One Punch from the Promised Land

by John Florio

  As New Jersey boxing commissioner, Hazzard was responsible for restoring order. “[Tyson] was getting pissed off,” Hazzard recalls. “They were doing some construction in the back of the dressing room, and there was a wall that had sheetrock and [Tyson] put his fist right through the fuckin’ sheetrock.”

  According to Tyson, “Butch Lewis was trying to antagonize me before the fight and that wasn’t gonna work. He was saying to unwrap the gloves, saying that nobody was here from his side [when my hands were wrapped]. He was trying to get me upset, get me frustrated. I may have said some foul words. He fed my fire. I’m a street guy, he’s a street guy, so we were talking street stuff back and forth. Yes, I did [punch a hole in the wall].”

  Why did Butch Lewis do it? Why enrage Tyson? The answer wasn’t in Tyson’s dressing room. It was in Michael’s.

  Emanuel Steward had flown to Atlantic City to see the fight and went to check on Michael. “I went into his dressing room; they couldn’t even get him to come out, he was so scared. He was a nervous wreck, really freaking out. Leon wouldn’t have given a damn. Leon was a free spirit. [Michael] didn’t have the personality to come out.”

  Not until 11:20 did Michael finally make his way to the ring, snaking through a celebrity-studded audience that included Norman Mailer, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Sean Penn, Madonna, and, of course, Donald Trump. The fighter gave a hesitant wave to the crowd, acknowledging his family and friends. He entered the ring in a gleaming white robe as Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald sang “This Is It” through the PA speakers. Sweat glistened on his cheeks and forehead. He had the look of a rabbit that had just spotted a hunter’s rifle.

  Boxing writer Royce Feour says, “I never saw a fighter entering the ring, and standing in the ring, that looked as scared as Michael Spinks. Never. And I’ve covered fights since 1965. Never. [Michael] was petrified.”

  Three minutes later Tyson entered, naked except for black trunks, black shoes, and red gloves. He charged through the crowd with all the elegance of a military tank. The overhead speakers blared music that was so dark and industrial, it sounded as though the audio man had opened a microphone in a prison sweatshop.

  Once both fighters were inside the ropes, ring announcer Michael Buffer introduced Muhammad Ali, dressed impeccably in a dark-gray suit, pink tie, and oversize eyeglasses. Ali, presumably, still loved the spotlight, but his face was locked into a frozen stare as he inched his way to the center of the ring. He waved to the crowd with a jerking right hand that seemed to be controlled by an amateur puppeteer. His mouth, which once operated in only one mode—fast-forward—now struggled to get out of pause. He leaned into Michael’s ear with some barely audible last-minute instructions.

  “Stick and move,” he mumbled.

  Butch Lewis stood nearby, wearing what was now his trademark “chocolate tuxedo”: white pants, white jacket, white bowtie, no shirt.

  Next, Buffer introduced the fighters, a ritual that lasted more than two minutes.

  Eventually, the bell rang.

  Tyson, who had been in constant motion, galloped to the center of the ring like a bronco released at a rodeo. He met up with Michael and, predictably, began to swing for the fences. Unpredictably, Michael went toe-to-toe with the human wrecking ball. At about the forty-second mark, he threw an overhand right that missed Tyson by inches. At the one-minute mark, he paid the price for leaving his bicycle at home: Tyson threw a left to his head and a right to his body, and Michael dropped to one knee. It was the first time he’d been down in his career, aside from Hazzard’s missed call in the Qawi fight.

  Michael popped right back up.

  Referee Frank Cappuccino gave him a standing eight, holding his fingers in the air as he ticked off the count.

  “Six, seven, eight.” The diminutive Cappuccino looked up into Michael’s eyes. “You all right, Mike?”

  Michael nodded. “I’m all right.”

  But he was far from all right. He was being gunned down by a pair of cannons wrapped in red boxing gloves.

  He banged his fists together and marched back to the front line—fear seemingly replaced by courage. Two seconds later a Tyson right uppercut slammed him in the jaw.

  Michael fell flat on his back. His head came to rest under the bottom rope. All he could do was stare blankly up at the klieg lights.

