One Punch from the Promised Land

by John Florio

  Noble lived 1,225 miles away, so the two lovebirds didn’t lay eyes on each other for months. Through frequent phone calls and letters, Leon was able to find out all about Noble. She came from only slightly better circumstances than he did, she was the eldest of nine children, and she carried the weight of knowing that her mother had served eight months in prison for stabbing her father to death.

  Leon finally met Noble face-to-face in the spring of 1974. She was hardly in as good shape as Leon—who was?—but she did stand taller than his six-foot-one stature, if you included her bleached Afro. Leon was smitten.

  By then Noble had changed her name to Nova (“It represents not the car, but a new star,” she told Jet magazine). On May 21, 1974, she changed it again—this time to Nova Spinks—when the bride and groom exchanged their vows in Des Moines.

  Leon was visibly shaking. He was obviously more nervous than he’d ever been stepping into a boxing ring.

  The preacher turned to Leon. “What do you have to give this woman?”

  Leon hesitated. “My life,” he said.

  Nova elbowed him in the side. “The ring, Lee. The ring.”

  Leon then delivered on both counts: He handed Nova a ring and his life.

  Within weeks Leon, Nova, and Nova’s six-year-old son, Charles, moved into Tarawa Terrace, a housing complex on the base. The marriage was anything but smooth. Nova was convinced the Spinks family didn’t like her because she wore too much makeup. It’s nearly impossible to substantiate or refute her claim, but it’s noteworthy that, years later, Nova made similar accusations about Top Rank, the company that promoted Leon’s early fights. “[They] told me I looked whorish and warned me that white people don’t take to black people with blonde hair,” she told People magazine. “They all make me think negatively about myself.”

  Leon may have been Nova’s husband but he wasn’t around often enough to boost her confidence. He continued to spend time at the bar or in a boxing ring, leaving Nova at home with Charles.

  This was old hat to Leon. He had already fathered two sons—Little Leon and Darrell—who were back in St. Louis with their mother, Zadie Mae Calvin. Just as the eldest Leon had been a teenage father and largely absent from his children’s lives, so too was Leon.

  Yet when the Olympic trials started, Nova gave Leon what he wasn’t able to give to her or to Zadie Mae: a voice of encouragement. She repeatedly built Leon up and was persistent enough to drown out the echo of Leon’s father telling him he’d never amount to much.

  “You can be anything you want to be,” she told Leon. And she was right. She just never realized he wanted to be a champion, not a husband.

  3

  THE MID-1970S WERE THE GLORY DAYS OF AMATEUR BOXING. Picture a band of hopefuls with names like Thomas Hearns, Sugar Ray Leonard, Michael Dokes, and Aaron Pryor traveling the globe in hopes of winning Olympic gold.

  How did America’s talent pool get so deep? One theory could be called the Muhammad Ali effect. The champion’s ring style was so infectious that mini-Alis cropped up in YMCAs and rec centers from Bed-Stuy to East L.A. AAU and Golden Gloves tournaments were flooded with Ali look-alikes, dance-alikes, and brag-alikes in every weight class.

  Award-winning sports journalist Robert Lipsyte says, “By the time that Michael and Leon are heading toward the Olympics, Ali is at the absolute crest of his popularity. He was by all means the boxing role model, the last great heavyweight champion. I don’t mean strictly as a boxer. I mean, with all the role model accolades of what that really once meant. It must have been an enormously exciting time for the Spinks boys. Ali had won a gold medal in the Olympics as a light heavyweight. In a sense, they were following in his footsteps.”

  Some ring insiders believe America’s newfound grit wasn’t found in its larger-than-life champion, but in the unassuming figure of Rolly Schwartz, a retired Army major who’d become a prominent fixture on the amateur boxing scene. Schwartz had officiated at the 1968 and 1972 Olympics and at six Pan Am Games, and was credited with bringing about new international rules, including one that required amateur boxers to wear protective headgear. Schwartz was tired of seeing the Americans come out on the losing end. In the previous three Olympics, the United States had won only four gold medals, half as many as the Soviet Union, which was considered the world’s amateur powerhouse. When recruiting talent for the 1976 team, Schwartz set up matches in Eastern Europe to expose inexperienced American boxers to international styles.

