One Punch from the Promised Land

by John Florio

  “He talks about what he needs. That’s it. He needed to get something to eat; he didn’t have the money. That’s what he wanted. It doesn’t occur to him to make more of his situation than he perceives it to be.”

  Leon felt Carlo had gotten lucky and asked Farrell to pursue a rematch, but Farrell refused, advising Leon to retire. “He had no business fighting anybody,” Farrell says. “He was knocked out, essentially, by one punch. He should not have been in the ring.”

  But that didn’t stop Leon. Eight months later St. Louis attorney and boxing promoter Steve Frank arranged a bout at a country-and-western bar called Little Bit of Texas. It was a far cry from Vegas. The ring was set up on a dance floor usually occupied by line-dancers and two-steppers. The mechanical bull rested silently in the corner. The sign over the ring read NO SPURS ALLOWED.

  In the hopes of protecting Leon, Frank had scoured the town for an über-unworthy opponent. He’d decided on the bar’s bouncer, a blond-haired, mullet-wearing thirty-three-year-old lug named Ray Kipping. Like Carlo, Kipping fit the bill—he stood six-four, weighed 220, and couldn’t fight a lick. His pro record, if you could call it that, was 1–2–1.

  Steve Frank recalls, “I want to promote my fight, so I call up [Tom Wheatley, boxing writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch] and I say, ‘Leon’s gonna fight Ray Kipping for the IBA championship, the International Boxing Association. Kipping’s record is 32–2 with twenty-eight KOs.’ I made [the whole thing] up. So Jon Saraceno stopped off at the airport, bought a Post-Dispatch, and reads about the fight. So he puts it in his column in USA Today. So I had a belt made and Leon [fought for] the belt.”

  Knowing Leon’s appetite for booze, drugs, and self-destruction, Frank tried his best to keep Leon on the straight and narrow. He put Leon’s son Darrell on the undercard, matching him up against the eminently beatable Earl Abernathy. It would be Darrell’s third pro fight, the first of which had been a four-round decision over the same Earl Abernathy.

  Frank figured he was handing Darrell an easy victory and hoping, in exchange, that the younger Spinks would keep an eye on his wayward father. This soon proved to be a farcical plan when, according to Frank (but denied by Darrell), Frank brought his promoter-friend Ray Sepulveda to Darrell’s hotel room to introduce the two before the fight.

  “It’s four-thirty and we go to Darrell’s room,” Frank recalls. “The door was partly open. There’s no answer but we hear someone in there. So I push the door open. [Darrell’s] having sex with a girl, and, I mean, slamming this girl. I said, ‘Darrell, what the fuck are you doing?’

  “And he doesn’t break stride. ‘What’s up, Steve?’

  “Ray Sepulveda’s jaw is on the ground. He’s like, ‘What the hell?!’

  “I say, ‘Darrell, I want you to meet Ray Sepulveda.’ Then Ray says, ‘Excuse me if I don’t want to shake your hand.’

  “It’s awkward, so I say, ‘Is there anything I can get you?’

  “He orders a cheeseburger. And he’s still having sex. And then he asks [the girl] if she wants anything. And she orders fries.”

  According to Frank, the incident was merely the beginning of his troubles that evening. A half hour later he learned that the Spinks-Kipping fight was in jeopardy.

  “At five o’clock somebody called [the state commission] and said Leon’s punch drunk,” Frank remembers. “So Butch Wilkinson from the commission says, ‘I’m told Leon can’t fight.’

  “I said, ‘My brother [neurophysiologist Bennett Frank] examined him.’ So Wilkinson says, ‘We need a written statement notarized.’ But my brother was at my cousin’s funeral.

  “We reached an agreement. The fight was [shortened] to eight rounds and fought with sixteen-ounce gloves. Sparring gloves.”

  That doesn’t sway Jackie Kallen. “They put him out like a circus performer,” she says, “and I thought it was so cruel, because if there’s any doubt, the man’s over forty years old. Look at his record—he’s been knocked out nine or ten times. For what reason? Your brother’s the doctor? He approved it? The whole thing was shameful.”

  “I’ll put my brother’s credentials against anybody’s in the country,” Frank responds. “He gave Leon an extremely thorough exam. He said there’s a slight tremor in his hand that’s probably related to boxing, but he’s fine. Leon’s problem at the time was his drinking. I truly, truly believed that Leon was not in any danger. I think the damage was already done with all those years of drinking and drugs, and taking fights without training against really good fighters.”

