One Punch from the Promised Land

by John Florio

  Cosell praised “The Wild Bull of Camp Lejeune” and spoke often of Kay Spinks, who wanted to see her Olympic sons become preachers. And America heard about the anonymous donor in St. Louis who’d read in the local paper that Kay was watching her sons on a borrowed television set and sprung for her trip to Montreal.

  In a story worthy of Hollywood, the donor told James Rogal in the Post-Dispatch, “I’ve played sports all my life and so have my kids. I can’t think of anything better than going to see my kid win a gold medal in the Olympics.”

  “God bless him,” Kay said. “This is just like getting a diamond ring. I’m just so happy, I can’t believe it.”

  When asked how he greeted his mother upon her arrival in Montreal, Michael said, “‘Hello, Mama.’ That’s all you ever say. After that, it’s ‘Uh huh and yes, ma’am.’ She can rap.”

  It was Kay’s first airplane trip and it brought her to Montreal just in time. She arrived Friday night and would see her sons and four of their teammates compete in the most important matches of their lives on the following day.

  Michael was scheduled to take on Rufat Riskiev, the same fighter who’d bested him in the Soviet Union eight months earlier.

  Leon was to fight Cuba’s Sixto Soria, a tremendous right-hand puncher touted by the media as the odds-on favorite to take home the gold.

  The Americans were underdogs. The Spinks brothers were long shots.

  Ray Sons, writing in the Chicago Daily News, was convinced that no member of the US team was in the same class as their opponents. “American boxers will step into the lion’s cage with a whip and a chair tonight in the Montreal Forum. They’ll depend on tactics and skill to win Olympic gold medals, because the big claws and teeth are on the other side.”

  Flyweight Leo Randolph went first, squaring off against the reigning Pan Am champion, Cuba’s Ramon Duvalon. Randolph earned the heavy side of a 3–2 split decision, and after receiving his gold medal, endeared himself to the television audience by telling the press he’d be home for church in the morning.

  Next up was Charles Mooney, who was due to battle North Korea’s Yong-Jo Gu. Unfortunately, Mooney was battling a case of diarrhea that left him weak and dehydrated. Still, when the final bell rang, he thought he had taken the fight from the Korean. The judges disagreed. He lost 5–0 and had to settle for the silver.

  “I felt bad that I didn’t win the gold,” Mooney says. “I already had it practiced what I was gonna do. I was gonna snap a salute as soon as the American flag came up. But I just looked at that American flag while they played the Korean music. It was a hard moment to take.”

  Next in line was Howard Davis, who seemed to channel his grief and anger into his fists. Firing his arsenal at two-time European champion Simion Cutov, Davis outboxed the Romanian so deftly that the pundits began referring to him as a miniature Ali. Davis later received the Val Barker Award as the tournament’s outstanding boxer, but he wasn’t there to accept the honor. After slipping the medal around his neck and declaring that the gold was for his mother, he left Montreal and drove home to Long Island to be with his family.

  Coming off unexpected victories by Randolph and Davis, America’s hopes for a third boxing gold medal rested with Sugar Ray Leonard. His opponent, Cuba’s Andrés Aldama, had reached the finals with five straight knockouts.

  In preparation for his match, Leonard had studied footage of Aldama. He told the Syracuse Post-Standard: “I’m sitting in this dark room watching the guy fight and I heard someone else in the room say, ‘Damn, that guy’s going to kill Sugar Ray.’”

  But Leonard felt he and his teammates had found the secret to winning, which was to keep their opponents off-balance. He followed the plan beautifully, dropping Aldama with a left to the head at 1:10 of the second round and spending the rest of the fight cruising to a unanimous decision. After the bout, as the country embraced Leonard’s plans to attend college, Sugar Ray bid one of the Olympics’s most famous farewells when he declared, “My journey has ended. My dream is fulfilled.”

  Back in St. Louis, James Caldwell was at home watching the Games. He and his buddies anxiously waited for their childhood friends to enter the ring. Michael was first.