  Three-time All Army champion Charles Mooney remembers traveling where other US amateur teams had rarely ventured. “I guess parts of Russia hadn’t seen that many black people. And especially with Michael Spinks wearing that big cowboy hat, they couldn’t take their eyes off him. We went downtown to look for some gifts and stuff, and a little boy came up to me and touched my hair. In the lobby the whole front window would be filled with people looking at this black boxing team.”

  In March of 1976 Leon and Michael arrived at the Olympic trials in Cincinnati, Ohio. They were among eighty-eight boxers competing for eleven spots on the US team. Michael, six-two and fighting as a middleweight, was in peak form and sailed through the early rounds. In the finals he outpointed four-time All Navy champion Keith Broom to win a lopsided decision and capture the middleweight spot. Leon, fighting as a light-heavyweight, advanced with three straight knockouts before squeaking by John Davis in the final qualifying bout.

  Boasting what Rolly Schwartz called “chins of granite,” Leon and Michael became the first pair of brothers to make the US Olympic team since the trials began in 1904.

  The other slots on the team would be filled by light flyweight Louis Curtis, flyweight Leo Randolph, bantamweight Charles Mooney, featherweight Davey Armstrong, lightweight Howard Davis, light welterweight Sugar Ray Leonard, welterweight Clint Jackson, light middleweight Chuck Walker, and heavyweight John Tate.

  However, given Olympic protocol, none of the eleven fighters would officially become Olympians until they confirmed their spots on the team by winning a double-elimination box-off, which was to be held in Burlington, Vermont. The rules of the box-off were simple: Each winner of the Olympic trials had to defeat his runner-up one more time. He’d be given two chances; if he failed, he’d forfeit his slot on the team.

  Schwartz’s rules were equally straightforward: “No smoking. No booze. No babes.” The idea was to instill in his young fighters discipline, hard work, and commitment—and to convince them that they could win. Schwartz himself had high hopes, declaring to the press gathered at the team’s training camp at the University of Vermont, “We have a minimum of four men who, with a good draw and fair decision, could go all the way.”

  Leon was not counted among them.

  Schwartz later told United Press International (UPI), “Leon had some personal discipline weaknesses at our Olympic training camp. Michael was the first up in the morning doing roadwork and the last out of the gym at night. But not Leon. He was the type of fellow you had to push and push hard. We were continually on Leon to get himself ready.”

  According to Charles Mooney, Schwartz was putting it mildly. “Team coach Pat Nappi was gonna send him home,” he says. “But there was a big [discussion] about that because it was the first time two brothers had been in the Olympics together. So that didn’t happen.”

  Most of the boxers shared sleeping quarters, so they got to know one another’s idiosyncrasies. “We had fourteen of us in one huge room,” teammate Howard Davis says. “I happened to be laying down in a cot next to Michael and Leon. They shared a bunk: Leon was on the top, Michael was on the bottom. They would watch TV until the wee hours of the morning. And I liked going to bed early because I got up at 5:30 to do my roadwork. So this one particular night, they were watching a movie and they were laughing and I kept tossing and turning. After about fifteen, twenty minutes I said, ‘You guys, man, you’re incredible. You’re at the Olympics, not many guys make it here.’ And Leon says, ‘Shut up, you little lightweight.’ And I said, He’s ri
ght, I am a lightweight. So just based upon poundage, I shut up. Ray Leonard was the captain of the team and he had his own room. I eventually ended up there because I couldn’t take Leon and Michael laughing and talking all night long.”

  The Spinkses’ antics extended from bedroom to bathroom. “To go to the bathroom, you had to go down to the basement from our dorms,” Davis says. “I’m at the urinal and I see Leon come in. I’m from Glen Cove, Long Island, a really honest kid and sort of naive, and I’m looking at him and he’s putting water all over his sweat suit and his face, and then it dawned on me: He’s coming in from being out all night and wants to make the coach think he just got in from running.

  “There was definitely some destructive behavior on Leon’s part that didn’t fit in with boxing. You can’t drink, you can’t party, or shouldn’t, because it’s bound to catch up. I can’t remember anyone else on the team doing it. Leon loved to fight, but he didn’t enjoy the rigors of training. One night he came in around one or two and I asked him where he’d come from. And he said, ‘I was at a discotheque.’ He was incredible. I don’t know how he could muster up the strength to fight. But he was one of those rare individuals that had that I-don’t-care attitude, I’m gonna fight no matter what. I truly believe if you put him in a cage to fight a lion, he would actually fight that lion.”

