by John Florio
Betty blamed the stormy marriage, her drained bank account, and her wrecked cars on Leon—particularly on his drinking, drugging, and philandering. For his part, Leon promised Betty she’d never see him drunk again, and in his defense, he spoke the near truth—because he would disappear for months. He’d go on prolonged binges, seen not by Betty but by his old St. Louis friends when he’d pop up in the bars and on the street corners he used to frequent. Every so often he’d pay a visit to his father, who was still in St. Louis and now dying of cancer. Although the two never reconciled, Leon had buried his anger in the rubble of Pruitt-Igoe.
Perhaps Leon had come to understand his father. He himself barely knew his own sons, Leon and Darrell, and had never met Cory. All three of his boys had taken up boxing—lured into the ring by the famous Spinks name. Their mother, Zadie Mae, had seen what Leon and Michael had accomplished between the ropes and encouraged her sons to join the gym, hoping they too could punch their way to riches. On their journey into the ring, the boys had come under the wing of Charles Hamm, the plumber who had once trained Leon and Michael, and who still trained neighborhood kids out of his Northside Bombers Boxing Club. The storefront gym on West Florissant Avenue was so ramshackle it lacked a front door and indoor plumbing. But that didn’t bother the kids who frequented it. The place may have been short on amenities, but it did have the kindhearted Hamm, who lived with his wife Jeridean one flight up from the gym. Hamm had turned many of his novices into competent boxers, and if the local legend is true, developed more than a handful of young plumbers in the process. He could still be found cruising north St. Louis in a rusted van, doling out boxing and life skills to the teenagers who had the smarts to listen.
For the younger generation of Spinkses—Leon, Darrell, and Cory —Hamm had stepped into the shadow their father had left behind.
“You would think they were my kids, I was around them so much,” Hamm says. “I was a father figure to them, so they didn’t miss having a father too much.”
Darrell Spinks says, “Mr. Hamm was a coach-slash-father to me, Cory, and my brother Leon. He took care of me. I would walk around with busted shoes; he would buy me shoes. He would do everything. For a while Mr. Hamm didn’t even know that Leon Spinks was our daddy ’cause we never did tell him. When he found out, he called my father and talked to him. My dad didn’t know we was boxing.”
Cory also found a substitute father in Hamm. “Charles Hamm did so much for me. I love him to death,” he says. “I looked up to him as being a dad. He’s a terrific man.”
In the mid-1980s, upon Betty’s urging, Leon invited his three sons to Detroit for the summer. Zadie Mae agreed to let the two older boys go, but said that Cory, who wasn’t yet ten, was too young.
“It was supposed to be two months but it ended up being one month,” Darrell remembers. “My brother Leon didn’t talk to my father. He stayed out of his way. He was angry. He say, ‘We stay in the ghetto and we got a rich father.’ My brother never did forgive him.”
At one point during the visit, the two Leons went into the backyard for an impromptu sparring session and the young Leon held his own against the ex-champ. Later that day the two got into it when the youngster asked his father for money for gym shoes. The argument spilled onto the windowed front porch.
“The next thing, I heard the glass break,” Betty recalls. “I jumped up and ran to the porch to see what was going on. Big Leon had pushed Little Leon in the chest, and he fell against the glass. Big Leon started saying, ‘Don’t let that sparring session go to your head thinking you can whip my ass.’”
The wedge between the two Leons was deeper than ever.
What makes Leon’s case especially frustrating is that he blew opportunity after opportunity. There was never a shortage of people willing to help him get back on his feet.
“[Managing Leon] sometimes felt more like a babysitting job than it did anything else,” Al Low explains. “It was a daunting task, but it was one that you really wanted to do ’cause you wanted to help him so much. Leon was a good guy with such a good heart.
“He wanted to please people and he wanted people to love him. I remember we were in Vegas one time and he handed the fellow who took us up in the elevator a hundred dollar bill. So I said, ‘Lee, why did you give him a hundred dollar bill for taking us up?’ He said, ‘Oh, I just wanted him to remember me and think good of me.’ I said, ‘Well, Lee, he knows that you were the heavyweight champion of the world. He’s not going to forget that.’
