters that he wasn’t thrilled about getting in the ring with Cooney. “I don’t even watch films of him. He hasn’t fought enough rounds for me to get much out of it, and besides, all they show me are guys going down, going down, going down. I find that very terrifying.
“Even though I’m a heavyweight, I’m probably the smallest heavyweight out there, and I have to admit, boxing all these big guys all the time, it isn’t like lying on the beach or a walk in the park. It’s work. It’s serious work. It leaves me with an attitude of, I mean, really, really wishing, hoping that overnight I just wake up and I’m all that I would ever want to be as a heavyweight, weighing maybe around two-fifty and punching like a Mack truck.”
Mackie Shilstone remembers sitting with Michael at training camp. “We’re watching TV and the [commentators] are all saying Michael’s not gonna stand up against this guy. And [Michael] said, ‘They don’t think I’m going to make it.’ Cooney was this giant man. I think of all the athletes that Michael faced, Michael had the greatest apprehension about him.”
Cooney was a slight favorite going into the fight—the odds more the result of his size than his skills. He’d fought only seven rounds in the previous five years, and word on the street was that he was battling depression with an arsenal of alcohol and drugs.
Kevin P. Porter, Cooney’s sparring partner, recalls, “I was with him up in Great Gorge [while he was training to fight Michael]. I could see guys bringing cases of beer to Cooney’s condo…. I think he had a drug problem too. He always gave these little speeches about his brother—he had a brother who was strung out on something—but I don’t think he was talking about his brother, he was talking about himself. It eventually came out about his partying.
“I tried to tell Dennis [Rappaport] that Cooney would not be able to get to Michael Spinks. [Michael] would be able to elude him, and when he hit Cooney, he would hurt him. If you could avoid the left hand, Cooney was easy to get to. I thought Michael would eventually knock him out.”
It turned out the public didn’t care. Nobody was salivating over a match between a hungover Cooney and a gentle lineal champion. Hundreds of venues showing the fight via closed-circuit hookup were starved for business. The managers of one such venue, Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, pulled out of their contract when they sold only sixteen tickets. Even theaters that pulled the race card (against the wishes of Butch Lewis) weren’t able to build a gate.
In the Los Angeles Times, Richard Hoffer gave his view as to why the Cooney fight wasn’t the draw that the promoters thought it would be. “[They] misjudged badly,” Hoffer wrote. “Cooney’s mysterious appeal, that of a white puncher, inspired a gate of more than $30 million for his challenge of Holmes in 1982. As he remains white and a puncher—as an 86-second destruction of Eddie Gregg last year reminded us—it was thought that his appeal was intact. Promoter Butch Lewis reports that a closed-circuit distributor in the South has a promotional tape that advises fans to ‘be there for the pride of their race.’ But nothing sells Cooney any more. Seven rounds in five years do not qualify even a white heavyweight with a left hook for contention.”
Despite lagging closed-circuit sales, all 16,000 seats in Convention Hall were filled on fight night. Mike Tyson sat ringside. So did Sugar Ray Leonard, Evander Holyfield, and Jersey Joe Walcott. First-round NFL draft pick Vinny Testaverde was on hand, as was Miami Vice star Don Johnson and celebrated jockey Angel Cordero Jr.
Ring announcer Ed Darien introduced the challenger as “‘Gentleman’ Gerry Cooney” and Michael as “the heavyweight champion of the world.”
Michael came out swinging. Rather than run from the towering Cooney, he lunged at him with left jabs, overhand rights, and short left hooks—twice backing up the 238-pound behemoth. Cooney landed his own shots, though, and the momentum swung back and forth throughout the first two rounds.
Frank Lotierzo, Michael’s former sparring partner, sat ringside. What he saw didn’t surprise him. “I went to watch Cooney work out at Caesars,” he recalls. “I see how he’s training and I tell [Cooney’s trainer] Victor Valle that Gerry is reaching with his jab. ‘Tell Gerry after he jabs to hook off his jab, that will get him closer. Michael will bring his hands down and Gerry can step in and come through with his finishing punches.’ Victor Valle looked at me, like, ‘Who is this guy?’ Well, in the first round, by accident, Cooney throws a jab and a left hook and he misses Michael by an inch. If he were to hit Michael with that left hook, he would’ve put him in the ocean. But the left hook went right by Michael’s face and [Cooney] never did it again.”
Cooney didn’t connect with that hook, but in the second round he accidentally butted Michael’s head, cutting the brow over his right eye. By the third round the cut was obviously a factor. Cooney took control of the fight in the latter half of the third and kept it throughout the fourth. After the round the fight was even on the judges’ cards. Harold Lederman had Cooney up 39–37, John Stewart had Michael up 39–37, and Tom Kaczmarek had the fight even. But things were trend
ing in Cooney’s direction.