  “Leon was a buzz saw,” Caldwell remembers. “We knew he was going to do well. We were more concerned with Michael. We were on pins and needles for his final. Will he generate enough energy?”

  Mike Tyson was a ten-year-old kid in Brownsville, Brooklyn, when he watched Michael fight for the gold.

  “The Russian guy had beaten him in the fight before,” he says. “You know what that must have felt like, going into that fight in front of all those people? This guy beat you, and normally when a Russian or a Cuban beats you, they’re gonna beat you again. When they got your number, they got your number.”

  Michael Spinks couldn’t wait to get at Riskiev. He told reporters he had done extra training in preparation. At the opening bell he uncorked laser-like two-fisted combinations, dazing Riskiev in the first round, decking him in the second, and finishing him with a cannon-shot to the gut in the third.

  “Even though I had the reach on him, he was strong—exceptionally strong,” Michael told UPI. “So I kept inside and worked on the body. I was catching him with flurries of punches every now and then and it was adding up.”

  Riskiev complained that the third-round body punch was a low blow, but his accusation went unheeded. When he couldn’t go on, it was official: Michael had won the gold and pulled off the biggest upset of the night.

  Leon was the last American to fight. Despite a spectacular performance throughout the Games, he was a huge underdog against Sixto Soria, and judging by the left hook he absorbed in the opening round of the gold-medal bout, the odds weren’t steep enough. But on this night it would take more than a mustard-packed haymaker to drop Leon. As he had vowed after losing the finals in the previous year’s Pan Am Games, “If I have to die in the ring to win the gold medal, then I’ll die.” He might well have meant it. After taking the left hook, Leon smashed the Cuban to the canvas with a succession of right hands and dropped him again in the third round. The fight was stopped.

  “Oh, man, it was phenomenal how he just dominated the fight,” teammate Leo Randolph says. “That Cuban guy was supposed to be one of the best in the world. And it was kind of comical how Leon did it. The adrenaline kicked in. The guy hit [Leon] and [Leon] said, ‘Wait a minute, this isn’t right,’ and he ran over to the guy and pounded on him.”

  Kenny Loehr, who had paid his own way to Montreal and served as Leon and Michael’s unofficial coach, recalls, “I was rubbing Leon down at ten in the morning the day he fought in the finals and he had enough alcohol coming out of his pores to knock me out. [Then] when this Cuban kid hit him, he just growled. He growled. The kid hit him with his best shot, and Leon just kept coming at him and knocked the kid out.”

  Charles Mooney knew that growl. He had heard it in an inter-services match when Leon absorbed a vicious punch that, by all rights, should have floored him. “But Leon stepped back and cleared his nose and started to fight,” he says. “That was his call sign. He would growl, and you better get out of the ring.”

  Howard Cosell was at the microphone. “[Soria] is still punching and his hands are quick. You can see it. He’s coming on! He staggered and hurt Spinks! Spinks is without boxing skills. Remarkable to see the way the Cuban is coming back. What a fight! Don’t talk to me about proficiency. Oh, the right! A sudden turn and punch! The right punched Soria flush in the face. Down he went!”

  George Foreman, ABC’s color commentator, weighed in, “Spinks isn’t a boxer, but he’s the best street fighter I’ve ever seen.”

  As the Games wrapped up and the crowds filed out of Olympic Stadium, the US boxing team had done itself proud, winning thirty-five of its forty-one matches and capturing five gold medals. Only the 1952 US team had won as much gold. As for the other standouts of the Games, Nadia Comaneci took three gold medals back to Romania; and Americans Edwin Moses
and Bruce Jenner each captured a gold medal and a world record.

  “Standing on the podium after winning was the greatest feeling you could have in the whole world,” Leo Randolph says. “You do all this preparation, you go through all these traumas of going into the valleys and tripping and falling, and you finally reach the top of the mountain. You see the flag waving and your hands go up. Hey, I did it! All the trauma and the hurt and the pain, it was all worth it.”