“He went through a lot of money in a very short time. He was just handing it out to entourages, and for parties. But he would just smile and go on. It just didn’t make any difference how much he lost as long as he was OK tonight. If he had enough money in his pocket for that evening’s activity, then life was good and everything was fine.”
Boxing manager Jackie Kallen said she “wanted to help Leon out any way she could.” She convinced her dentist to replace Leon’s missing front teeth for free. She also worked with Al Low to find Leon a steady job. Kallen and Low approached Al Balooly, the owner of Jovans, a restaurant in the upscale Detroit suburb of Birmingham. They thought Leon could make money simply by shaking hands and telling stories.
The value of employing retired sports celebrities wasn’t lost on Balooly, who had already hired former Tigers pitcher Denny McLain to entertain patrons at the electronic keyboard. McLain, too, was down on his luck. Two decades past his baseball prime, he had served prison time for an assortment of federal offenses. McLain had shed many of the 330 pounds he’d weighed only a few years earlier, and at Jacques, the bar side of Jovans, he earned a thousand dollars a week playing such pop standards as Misty and Yesterday. Balooly offered Leon far less, and Leon took it gladly.
For Balooly, the experiment proved to be an instant success. The place was jammed nightly with customers eager to share a drink with a couple of former sports stars.
For Leon the job was a dream come true. He’d gone to bar-tending school in the vague hope of someday setting up his own joint, and when the chance came to pour drinks at Jacques, he took to the job with gusto. He’d show up on time, flashing his gleaming new front teeth, and sporting the last vestige of his glory days: a full-length mink coat. He would shake hands, pose for pictures, and on request pop out his dentures to reveal his famous toothless smile. For three months Jacques was the hottest spot in town. Newsweek and Time showed up. So did local television and radio stations. Everyone wanted to celebrate Leon’s latest comeback.
Denny McLain remembers, “Anybody could talk to [Leon]. He’d sign autographs all night. [And he’d] tell the same stories every night, one after the other. I never heard him get mad; I never heard him wallow in self-pity.
“One night, Leon lost his teeth for a couple of hours. Everybody in the place was on their hands and knees trying to find the damned teeth, like looking for a contact lens. Eventually, I think, it had fallen behind one of the bottles in the well and when they went to use that bottle of liquor or whatever, they found the teeth.”
The problem was that Leon’s job came with temptation. McLain recalls, “Every person he signed an autograph for bought him a drink, then another drink, and another drink.”
Emanuel Steward remembered stopping in one night, “I go in there. Hey, look at that. It’s Leon. ‘What in the fuck are you doing?’ He’s behind the bar all dressed up. So I ask for a Chardonnay and I get a glass filled [to the rim].
“I said, ‘What’s this?’
“He said, ‘Go, go, enjoy yourself.’
“Then he grabs another glass and says, ‘That looks so good I gotta have a fuckin’ glass too.’”
The customers, many of whom shared a glass with Leon, loved him. Yet he and Balooly parted ways after a few short months. When asked why he let Leon go, Balooly says the novelty had run its course. McLain backs the story. But Al Low doesn’t.
“The night Leon was let go, Denny called me,” Low remembers. “I picked [Leon] up and took him to dinner down
the road and talked to him. He’d been sampling some of the steaks, and I think he was going to take a couple home with him. He was very embarrassed and sad. I told him that the job wasn’t his niche and that we needed to find another direction to go.”
But Low soon realized that Leon was running out of options.
17
IN FEBRUARY 1990 ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE IN THE HEAVYWEIGHT division. The seemingly indomitable Mike Tyson was brought down by the 42–1 underdog Buster Douglas. In a quasi-replay of Leon’s reign, Douglas upset the underprepared champion and then spent more time celebrating his victory than staying in shape. Eight months later, after ballooning to 246 pounds from 231, Douglas took on former cruiserweight Evander Holyfield for his first defense—and got nailed in the third round by an evening-ending right hand. Holyfield walked away with the undisputed title, but in two years he would lose it to Riddick Bowe. A month after that Bowe would refuse to defend against Lennox Lewis and be stripped of the WBC belt. Once again the heavyweight division would be splintered and America would be denied a unified champion.
