One Punch from the Promised Land

by John Florio

  “We can’t shackle him to the training camp,” Sam Solomon told the assembled media. “When he’s off, he’s his own man. I go by his performance.”

  Leon’s performance began when he showed up three weeks later. His day started with breakfast: three eggs, sausage, vitamins, and two bottles of beer. His day ended with a trip to the bar, where he’d drink, dance, and smoke cigarettes.

  On July 1, only eight days after his arrival, Leon closed camp to have a birthday party. The festivities lasted through his actual birthday, ten days later.

  Butch Lewis told New York Magazine’s Vic Ziegel at the time, “Leon’s always looking for somebody to say he doesn’t have to do something. And the people around him want to keep a smile on his face. He says, ‘I think I’ll go out tonight; it won’t hurt me.’ There they are, ‘Yeah, Champ, anything you say, Champ.’ He’s surrounded by people who don’t know anything about boxing. They’re scufflers.”

  Leon went AWOL twice. Both times he was tracked down by a member of his entourage. The second time, when Lester Hudson found him in Detroit, Leon hadn’t slept in three days.

  Mr. T spent more time chasing the champ than guarding him. It was clear Leon was in the next phase of his lifelong bender—and this one came with an outsized budget and a never-ending supply of marijuana and cocaine. According to Mr. T, whatever hunger Leon had before winning the title was gone. The champ was buying—and blowing—cocaine by the pound.

  “He’d wake up and snort it.” Mr. T wrote in his autobiography, Mr. T: The Man with the Gold. “He had long fingernails and he would put it under his nails. The more cocaine he snorted, the less he trained, and the less he trained, the more out of shape he got.

  “Leon was trying so hard to make friends with the ghetto dwellers. He would buy people drinks, share his smoke and blow with them, then ride them around with him. They would eat his food, drink his drinks, sleep in his hotel rooms, snort his cocaine and still try to rob and steal from him. Even Leon’s ghetto friends said, ‘He’s a damn fool using all those drugs and not training.’ They had lost respect for Leon and his name was mud.”

  Harold Petty, Leon’s gym mate at the DeSoto, remembers Leon as a “wild man.”

  “He wanted to be accepted and that hurt him more than anything,” Petty says. “He would come back [to St. Louis] after turning pro; he’d be driving this big old car and he’d be out there talking to everybody, talking to the kids, telling them to stay in school, saying all the right stuff. Then he’d leave and come back drunk.”

  Bruce Newman of Sports Illustrated wrote in late July 1978, “Usually Spinks heads for large urban centers like Philadelphia, Cleveland, or Detroit, diving into them as if they were foxholes that remind him of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in which he grew up in St. Louis…. [Leon] is one of the few successful athletes whose money does not seem to be able to separate him from poverty.”

  Leon told Newman, “I’m a ghetto nigger, people shouldn’t forget that about me. You can take the nigger out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of the nigger. One of the great things about Ali was the things he did for the black man in the white society—but you don’t never see no Ali down in the ghetto…. I go to the neighborhoods and give those people a chance to see the heavyweight champion of the world on their own ground.”

  Another ex-champion with a troubled past can relate. “When [Leon] had all his money and he was champion, he wants to go back and show everybody, wants to share it with these guys,” Mike Tyson says. “‘This is what I got! Look at me, ain’t I bad? Didn’t I make it? I’m the champ of the world!’ I always liked Leon ’cause Leon was a street guy. He dressed like a street guy. ‘Yo, look at his hat. His hat is fly.’ He always had a sharp hat. Always getting in trouble like we were.”

  It was the getting-in-trouble part that helped Leon’s camp keep tabs on their employer. In one instance Leon was spotted in his Coupe de Ville outside the main gate of the airport in Savannah, Georgia. This wouldn’t have been newsworthy had he not been in the car with a young lady—necking for three solid hours—as his flight took off without him.

  On another occasion a wire service released a photo in which Leon and a woman were shopping in a Las Vegas jewelry store. The article identified the woman as his wife, Nova. The article was wrong. And Nova saw the picture.

  “I know who the woman is,” she said. “If I ever see her face to face, I’ll smash her.”

  Meanwhile, back at training camp, Leon’s many advisors were still jockeying for power. Sam Solomon, Art Redden, and John Davis were all taking credit for Leon’s success. Davis got tired of waiting for Leon. After ten days he gave up and went back to Camp Lejeune. Lester Hudson and Ed Bell were under the impression that they were calling the shots.

  Nova, now in Detroit, was under the impression that she was calling the shots. Michael and Kay thought they were advising Leon. Roger Stafford and Jerome Tunstall thought they were advising Leon.

  Mitt Barnes, who had signed Leon before anybody else, accused Bell of choosing Hilton Head for Leon’s camp site so that Bell could have an extended tennis vacation. The tension between the two didn’t last long, because Barnes was ordered off the Hilton Head premises after calling Leon “ignorant” during an interview with the press. Barnes left but made it clear that Leon belonged to him for the next seven years.

  Arum and Lewis both threatened to clean house and start from scratch.