  Having lost out on that experience, Charles Mooney remembers the ’76 Games differently. “I was feelin’ real low. During the closing ceremonies, Leon and Michael swooped me up and we went to their coach’s hotel. I did some cryin’ and they popped me a beer and I cried some more. And they cried. Then we laughed and joked and they consoled me and it was over. I’ll never forget that. They took time out from their glory to make me feel better.”

  For Gerald Early, professor and author of The Culture of Bruising, the Games were a watershed moment. “The 1976 Olympics was huge,” he says. “That’s when the Spinks brothers emerged in the public consciousness. Every guy who came out of that Olympics was a household name, at least among inner-city black people. Howard Davis, Sugar Ray Leonard, they became huge, huge names. They were super-famous. You had this class of unbelievably talented African-American fighters who were so disciplined and serious about the craft.”

  Douglas Hartmann, author of Race, Culture and the Revolt of the Black Athlete, points specifically to Leon and Michael. “When I think about the Spinks brothers, the ’76 Olympics is what defines them, what makes them the interesting figures that they are. [That Olympics] was the last gasp of the old black athlete’s story, which was out of the ghetto and showing that America was a great country and that you could overcome racism.”

  In 1976 Jim Lampley was a feature reporter for ABC Sports. The day after Leon won the gold medal, Lampley combed Olympic Village looking for the young light-heavyweight star.

  “My assignment was to interview at least six or eight American medal winners,” he says. “We wanted to roll these interviews into the closing ceremony before leaving the air, and one of the names on the list was Leon. And I ran around the Olympic Village with my camera crew, and I got everybody else within a two- or three-hour period. I kept coming back to his room and checking through the press attaché, and we couldn’t find Leon. And finally I was just ready to bundle out and I saw him come walking around the corner. He was wearing a shirt that was completely unbuttoned and the tail was out. He had, in each hand, an open bottle of Cold Duck; you could’ve smelled it from two blocks away. I walked up to him and I began to utter my spiel, ‘Leon, I’m here because I need to blah-blah-blah,’ and I got about seven or eight words out and I looked at him and I said, ‘I never saw you.’ And he said, ‘Fine.’”

  The day after the closing ceremonies, Michael flew back to St. Louis with his mother, and when the plane landed at Lambert Field, hordes of relatives and friends—along with boxing and city officials—came to greet them. Michael wore an oversize sombrero, a gift from Kenny Loehr, and Kay showed off her son’s gold medal by hanging it around her neck. As the police escorted mother and son into the city, Michael sat on the top of the backseat of a Cadillac convertible with younger brothers Evan and Eddie beneath each arm. In interviews that followed, Michael thanked the people of St. Louis who’d landed him in that motorcade, most notably Loehr and Vashon principal Cozy Marks. His gift to his old trainer was a pair of miniature leather boxing gloves that have hung in Loehr’s car ever since.

  Leon was celebrating in his own style, which meant that nobody knew where he was. He was supposed to be at Camp Lejeune, but according to the administrative officer at Headquarters Company, S. J. Stockhausen (now known as Suzanne Wheatley), he was AWOL.

  “My CO [commanding officer] told us to hurry up and make leave papers for [Leon], so we could pretend he was on leave until we could find him,” she says. “Then someone made the unbelievably dumb mistake of sending him unescorted up to Washington, DC, to see the Commandant of the Marine Corps [General Louis H. Wilson]. When my CO found out, he started yelling, ‘What idiot was in charge of this? Why would anybody let him try to find the way to DC by himself?’

  “He was frolicking about someplace and not back at the base, and we were extending leave papers, probably doing things that weren’t exactly on the up-and-up, all to keep his name and the Marine Corps’ name untarnished.”

  Leon resurfaced on August 4 at Kiener Plaza in downtown St. Louis. Two thousand people had come out for “Michael and Leon Spinks Day.” A local drum corps, the Hornets, played marching music as the two Olympic heroes paraded into the staged area.

  Jesse Davison took off work to attend. “We were shocked at how big the parade was, that they threw a parade for [guys from Pruitt-Igoe]. I most remember seeing them on the podium holding up their medals. Their mom was with them. It was overwhelming when I saw how many people were at the parade to celebrate these two guys, guys I knew and hung with.”