  Jim Lampley announcing the fight. “And he’s down again and in serious trouble. A right hand right on the chin.”

  Cappuccino, standing over Michael: “Three, four….”

  Michael gamely tried to get up—he made it to one knee by the count of nine—but toppled back down between the bottom two ropes. When Cappuccino reached “ten,” Michael’s body was halfway out of the ring.

  “He’s not going to make it!” shouted HBO’s Larry Merchant. “It’s all over.”

  In less time than it took to buy a bucket of popcorn, Michael had slid from the peak of the mountain into Tyson’s scrapheap.

  “The fact that he went down and had never been down before was devastating to me,” longtime friend James Caldwell says. “We were yelling from our seats, ‘Box him! Box him!’ Anything but stand in front of him. That was the killing point.”

  New York Times columnist Dave Anderson recalls, “Spinks was moving, boxing, dancing away from Tyson and I remember he kind of stopped and planted himself and I said, ‘Oh my god.’ I don’t know anybody in those years who stood toe-to-toe with Tyson and lived to say it.”

  The Newark Star-Ledger’s Jerry Izenberg saw a ring strategist abandoning all strategy. “When Spinks went down the first time, he knew he was hurt. But Spinks is a fighter, he knows he’s got two minutes to finish the round,” Izenberg says. “He knows what he’s supposed to do and he knows what he’s not supposed to do. And what did he do? He did what he was not supposed to do. He should’ve grabbed Tyson and he should’ve danced like it was a bump and grind. He didn’t get his head back. He didn’t get his legs back. His thought process was totally paralyzed. You have to remember, he was in a place he had never been in his entire life. Michael absolutely froze in that fight. He was a brilliant tactician. He understood boxing. He understood what he could and couldn’t do. And he forgot it all the night he fought Tyson.”

  Based on the way Tyson came charging out, referee Frank Cappuccino had figured the fight wouldn’t last two rounds. “I thought [Michael] would try to stay away from him, but I think he was too hesitant to try to get [Tyson] off his game. And that’s why he got careless.”

  Michael’s trainer Eddie Futch had said to Stan Hochman of the Philadelphia Daily News, “I told him, ‘Go out and box this guy and move, let him wind down for five or six rounds and then we’ll go after him.’ I was as surprised as anyone in the house when he went out there and took him on like he did.”

  According to Rock Newman, the confusion had boiled down to two opposing plans. “There was a bone of contention that lasted to the end between Eddie [Futch] and Butch [Lewis]. Eddie thought Tyson was a bigger version of Qawi, a quicker version of Qawi, and a more powerful version of Qawi. And he had taught Michael to run, run, run. Eddie’s strategy was to replicate the Qawi fight. Move, turn, dance, move, dance. In rounds one through four, Tyson was a truly great fighter. In five through eight, he became more ordinary, and after that he was subpar. So Eddie told Michael, ‘Take him out in deep water and then we can drown him.’ But Butch incessantly told Michael, ‘Yeah, that’s cool, but you gotta hit that motherfucker, hit ’im with the right hand like you did to Qawi in the first round. You gotta pop that motherfucker and get some respect.’ And Eddie was always like, ‘Take no early chances. Make Tyson chase you.’

  “Well, Michael went out and tried to throw the big one and he got knocked out. And Eddie was, oh my god, he was so incredibly livid.”

  Michael defended his strategy to Dave Anderson of the Times. “I didn’t think it was necessary to avoid getting hit,” he said. “The boxer comes in and tries to nail you with a good right hand. I thought I’d exchange. Inste
ad, he hit me with an uppercut. I just tried to do what I knew I had to do, and that was fight. Not that I stood toe-to-toe with him, but I tried to take the shot and I came up short.”

  The fight lasted all of ninety-one seconds, making it the fourth-quickest heavyweight title fight in history. (The fastest took place on April 6, 1900, when Jim Jeffries knocked out Jack Finnegan in fifty-five seconds.) In the end the ringside spectators had spent fifteen hundred bucks to see Tyson throw eight punches.

  Some boxing fans questioned whether Michael could have gotten up and continued fighting. Perhaps they expected too much out of a man who’d been outrunning the odds for thirty-one years.