  Leon beat Kipping in a unanimous decision. According to Marty Bickle, who judged the fight, it was a “typical Leon maul-and-brawl fight,” and the norm for “somebody at the end of their career.”

  “Let’s put it this way,” Bickle says now, “when the fight was over, both fighters were verrrry tired.”

  Ray Kipping says, “Physically, [Leon’s] body was OK, but his head wasn’t. Even before the fight, he talked funny. I wanted a rematch but I was told he was too sick.”

  After the fight Steve Frank paid Leon five thousand dollars—the $2,500 purse plus an additional $2,500 in cash.

  “I bet you that money was gone before I left the building,” Frank says. “[Leon] would just give his money away.”

  Six months later, on December 4, 1995, Frank promoted Leon’s final bout, an eight-round slopfest against Fred Houpe, a onetime hopeful who’d been away from the ring for seventeen years. Again, the fight was held at Little Bit of Texas, and again Frank wasn’t able to stop Leon from being Leon.

  Frank recalls, “I put him up at the Harley Hotel a few days before the fight. The area was foreign to Leon and I knew that if I cut off the phone, there was no way he would escape. At four o’clock I went into his room. It smelled like marijuana and he was drinking a beer. I’m 99 percent sure that in both of the fights I promoted, Leon went into the ring messed up. He’d had something to drink and I know that he was smoking.”

  An impaired Leon had no chance against Houpe and lost a unanimous decision.

  “At the end there, he could be knocked out fairly easily,” Jackie Kallen remembers. “I think a lot of it was the alcohol too. His balance was gone and his reflexes were shot. I cringed anytime I saw his name on a list of fights. I think if the promoter was a kind guy, he would’ve had him sign autographs and make an appearance and give him a thousand dollars rather than put him in the ring. What kinds of ethics does a person display?”

  Many boxing insiders agree that Kallen makes some valid points—there’s no doubt that aging fighters are pushing their luck any time they step into the ring. But the same insiders say that all managers, Kallen included, will continue to put fighters in the ring well past their prime, especially if the fighter has passed a neurological exam and the fight appears to be evenly matched. It is, after all, what they do for a living.

  In Leon’s case his small circle of friends and family had tried telling him that his skills were gone and that taking beatings from the likes of Eddie Curry and Fred Houpe was a sure sign to retire. He ignored them. And he wound up paying the price.

  After Leon’s last fight his health deteriorated so badly that it became evident on neurological exams, in physical tests, and to the naked eye.

  Betty Spinks says, “Lee was dragging his leg, falling, and getting lost. His father called and asked me if Lee had a stroke. I took him to the doctor and had tests done. He’d had no stroke. They said he had memory loss. They said it’s from the boxing, but the alcohol is making it worse. Dementia is setting in. So my son and I bought boots to support his ankle. We couldn’t even leave him home by himself. He’d fall through glass tables. He’d lose his keys.”

  Two years later, in 1997, while still married to Betty and maintaining an apartment in Chicago, Leon wandered back to his old neighborhood in St. Louis. At the age of forty-three, he was back where he’d started: a short walk from Kenny Loehr’s gym—and a shorter walk to the overgrown lot where Pruitt-Igoe once stood.

  The
re, New York Daily News reporter Wayne Coffey found him living in a homeless shelter. Leon explained his situation by saying that he preferred to stay in St. Louis.

  Leon told Coffey, “Everybody [in Chicago] is too busy criticizing me for what I’ve been through and what I did. They tear you down about what you should have been.”

  For $4.75 an hour, Leon was sweeping the aisles of Kiel Auditorium, the downtown arena where boxing fans had stood on a spring night in 1977 cheering their young hometown hero as he raised his arms in triumph over the fallen Pedro Agosto one minute and fifty-five seconds after the opening bell.

  Jesse Davison, Leon’s boyhood pal, spotted him one day in June. “I saw him sweeping the floor. He looked at me and said, ‘Hey Jesse, what’s goin’ on?’ I said, ‘Leon, you made millions and you sweepin’ the floor?’ I had tears in my eyes when I saw that. It shocked me. I thought, damn, he’s come a long way. Amazing. God can bring you up and bring you back down if you don’t do it right.”