  “Even after he did all that [partying], you couldn’t tell when he got into the ring,” teammate Leo Randolph says. “It was a whole different person come about. That killer instinct that they say develops in a boxer, he had it. He’d get into the ring and just start wailing on the guy.”

  Despite his penchant for extracurricular activities, Leon scored a decisive victory against John Davis in the box-off. Michael lost a 4–1 decision to Keith Broom in their first box-off competition but survived the second with a first-round TKO.

  When the team broke training camp on July 10, all eleven trials winners had preserved their slots on the Olympic team.

  Next stop, Montreal.

  On July 17, 1976, the Summer Olympics kicked off with its opening spectacle. Under the gaze of Queen Elizabeth II, the parade of athletes and team officials—nearly nine thousand representing ninety-three countries—went off without a hitch. But in the days to follow, twenty-eight African nations, and a few additional countries, boycotted the Games in protest of New Zealand’s inclusion. The issue had arisen earlier in the year when New Zealand’s rugby team toured South Africa, which had been banned from the Olympics since 1964.

  The diminished competition did little to raise hopes for the American boxing team. Most experts agreed that the United States was no match for the Russians or the Cubans.

  “We knew that we were up against maturity and experience,” Olympic coach Pat Nappi told Sports Illustrated at the time. “Our kids would be out-experienced ten to one. When a man becomes a champion in an Iron Curtain country, you can bet he’s good. Look at Russia. The last time I was there, in 1971, they had 480,000 amateur fighters. We had ten thousand.”

  To give their kids a fighting chance, Nappi and Schwartz studied their opponents and searched for their weaknesses. They analyzed films of previous bouts and assembled a playbook to combat the more experienced Eastern Europeans, who routinely trained eleven months a year. As Schwartz told the press, “Our guys have to use a little strategy, a little pizzazz. That’s the only way to beat them.”

  “We had different styles, so we played different [training] games,” Charles Mooney says. “Pat Nappi would have us open the gap and close the gap. He would show us how to move and punch. And then if we were aggressive, we had to know how to cut the ring off.”

  The team—eleven fighters and three supervisors—was housed in a small apartment at Olympic Village. Schwartz felt that living with his team in cramped quarters enabled him to key in on what made his fighters tick. The arrangement also made for a tight-knit unit wherein the guys formed close friendships, watched one another’s bouts, and cheered one another on.

  The strategies and accommodations seemed to work, because the team looked strong right from the opening bell. Nine of the eleven fighters blew through the first round. When it was Leon’s turn, he chased Morocco’s Abdellatif Fatihi around the ring, putting on a fireworks show that thrilled the 6,400 fans packed into Maurice Richard Arena. He overwhelmed Fatihi from the start and finished him with one second left in the first round. After the bout Leon was chased by so many autograph seekers that it took him and Michael nearly twenty minutes to walk the short distance from the arena to their apartment.

  Michael had benefited from a bye in the first round and a walkover in the second as a result of the boycott. When he finally got into the ring, in the quarterfinals, he barely broke a sweat—demolishing Poland’s Ryszard Pasiewicz with the biggest lopsided decision in the first eleven days of competition.

  In Leon’s quarterfinal match, “The Wild Bull of Camp Lejeune” knocked down East Germany’s Ottomar Sachse shortly after the opening bell and then pelted him with a hailstorm of rights and lefts for the remainder of the fight. The only hiccup came when the Tunisian referee took a point away from Leon for talking back on a caution. When Leon came back out for the announcement of the decision, he was wearing a red and white Scottish cap. The referee promptly pulled it off his head and threw it into Leon’s corner, which only made Leon more of a crowd favorite.

  By the time the semifinals came around, Louis Curtis, Davey Armstrong, Clint Jackson, and Chuck Walker were spectators. The Americans’ biggest surprise happened when twenty-one-year-old truck driver “Big” John Tate defeated his first two opponents. But his luck came to an end when, in the semis, he was kissed by a picture-perfect right hand attached to the arm of Cuba’s invincible Teófilo Stevenson.

  Also in the semis, Michael won by walkover when Romania’s Alec Nastac failed his prefight physical; he then watched as Leon easily defeated Poland’s Janusz Gortat.