  Steve Lott says, “When [Michael] went down it’s not like he looked around and made a decision to stay down. His eyes were in a different country.”

  “I’m looking at his eyes,” Frank Cappuccino recalls. “His eyes are way back in his head. I said, this guy is hurt.”

  Tyson’s trainer Kevin Rooney remembers, “Boom, right uppercut. Spinks came right into it. Once he went down I knew the fight was over.”

  Former New Jersey Boxing Commissioner Larry Hazzard says, “The referee was counting over him, and when he got to, like, six and seven, Michael was still on his rear. I’ve given enough counts in my day to know that he’s not going to make this one. I said, ‘Un-fucking-believable.’”

  There was no longer any question as to who owned the undisputed heavyweight title. Mike Tyson was, by all rights, king of the world.

  And Michael Spinks, the kid from Pruitt-Igoe who’d lived the mythic journey to the far side of the rainbow, was now the former light-heavyweight champion and former heavyweight champion of the world.

  Once his head cleared and he’d risen from the canvas, he walked down those three terrifying steps leading up to the ring and looked for the exit sign.

  16

  ON JULY 27, 1988, TWENTY-NINE DAYS AFTER SUFFERING THE ONLY loss of his career, Michael stood inside Tavern on the Green, New York’s glitzy Central Park landmark, as waiters in sea-green uniforms served seafood and poured champagne. He was there to do what few other professional boxers had done: pull the plug on his career before it pulled the plug on him. He credited Butch Lewis with the decision, saying he’d always left his career in his promoter’s hands.

  “Twelve years is quite a while to be getting swung at and having to duck punches,” Michael said to a gathering that included Lewis, Joe Frazier, and a roomful of boxing insiders and sportswriters. “It’s been a tough twelve years, but it’s been fun. I’m a happy young man today.”

  Who could blame him? He’d gone off to war and come back physically and mentally sound. And though he didn’t understand Wall Street, he understood Butch Lewis, who managed his money and paid his bills, right down to doling out his spending allowances. Lewis told Michael he’d been investing his money, including the Tyson windfall, into conservative zero-coupon bonds. He said the stock market crash that had shaken the country eight months before the Tyson fight would have little effect on Michael’s retirement. Improbable as it may have seemed back at Prutt-Igoe, the thirty-two-year-old would never have to work another day in his life.

  During his retirement speech, Michael looked at Lewis and said, “I can’t thank you and kiss you enough for all the wonderful things.”

  He wept when he said it. So did Lewis.

  “There was no other team like us in boxing, ever,” Lewis said. “Me and Slim, we’re like family.”

  Lewis also made a point of injecting himself into Michael’s greatest achievements—even ones that occurred before the two had met.

  “We did it our way,” he said. “We made history in Montreal when we won the gold medal. We became the first brother team to win gold medals and part of the first brother team to win world championships. We went on to be the first light-heavyweight to dethrone a heavyweight champion. Whatever it took to get the job done, we did it.”

  Michael’s list of accomplishments was impressive, to say the least. He’d also been a dignified champion and a gentleman from start to finish. Yet, aside from the friends and newspapermen gathered at the Upper West Side restaurant, America had moved on. It had cast Michael aside the instant he’d walked into Tyson’s whistling right uppercut. In the end Michael’s retirement commanded about as much newspaper ink as the same-day passing of Frank Zamboni, the inventor of the ice-cleaning machine.

  “Michael Spinks got a bad break in life,” Mike Tyson now says. “He has legendary victories under his belt, but his legacy is being beaten by me in ninety-one seconds. That’s not fair at all. He beat Larry Holmes twice, he beat Eddie Mustafa Muhammad, and he beat Qawi. He just got a bad break.”

  Top Rank promoter Bob Arum limits Michael’s legacy to the light-heavyweight ranks. “Michael was heavyweight champion for a cup of coffee,” he says, “and that all got blown away with the devastating knockout loss to Tyson. So nobody considered Michael a real heavyweight. He was a great light-heavyweight, he was a terrific fighter, a dedicated fighter—he knew how to fight—but nobody looked at Michael as a heavyweight.”