  Michael, on the other hand, couldn’t have been farther from the war zone that had led him to God, boxing, and ultimately, riches. He was halfway across the country, partying with Denzel Washington, Joe Frazier, and three hundred other VIPs at Butch Lewis’s oceanfront mansion in the Delaware resort of Bethany Beach. It was the start of a three-day bash celebrating Lewis’s fiftieth birthday. James Brown sang. Bobby Womack followed. A “Big 50” birthday message streaked across the soft evening sky, courtesy of BET founder Robert L. Johnson. Delaware Governor Thomas Carper signed a proclamation declaring a statewide Butch Lewis Day. Rumor was that the party cost more than half a million dollars.

  It was hard to look at Michael without comparing his and Leon’s journeys.

  Butch Lewis told the New Orleans Times-Picayune, “I know I could have made Leon upwards of fifty million [dollars] if he had disciplined himself and done the right things for four or five years. A lot of people felt that [Michael] had less talent. One took one fork in the road; one took the other.”

  But while Lewis spoke of the riches Leon might have earned at the top of the fight game, the bigger question may be whether Leon would have been better off if he’d never climbed the mountain at all—if he would have had a happier life just being Leon, instead of “the guy who beat Muhammad Ali.”

  “He got lucky with the one fight with Ali,” Jackie Kallen says, “and I think it turned out to be the worst thing that ever happened to him. You beat the greatest. People expect that you’re the greatest now, and he could never fill those shoes. When you’ve been to the top of the mountain and the whole rest of your life you’re sliding down, that’s really difficult.”

  In the end the heavyweight title had broken its promise to Leon—much as it had to Joe Louis and, yes, even Muhammad Ali. It made him rich for a while, but it’s hard to say that a forty-three-year-old ex-fighter with nothing to show for his career other than dementia and a minimum-wage job could look at his rusty championship belt and say thank you.

  18

  BOXING HAS SPIT OUT A LONG LIST OF FIGHTERS THAT HAVE STUCK around too long. Michael Spinks wasn’t one of them. At thirty-two he walked out of the ring—and stayed out.

  On June 12, 1994, when Michael was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York, he became the youngest fighter in history to earn boxing immortality. Addressing the more than two thousand fans who attended the ceremony, he was, as always, a man of few words. Many of them were directed at Butch Lewis.

  “Thank you,” he told the crowd, which included Lewis and Leon. “I’d just like to say that it’s been one heck of a weekend, a very special weekend for me and a very special weekend for my crew that I shared my career with. I take into the Boxing Hall of Fame Butch Lewis and Butch Lewis Productions. I take into the Boxing Hall of Fame with me all the people all over the world that prayed for my well-being. I thank God for everything that he has allowed to happen in my life. And I also thank you beautiful people of Canastota. May God bless you all.”

  The bond between Michael and Lewis extended through July 23, 2011, when Michael received word that his friend, partner, and surrogate father was gone. Butch Lewis had died of a heart attack at his home in Bethany Beach. With the death of his mother Kay thirteen years earlier, Michael had now lost the two people he trusted the most.

  A memorial for Lewis was held at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware, drawing a standing-room-only crowd of more than a thousand grieving friends and family members. The lineup of mourners was a testament to Lewis’s influence. Denzel Washington paid his respects, as did Morgan Freeman, Queen Latifah, Mike Tyson, Robert L. Johnson, and a roster of Delaware businessmen and politicians. The service lasted three and a half hours and ended with a twenty-five-minute performance by Stevie Wonder, who tweaked his famous hit and sang, “Here he is, Father. Signed, sealed, delivered, he’s yours.”

  Michael wept as Lewis’s body was loaded into a horse-drawn carriage to be brought to its final resting place.

  “He helped me stay in the game,” Michael told the Wilmington News Journal. “I wouldn’t have been able to do it without him. He was a very unique individual and very special to me. We got together; it was like a marriage. We were both married to our jobs, but we were together.”

  Less than two weeks after Lewis’s death, Michael’s health coverage lapsed. He soon discovered that none of his monthly bills were being paid. For more than two decades, Lewis had lived up to his side of their agreement and managed Michael’s finances. Now, with Lewis gone, Michael’s money appeared to be gone, as well.

  Confused, Michael made a desperate call to the one person he thought would have some answers: his friend from Butch Lewis Productions, Amelia Patterson.