Newsday’s Wallace Matthews recalls, “Michael was cut early in the fight, and I remember Leon was in the corner. He was down on his knees and he was crying as he was watching the fight because he thought his brother was going to get beat. And I remember seeing him pounding the ring steps with his fists because Michael was a bloody mess.”
Rock Newman was in the Spinks camp and remembers how the blood woke Michael up. “Our cut man, Percy Richardson, instead of being the cool, calm, collected cut man that keeps the fighter calm, looked at [Michael’s] eye and screamed, ‘Cut! Oh my god!’” says Newman. “Michael, sitting on the stool, got so goddamn amped up that he went out and fought like a wild man the next round.”
In that next round—the fifth—Michael threw combinations that were more easily measured by the knockdown than by the punch. Cooney barely threw a punch in return.
Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat, down.
Referee Frank Cappuccino gave Cooney a standing eight count; then Cooney, still dazed, walked back into the hailstorm.
Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat, down.
Cooney took a second standing eight and again came back for more. Michael unleashed yet another assault, showing no sign of tiring. This time Cappuccino didn’t wait for the knockdown. The fight was over.
“When Cooney was down, his eyes are right in my eyes,” Cappuccino recalls. “I’m thinking he’s saying to himself, ‘Goddamn, when the hell’s he gonna stop this fight?’ He kept staring at me. Eyeball to eyeball.”
Mackie Shilstone gives himself some credit for the machine-gun outbursts of Michael’s fists. “We had trained for Cooney using surgical tubing,” he says, “and we did it on a bike because Michael’s knees were bothering him. We would only run three days a week and I had him punching [while] on a bike, hundreds of punches against surgical tubing. I said, ‘This is gonna come back and be the victory.’ Michael hit Gerry Cooney, I’ll never forget it, eighty-three punches in two minutes and thirty-seven seconds. Had the referee not stopped that onslaught, Michael would have kept punching him, because we’d trained to 175 punches in three minutes. He just killed him. Punched him into submission.”
Michael explained at the postfight press conference, “I had been training to fight aggressively. That’s the way we wanted to fight. We wanted to back him up. They say he punched so hard, but he had to hit me. He was confusing for a while, but I saw how to fight Gerry. I saw exactly where he was coming from. I saw everything. I went in with the strategy to be there and not be there. I planned to never be on the ropes. That’s where he wanted me to be.”
Cooney has a list of excuses as long as his reach. “I was worn out,” he says. “The fight was on, the fight was off. I never believed the fight was gonna happen. I had no motivation. I wasn’t taking care of myself. I shouldn’t have been in the ring that night. I was drinking every day. He got me at a bad time in my life. It was the most regretful fight I ever had.
“[Michael] didn’t belong in the ring with me. He didn’t belong in the ring with a heavyweight. Michael was a very good light-heavyweight, not a heavyweight. If he fought me on any healthy day of my career, I’d knock him out easily. That’s the truth. If I’m in shape when I go into that fight, he ain’t gonna last. I’m gonna catch him.”
Wallace Matthews recalls, “Cooney’s first reaction [after signing to fight Michael] was to call a friend and say, ‘I’m fighting for the light-heavyweight title.’ He thought it was a joke. He thought he couldn’t possibly lose to this little guy. And [after the fight] he was making all kinds of excuses. He couldn’t get his wind. It was all kinds of bullshit: ‘I never got loose.’ The typical things that losers say after a fight.”
Kevin P. Porter, Cooney’s sparring partner, writes off the excuses as meaningless. “Even if Cooney was in great, great shape, nope, he [wouldn’t have won],” Porter says. “Michael had a lot of arsenal—that overhand right and a couple of hooks. Michael can punch. He’s in tremendous shape and he can punch.”
Harold Lederman, one of the official judges that night, disagrees. “Gerry wasn’t Gerry in that fight. Something was wrong. There were rumors about alcohol. If Cooney was in his prime, there’s no doubt he would have knocked out Michael. I will back that ’til the day I die. He had a huge left hook and if he was sharp, if he was really on his game, he would have flattened Michael. There’s no doubt about it.”
Jim Lampley called the fight and now sees it as a defining event in Michael’s career. “I drank all of the Kool-Aid regarding Cooney’s size,” he says. “It was not my perspective going into the fight that Michael could jump inside, beat Gerry to the punch as quickly and aggressively as he did, round after round, and pummel him the way that he did. I was stunned by his performance. Michael was a much better fighter than I thought he was, and he was a much better fighter than Gerry Cooney. At that point Gerry didn’t have the sheer physical and emotional presence to compete with Michael Spinks. I way underestimated what Michael Spinks was.