  Gerald Early, professor and author of The Culture of Bruising, says, “The public wasn’t as clued in to the light-heavyweight division as they were to the heavyweight division. People don’t pay much attention to it. The light-heavyweights are kind of like the Korean War, wherein the Vietnam War and World War II get all the attention, and nobody knows anything about the Korean War. I thought Michael was the greatest light-heavyweight champion of all time.”

  Carlo Rotella, author of Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, sympathizes with the plight of a light-heavyweight tactician expected to carry the aura of invincibility that comes with being heavyweight champion. “I don’t know how you succeed in that climate, as a light-heavyweight champion who moves up to heavyweight, who isn’t going to be knocking people’s blocks off, who’s not going to be physically terrifying. That’s not the kind of thing people are incredibly impressed by. It’s kind of lost on the lay fan.”

  In Tyson’s view Michael didn’t spend enough time creating a marketable persona. “He’s a very dignified person, very kind person, very respectful person,” Tyson says. “We don’t think much about those guys in this business…. People want a guy with charismatic flair who can give ’em great excitement.”

  Douglas Hartmann, author of Race, Culture and the Revolt of the Black Athlete, agrees that Michael’s personality wasn’t the type to grab headlines. “Michael got lost in history,” he says. “He didn’t occupy our larger imaginations. He didn’t want to have any kind of persona…. He didn’t let himself be the all-American boy that he could have been, given his Olympic history and the story that you could have told around him.”

  Michael’s ride in the ring was over. He had accomplished far more than he had set out to do. As he drove home to the quiet comfort of Greenville, Delaware, he wondered what lay ahead. One thing was certain: The days of Pruitt-Igoe were behind him. He had been one of the lucky ones. He had escaped and would never again be penniless.

  Unfortunately, the same could not be said of Leon.

  Leon hadn’t made it to Michael’s retirement luncheon, but the two brothers had been together five days earlier, on July 22, when Leon married his longtime girlfriend Betty Green. Michael paid for half the wedding, splitting it with Betty, and flew to Detroit for the celebration.

  The newly christened Mr. and Mrs. Leon Spinks were making ends meet in a spare three-bedroom brick house in Franklin Park, which lay three miles south and a couple of socioeconomic rungs below Leon’s former neighborhood of Rosedale Park. Cloned houses rimmed the streets, each fronted by a square patch of grass; the neighborhood conjured up images of little plastic houses on a Monopoly board. Leon’s business manager, Al Low, struggled to impart to his client some basic financial horse sense, but Leon’s portfolio failed to grow beyond his two main accounts: the few dollars in his pocket and the spare change he had sitting on the bar.

  For three days the marriage wen
t relatively smoothly. On the fourth day Leon was served with papers claiming he and his ex-wife Nova owed $187,000 in back taxes. Things went downhill from there: Betty would be in and out of her job on the assembly line at General Motors, and Leon would rarely be employed for more than a week or two at a time. He would spend most days in front of either a TV or a bar. He still made occasional headlines by smashing up cars—usually Betty’s—but he had long since moved off the front page. By now, newspaper copy about the onetime heavyweight champion had grown shorter, the incidents more pathetic, his name less and less relevant.

  Having vowed yet again to rebuild his life and his image, Leon took to spending Sunday mornings at church with Low, an active member of the Baptist church. Attending mass at various congregations in and around Detroit, Leon would penitently walk up to the front of the faithful and dedicate himself to God. But by the time the pews had emptied, Leon was back to being Leon.

  Low scratched together whatever work he could find for his client. He had him signing autographs, competing in kickboxing events, and taking another turn at wrestling. At one match Low choreographed a scenario that culminated in Betty’s getting in the ring and angrily swinging her purse around. The staged conflict wasn’t all that far from the truth.

  “I had many two- and three-o’clock-in-the-morning calls,” Low remembers, “[usually] the result of partying and [heavy] drinking. Leon and Betty would drink pretty good. I’d get a call from Betty, ‘Leon’s doing this.’ Then from Leon, ‘Betty’s trying to run me over with the car.’ [One] night I went over. Leon was up on the porch and Betty had driven the car up onto the lawn. She was asleep and Leon was passed out.”