  “What happened to my money?” he asked in quiet desperation.

  It was the middle of the night, but Patterson wasn’t put off by the call. In fact, she’d been expecting it.

  “Butch must’ve spent it all,” she told him.

  Michael didn’t say a word. But he also didn’t hang up. He just stayed on the open line, processing Patterson’s response in silence.

  Understandably, he was shell-shocked. But it was all coming together. How else had Lewis paid for a mansion, oceanfront property, a purple Bentley, and extravagant birthday bashes?

  “[Butch] did not have the kind of resources or money to afford his type of lifestyle,” Patterson explains. “He was wining and dining Bob Johnson of BET, hanging out with Denzel Washington, presidents of banks. He had some other businesses—he produced a show on BET, he had invested in BET—but I really don’t believe that he was generating the kind of income that afforded him his grandiose lifestyle. I knew one day it was gonna happen. Sooner or later it would reveal itself.”

  Lewis’s friends, including the co-executor of his estate, Robert L. Johnson, insist that Lewis always had Michael’s best interests in mind. Yet Michael had earned more than $25 million in his career, and Lewis’s entire estate was worth only $8.5 million. To Michael, it seemed that his fortune was no more real than the bogus rings Lewis had once sold on Market Street. Except for a single retirement account worth about $2.5 million, none of Michael’s earnings had been earmarked for his old age.

  Apparently, as wary as Michael had been, he’d still wound up wearing the same shoes as the parade of champions who’d come before him. Lewis’s betrayal stung even more because Michael had trusted him with everything.

  Patterson says, “I used to wonder if I [should tell] Slim, ‘You’re gonna have to do x, y, and z. You’re gonna have to file a suit against the estate, as much as you probably don’t want to.’ The kind of loyalty that Slim had with Butch is unheard of. Even talking to [Slim] on the phone when he’s questioning me about his money, he still couldn’t believe that Butch did this. And he still couldn’t say anything bad about Butch. That’s incredible love and loyalty.”

  But even Michael’s loyalty had its limits. On October 13, 2011, he went ahead and filed a lawsuit against Lewis’s estate. The promoter’s w
ill provided a minimum of one million dollars to each of his three children, Sita, Brandon, and Ronald Jr.; $104,000 to a fourth child, Kevin Mosley; $50,000 to each of his four grandchildren; and $52,000 to each of five other relatives. But it contained no provision for Michael.

  The lawsuit charged that Lewis had engaged in “fraudulent, unfair, and unconscionable” conduct by “commingling and mishandling” Michael’s earnings; it also charged that Lewis had taken custody of four hundred tapes of Michael’s fights, six championship belts, and a full-length mink coat.

  More than a year later, in November 2012, Michael’s attorney reached a settlement with Lewis’s estate. Although the terms of the agreement were confidential, it was made public that Michael would be able to meet his monthly bills and continue to live in his home.

  “It was unfortunate that Butch’s early death took place. It prevented him from doing everything he would’ve done for Michael had he lived,” Robert L. Johnson says. “And he always, as far as I was concerned, always had Michael’s well-being forefront in his mind.”

  If Lewis could speak from the hereafter, he’d probably say he had every intention of continuing to pay Michael’s bills, and if the money ran out, he would have found a way to continue fulfilling his obligation to Michael.

  He’d probably also say that he left his fighter in better financial shape than most ex-champions find themselves. And in that he’d be right. Especially if one were to compare Michael to his brother.

  Nevada, 2013. At age fifty-nine Leon struggles through daily life. Dementia has dulled his memory, garbled his gravelly speech, and reduced his gait to a rickety, lopsided hobble.

  He is part of an ongoing study at the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center in Las Vegas. There, doctors are examining the brains of boxers and mixed-martial-arts fighters. There’s no shortage of irony in the fact that the Nevada State Athletic Commission and Top Rank Boxing—two entities that could be considered complicit in Leon’s demise—are championing the study. Charles Bernick, the neurologist heading up the study, has been quoted as saying that science “has known for years that boxers—perhaps twenty to fifty percent of boxers who’ve fought professionally—will develop longterm brain complications.” Those complications include early-onset dementia, Alzheimer’s, and Muhammad Ali’s insidious opponent, Parkinson’s disease. Bernick and his team can no longer help Leon, Ali, or their contemporaries, although they hope to identify early warning signs that could benefit young fighters before it’s too late.