While all this was going on, Leon and Michael were continuing down their divergent paths. Michael was happily retired from the ring and working with Lewis in repping young fighters. Leon, at age thirty-eight, had questionable mental faculties and fewer skills than a dime-a-dozen bar fighter, yet he pushed to get back in the ring. He and Betty moved to Chicago, where he found a manager in John Caluwaert. A local business and real estate attorney, Caluwaert got together a group of investors to pay off Leon’s debts and launch his comeback.
“I took a heavy look at what would be involved,” Caluwaert told the Chicago Tribune. “It’s a major investment in your life, not to mention money. We had a couple of sports psychologists sit down with Leon and his wife in my office. I was very much aware of his background; it’s no secret he comes from a very difficult past. But I became aware of his phenomenal strengths as an individual, much of which has been blurred by media attention. The psychologists gave a very positive report.”
Leon’s comeback became official on November 15, 1991, in Gary, Indiana. His opponent was Lupe Guerra—the same Lupe Guerra he’d kayoed in four rounds six years earlier. Guerra, a used-up journeyman with a 23–24–2 record, had lost four of his previous six fights. What’s more, he hadn’t won more than two fights in a row in eleven years.
Leon kayoed Guerra in three rounds and then beat Andre Crowder, Rick Myers, Rocky Bentley, and Jack Jackson—four palookas with a combined record of 27–75–3. It’s fair to say the division’s top heavyweights weren’t looking over their shoulders.
In September 1992, two months after beating Jackson, Leon was matched against Kevin P. Porter at the Lansing Civic Center in Michigan. The fight didn’t get much press—Leon’s mythic status had eroded along with his reflexes.
“[At the weigh-in] Leon wasn’t dressed too good,” Porter recalls. “He had on some wrinkled pants and an old sweater with the sleeves cut off it. And a shoe with a hole. I really felt sorry for him. The shoe was worn out on the side and there was a big hole. I’m like, man, my god, former world champion. I’ve been poor all my life, money comes and money goes, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a hole [like that] in my shoe.”
It turned out that Porter—who’d lost his previous nine fights—was too much for Leon. Porter remembers being surprised at how easy it was to outpoint the former champ. “I did a couple of windmills with the right hand and hit him with the left hook. I did a couple of windmills with the left and hit him with the right. I tricked him a lot. I saw blood coming out of his mouthpiece. He was pissed.”
Those who cared about Leon begged him to quit, but he kept fighting. He kayoed Kevin Poindexter, a professional leather-eater who’d lost eleven of fourteen fights, and then couldn’t get by James Wilder, another perpetual loser with a 2–34–1 record. Leon’s friends argued that the boxing authorities should not have sanctioned the fights. Leon’s managers and promoters countered that Leon had passed every physical and neurological exam in the book—and that he needed the paydays to survive.
Jackie Kallen, who witnessed it all as a friend to Leon, says, “[Leon] is an example of boxing when they use and abuse a fighter for his name and he’s not in any shape to be really fighting. You didn’t have to be a licensed psychiatrist, psychologist, or neurologist to know that this man should not be in the boxing ring. All they had to do was have him count backwards from one hundred or ask him to do patty-cake, patty-cake, baker’s man, and they’d see that there was something not quite right.”
In 1994, after Caluwaert hopped off Leon’s caravan of managers, Charles Farrell hopped on. The ex-gambler from Boston figured he could do what his predecessors couldn’t: reestablish Leon as a marketable entity. Farrell put Leon in against Eddie Curry, a ring veteran who’d managed only four wins in his previous eighteen matches.
Farrell says, “Eddie Curry was a kind of dive artist, so you could expect him to lose if you paid him to lose. [I didn’t pay him because] it didn’t occur to me that Leon would lose. I didn’t realize how diminished Leon was. Leon got banged around and I wound up engineering a win for him, making a deal that got him a win out of a loss.”
Here’s how it happened: After beating Leon for eight rounds in sweltering heat in Raleigh, North Carolina, Curry was awarded a lopsided decision—but Farrell knew Leon needed the victory. Earlier in the evening, he had noticed a typo on the posters in the arena—the signs were mistakenly promoting the eight-round fight as a ten-rounder. He approached Curry’s cornerman, Bobby Mitchell. (Mitchell was later sentenced to thirty-seven months in prison for bribing opponents of Richie Melito Jr.)