  Six Americans—Randolph, Mooney, Davis, Leonard, and Leon and Michael—had reached the finals, giving the US boxing team its best Olympic showing since 1904.

  After the semis team captain Sugar Ray Leonard spoke to UPI: “[This] shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. It’s really beautiful. Every boxer on the team deserves it… the simple reason is we stick together, we train hard, we sacrifice a lot, and we’re the most beautiful people in the world.”

  Nobody was more in tune with the merits of Schwartz’s team than ABC boxing announcer Howard Cosell. Throughout the Games, he’d been urging Roone Arledge, the head of ABC Sports, to pay more attention to America’s upstart boxers.

  Terry Jastrow, Cosell’s producer at the Olympics, was caught in the middle. “[Howard’s] talking on a headset to me and I’m in the mobile unit underneath the arena with Roone Arledge,” he recalls. “Roone was busy with gymnastics and track-and-field and there Howard was in the arena screaming at me, ‘Tell Arledge that nobody gives a shit about gymnastics. The story is the American boxing team. Have him come immediately to the Maurice Richard Arena!’ After a day or two, he would say, ‘Put me on with Roone, I want to talk to Roone.’

  “Roone would say, ‘Howard is myopic. The boxing team may be great, but it’s only one story and at any one moment there’s twelve interesting stories.’ And [fourteen-year-old Romanian gymnast] Nadia Comaneci was capturing the heart of the Americans up close and personal.

  “Finally, Roone sort of capitulated. It was a combination of Howard’s pressure and the fact that the Americans were undeniably winning round after round in all the weight categories that boxing got a disproportionate amount of coverage. [Howard] considered this team his boys. When they won, he won. It was personal to him. I was his producer for fifteen, eighteen years, and I never saw him happier. It was a quiet, happy, personal satisfaction, personal joy.”

  Cosell used his airtime to captivate viewers around the world with stories of the fighters’ personal lives. No story was more compelling than that of Howard Davis, the twenty-year-old from Long Island who had been school
ed in the ring by his father, a former boxer, and who’d beaten Thomas Hearns and Aaron Pryor on his way to Montreal. Two days before the opening ceremonies, Davis’s thirty-seven-year-old mother, Catherine, died of a sudden heart attack. A grieving Davis was ready to give up his Olympic dream and fly home to be with his family, but Howard Davis Sr. and the team’s assistant coach, Sarge Johnson, convinced him to stay and fight to honor his mother’s memory.

  What Davis’s story had in pathos, Sugar Ray Leonard’s had in sizzle. The twenty-year-old Leonard was a ready-made media darling: He was handsome, talented, and arrived in Montreal complete with a catchy nickname. Television viewers heard of the love poems he wrote to his girlfriend, Juanita, and of the good-luck charm he had taped to his sock: a photo of Juanita and their three-year-old son Ray Leonard Jr. America pulled for the wholesome fighter who dreamt of attending college after the Olympics.

  Cosell also talked up eighteen-year-old Leo Randolph, the youngest and smallest member of the team. A devout Christian, Randolph had come up through the Boys Club in Tacoma, Washington. Until Cosell shared it on the air, nobody knew that he and Davey Armstrong had been sneaking food out of the Olympic Village cafeteria and bringing it to their coach, Joe Clough, who’d hitchhiked 2,700 miles to Montreal and was camped out in a local church.

  At age twenty-five Charles Mooney was the team’s senior citizen. An Army sergeant with a wife and young son, Mooney had come to Montreal from his station in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Mooney had become his own brand of Cinderella. With a mere thirty-two amateur bouts under his belt, the inexperienced fighter was now within striking distance of a gold medal.

  Next to these Olympians stood Leon and Michael, the two street kids who’d fought their way out of the war zone that was Pruitt-Igoe.

  “Howard, above all else, was a champion of the underdog,” Terry Jastrow says. “And so he loved the Spinks brothers. He even loved to say their name. Michael and Leon Spinks. [He imitates Cosell by emphasizing the Sp in Spinks.] He loved their backstory. Michael and Leon were shy, not particularly intelligent or articulate, but there was a soulfulness about them. There was a humanity about them. They were the kind of athletes that Howard loved—this whole idea of them coming where they came from in St. Louis and what they had to encounter and what they had to overcome to make the Olympic team.”