“There isn’t any one distinctive thing about him as a fighter. They used to print ‘Spinks Jinx’ because it was attention getting, and yeah, he had a sneaky right hand, but it wasn’t an eye-catching dominating weapon like Joe Frazier’s left hook. And so at the end of the day, if you’re gonna win forty or fifty some-odd fights in a modern boxing career, there are going to be a few nights that stick out where you were sensational, you were dominant, and you were as good as you could be, and that’s Spinks in the Cooney fight.”
As far as Michael was concerned, the timing couldn’t have been better. He’d just shown the skeptics that he could take a big man with a huge punch and topple him—and he could do it with pizzazz. So six weeks later, on August 1, 1986, when Tyson took a twelve-round decision from Tony Tucker to become the undisputed heavyweight champion, boxing fans wanted to know: Was Mike Tyson really the undisputed champ if he hadn’t beaten Michael Spinks, the lineal champion?
The WBA, WBC, and IBF all said yes.
Butch Lewis and Michael Spinks disagreed.
15
BY THE LATE 1980s NO LEGITIMATE PROMOTERS WOULD TOUCH Leon. The few small-timers that were hanging around plastered his name wherever they could, hoping to turn a quick buck. They had Leon hopping the globe, squaring off with no-name opponents in far-flung venues for two-bit pay. Boxing insiders shook their heads, wondering how much lower the ex-champ could fall. They found out when he landed in the New Japan Pro Wrestling ring, sleepwalking through mixed matches with the likes of Tarzan Goto and Antonio Inoki (the same Inoki that nearly destroyed Ali’s legs in 1976). Leon’s boredom was so contagious—and the matches so obviously staged—that even the rabid fans who had paid top dollar to see the bouts left the arenas with the same vacant look in their eyes.
In the two years following Leon’s loss to Dwight Qawi and his unceremonious dismissal from the Kronk gym, Leon fought nine boxing matches. He lost seven.
Rocky Sekorski knocked him out in Minnesota. Jose Ribalta knocked him out in the first round in Florida. Leon managed to squeak by Jeff Jordan with a split decision in Japan, but he got knocked out by Angelo Musone in Italy and then could only muster up a draw against Jim Ashard in Oregon. Terry Mims outpointed him in Ohio, as did Ladislao Mijangos in Texas and Randall “Tex” Cobb in Tennessee. Tony Morrison flattened him in thirty-three seconds in Connecticut.
The Morrison debacle, which took place on May 30, 1988, was all the Connecticut Athletic Commission needed to clamp an immediate thirty-day suspension on Leon. The head of the commission, John Burns, said Leon would be required to undergo a physical if he ever wanted to fight in Connecticut again. Burns also said he’d be notifying other state commissions of the suspension, implying that those states should consider a similar ban.
Two weeks later an obscure and highly suspect matchmaker named Dickie Hohn set up a kickboxing-karate match between Leon and “Bad” Brad Hefton at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. The fight would be legit and Leon would make $15,000. Reporters got wind of
the mismatch and exposed it to the public. It didn’t take a martial arts expert to realize that Leon’s cornermen would be doubling as pallbearers.
Jeff Gordon of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote, “Full-contact karate is cable TV’s answer to dogfighting. It’s not for the squeamish. Along with conventional jabs and hooks, jaw-crushing roundhouse and side kicks are staples of this blood sport…. Pitting Leon against Hefton would be like matching a Frito-fed schnauzer against a meanly bred pit bull. Defeat would be swift and final.”
Ferdie Pacheco was quoted as saying, “It’s almost to the point where they should be arrested for contributing to manslaughter. What do they want to do? Put Leon on a slab?”
In the end the Hefton fight never materialized, and neither did Leon’s paycheck. Unfortunately, the promoters kept knocking. And Leon kept answering.
Butch Lewis knew money when he smelled it. Two undefeated heavyweight champions squaring off in the ring. It hadn’t happened on this scale since 1971, when Ali met Frazier in “The Fight of the Century” at Madison Square Garden. Michael Spinks vs. Mike Tyson would be a box-office extravaganza.
Michael had chopped down the great white oak, Gerry Cooney, and the stage was set for him to take on the toughest man on the planet.
Meanwhile, the toughest man on the planet was knocking down wannabe after wannabe. After beating Tony Tucker for the IBF belt, Tyson kayoed Tyrell Biggs in seven and then temporarily re-retired the twice-unretired Larry Holmes in four. America had wanted a mythic champion, and Tyson was a perfect fit for the role.
Yet Tyson insists he always had respect for the lineal titleholder. “I don’t care what anybody says. Spinks was the champ. I was [just] the alphabet champion. You gotta beat the man that beat the man that beat the man. That’s just the history of boxing. I don’t care how many organizations they make. That’s the rule. You can’t lose the title unless you lose it in the ring.”