“I had done business with Mitchell before,” Farrell explains, “so I said, ‘Look, it’s a ten-round fight and it has to keep going to ten rounds. That’s what people paid for.’ But Eddie Curry wouldn’t fight. He’s one of these guys that gets paid by the round, so he cut off his gloves. I kept saying, ‘You got one minute, this is a ten-round fight.’
“Finally, Mitchell says, ‘I see what you’re doing here. Can we take care of this in the back?’
“I said, ‘Sure, we can take care of it anywhere you want.’
“And someone said, ‘The decision’s [already] been announced.’
“I said it’s been announced to three hundred people. It’s nothing. So let’s fix it. So we did. [We agreed on] a TKO win for Leon in the ninth. And that’s what I was told would go into the record books.”
The fight actually shows up in most record books as a win via disqualification, but regardless of how it’s registered, the added victory did nothing to advance Leon’s cause.
Leon then chose to take a fight with Shane Sutcliffe, a matchup strongly opposed by Farrell. According to Farrell, once he saw Leon’s performance against Curry, he’d never have “willingly put Leon in with anybody that could punch back.”
Farrell’s instincts proved to be correct. Leon kissed Sutcliffe’s fists for eight rounds and lost a lopsided decision.
Farrell figured he could undo the loss by setting up an easy victory against John Carlo, a gym rat who’d never set foot in a professional boxing ring. In Farrell’s view Carlo was an ideal opponent for Leon. Not only was the thirty-three-year-old willing to risk getting in the ring with the ex-champ, but he also looked the part of a legit boxer. He stood just under six-two and weighed a convincing 210. The only issue was sanctioning the mismatch, but Farrell got it by the lax D.C. commission by fabricating a record of 11–2–1 for Carlo.
“I figured I had nothing to lose,” Carlo says. “If I lost to Leon Spinks, who was an ex–world champ, it would be more of an honor just to fight him.”
The night before the fight, Farrell told a jittery Carlo not to worry about getting hurt because he’d never know what hit him.
Farrell recalls, “I said, ‘The bell is gonna ring and there’s gonna be a rush of adrenalin and within about thirty seconds you’re gonna be exhausted. And Leon’s gonna knock you out.’ And then I
said, ‘If you can beat him, beat him, because it means he shouldn’t be in the ring with anybody.’ Famous last words.”
One minute and nine seconds into the fight, Leon was flat on his back. The former champ hadn’t fired off a single punch.
“I went out and jabbed,” Carlo says, “and I noticed that he went to block it. So I faked the jab and threw a hook and it landed right on his jaw. It was so quick. He went down right away. I only threw three punches.”
Farrell now admits to some regret. “I guess you would have to say I’m sorry I put him in [against Carlo] because, as his manager, my primary responsibility is to keep the fighter safe,” he says, “and my secondary responsibility is to get him paid. It was bad judgment on my part because I didn’t know how far gone he was.
“[If I had it to do again,] I would have fixed the fight. I would have not have missed that last step. Because I could have then put him in a fight where he wouldn’t have gotten hurt, where he would actually have gotten paid. It might have helped his life a little bit. He was beyond being trained. He was way beyond doing real gym work.”
It was true that Leon needed a payday, but at the rate he burned through money, he would have had to fight every twenty-four hours. It took him only one evening to go through the fifteen hundred dollars he’d earned against Carlo.
“One of the truisms about fighters is that they always have their hand out,” Farrell claims. “I do not blame them for that. They’re an incredibly disenfranchised group. If they don’t look out for themselves, there’s a very good chance that nobody will look out for them.
“[After the Carlo fight,] I’m sitting in the lobby of the hotel where Leon is staying and I’m taking care of some business. And Leon came up to us—he’s a very shy person—and he wanted to know if he could enter our space. We talked alone for a couple of minutes, and as he’s leaving, he says, ‘Can I get some money?’ And I said, ‘Sure, what do you need?’ I’m thinking a couple hundred dollars, maybe five hundred. And he says, ‘Can I get five dollars for a sandwich?’