  In an unprecedented act of generosity, but a predictable act of public relations, the city of St. Louis bestowed gifts upon the Spinks family. Hamilton Jewelers presented Kay with a diamond ring. Local officials gave Michael and Leon keys to the city.

  A grateful Michael addressed the crowd with typical reticence: “I want all of you to know I appreciate this.”

  Leon added, “I really enjoyed coming back to St. Louis to see my buddies and my partners, to see what’s happenin’.”

  John F. Bass, the city’s comptroller, addressed the crowd too. “We are proud because they not only bring home two gold medals, but more important to us, they are statesmen,” he said. “They have gone out among men and have distinguished themselves as men who care about their country and as men who care about people. It’s not where you came from but it’s where you’re going. You can rest assured these champions are going places.”

  Bass never mentioned where he thought Leon and Michael were going, probably because he had no idea. Nobody did.

  Jesse Davison spent the night celebrating with Michael. “Mike came to my house, he got the key to the city, and he said, ‘Let’s go have fun.’ I was the only one with a car, so we got in my car and rode all over St. Louis that night. Everything was free. We were drinkin’ for free. Got into everyplace free. We don’t drink but we was drinking that night. We got home about four, five o’clock in the morning.”

  Following the celebration, Bob Broeg, sports editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, suggested that Michael might have benefited from more than a key to the city, that perhaps a more useful gift would have been the key to a job. “[Michael] needs something more substantial full-time than the outside chance to make good in professional pugilism, a field that offers more heartbreak than hope, more disappointments than surprises, more disillusionment than dough,” he wrote.

  John Holaus, president of the Ozark AAU, went even further in his attempts to improve Michael’s prospects. Holaus solicited city hall for work on behalf of the local hero but received nothing more than a cold shoulder.

  Leon, who’d begun a new celebration with unknown friends at an undisclosed location, showed up at Camp Lejeune a week after the parade. He memorialized his arrival by crashing his car into the welcome sign outside the base.

  “The rumor was that he was driving drunk, but I have no evidence of that,” says Administrative Officer Wheatley. “But that was what everyone was saying, and it was being hushed up.”

  Instead of reprimanding the young Leon, the Marines rewarded him, throwing him a party and milking it for every drop of public relations they could gain.

  First Leon was handed a telegram from President Gerald Ford. Next he received a phone call from Marine Commandant Wilson. Then he was summoned to the Goettge Field House, the gymnasium where he had trained for three years.

  The announcement came over the public address system: “Will Corporal Leon Spinks please report to the ring.”

  Three thousand people—Marines and civil
ians—cheered as the band played “St. Louis Blues” and Leon marched into the ring wearing his Marine uniform and newly minted gold medal. Major General Herman Poggemeyer, the commanding general of Camp Lejeune, joined Leon in the ring and congratulated “The Wild Bull of Camp Lejeune.”

  In the blink of an eye, Private Leon had been elevated to Corporal Spinks. Retired Captain Bill Darrow had recommended Leon for the promotion. “I looked at his pro and con marks,” he says. “If he has good marks and he’s doing his job, he gets promoted. He wasn’t what we call a brig rat, someone that gets drunk and is sent to the brig a lot. Leon was promoted because he was a good Marine. Anything else he did brought honor to the Corps and to himself.”

  According to Suzanne Wheatley, “None of us knew who [Leon] was until the Olympics. He was a private first class. His rank was so unimpressive that we promoted him to corporal because of the Olympics.”

  Leon may have been promoted, but he also wanted out. He had a year of service left, and even though he didn’t qualify, he applied for a hardship discharge. Wheatley voted against it. So did Kay Spinks.

  “His mother was very much against him getting out of the Corps,” Wheatley says. “He used to use the phone on my desk and talk to his mother; he’d plead with her to send us some kind of statement that she would like him out of the Marine Corps so that he could make more money and take care of her and his siblings. I distinctly remember him saying, ‘Mama! But Mama!’ He was a gold-medal boxer but she was the one that wore the pants in the family. He could barely get a word in edgewise. His only comments were: ‘But Mama!’