  Michael flew out to Hilton Head to confront Leon about his blown-out lifestyle. The two had it out, arguing as only brothers can. When Michael saw he was getting nowhere, he stormed out, leaving Leon alone at the heavy bag, swinging from his toes as tears streaked his face.

  Eventually, the calendar ran out. It was time to leave for New Orleans, so Leon arranged to have sixty-one rooms reserved at the Hilton. Butch Lewis estimated that Leon knew only ten of the sixty-one freeloaders (for whom Leon was also footing plane fare). The hotel bill alone came to an estimated $7,000 per night.

  Leon’s entourage landed at New Orleans International Airport on September 1. A police motorcade escorted the champ’s $45,000 limo to the Hilton. Leon was in the car with Mr. T, Solomon, Diggs, Hudson, and Bell. Before the motorcade even left the airport, one of the police motorcycle escorts bumped into the back of the limo. Leon jumped out and exchanged angry words with the officer until his aides calmed him down. According to Mr. T, when Leon got back in the limo, he said, “All right, give it here,” which meant he wanted some reefer.

  Mr. T wrote in his autobiography, “It was funny; Leon was getting high and all those police were around us. Leon was smoking reefers and waving to the crowds of people who had lined the street waiting to see him. He stood up in his sunroof limo, waving both hands now and smiling. The crowd loved him. People tried to run up to the moving car, but the police kept them back. The city of New Orleans belonged to Leon from that day up to the fifteenth. Whatever he wanted, wherever he went, anything, the city jumped to please.”

  On September 12, Bob Arum was on his way to breakfast at the Hilton. As he stepped off the elevator, Leon staggered past him and collapsed. Recognizing a drunk when he saw one, Arum said, “Leon, you’re fighting Muhammad Ali in three days. Are you crazy?”

  “Whatsa matter?” Leon mumbled. “I just got in from roadwork.”

  It was an obvious lie, but telling the truth wouldn’t have changed anything. Drunk, out of shape, and slumped on the floor, Leon had seventy-two hours to sober up before stepping into the ring with an over-the-hill but determined Muhammad Ali.

  7

  FOR LEON, THE THREE DAYS LEADING UP TO “THE BATTLE OF NEW Orleans” were last-call at a once-in-a-lifetime bender. And like any garden-variety alcoholic, Leon got as high as he could before closing time.

  By all accounts, Leon spent September 14, the day before the rematch, downing booze, smoking pot, snorting coke, and screwing women. It’s remarkable that he made it to the Hilton that evening for the weigh-in, a prefight ritual that had been a
nonevent until Ali turned it into a circus. This one deserved a big top. A chaotic crush of reporters, photographers, hangers-on, and boxing insiders crammed into the Grand Ballroom. One of the onlookers was Larry Holmes. The twenty-eight-year-old heavyweight got his start as a sparring partner for Ali but was now able to claim his own title: Leon’s vacated WBC belt, which he’d taken from Ken Norton in a squeaker of a split decision a week earlier in Las Vegas.

  “There ain’t nobody in the world who can beat me,” Holmes shouted, trying to convince the press that he hadn’t backed his way into the championship. His histrionics didn’t work. Few people, aside from members of his own family, saw Holmes as the legitimate titleholder. The boxing world recognized Leon as the king, and they were interested in only one fight: the Ali-Spinks rematch.

  Ali, a genius at stealing ink, was uncharacteristically quiet, chewing on a toothpick. When he stepped up to the makeshift platform, camera crews rushed to the staged area as if a starting pistol had been fired. They converged on Ali and Leon so quickly that the platform began to collapse under their weight.

  “Get back!” the announcer shouted, trying in vain to clear the area around a woman who had fainted. It took a team of gun-toting security guards to restore order. Once the crowd was under control, the ceremony of weighing the fighters took place.

  Ali came in at 221; he had dropped three pounds in the seven months since losing the title to Leon.

  Leon weighed 201. He’d gained four pounds since his first meeting with Ali, but some of that could be attributed to the fistful of gold medallions hanging around his neck and the new dentures between his lips.

  After stepping off the scales, both fighters left the Hilton without exchanging as much as a nod.

  Leon’s activities on the day of the fight are sketchy, but the facts that can be gathered don’t paint a picture of sobriety. In the early afternoon he brought an unnamed man and four women into his hotel room and locked the door. Mr. T said he knocked on the door at 5:15 and found him guzzling beer and snorting cocaine. Then Leon disappeared again, this time eluding even his bodyguard.

  An hour before the opening bell was due to ring at the Louisiana Superdome, Nova found her husband in a hotel room across town sprawled out in bed, drunk. He wasn’t alone.

  Infuriated, she dragged him to his dressing room, where his cornermen—Solomon, Benton, and Michael—had been waiting for hours. Inexplicably, nobody was prepared.

  Sports Illustrated’s Pat Putnam recorded the chaotic scene in the dressing room when Leon asked for his protective cup:

  “‘Go get a cup,’ Solomon said to Chet Cummings, a public-relations man for Top Rank. ‘For God’s sake, get Leon a cup.’

  “‘A cup?’ said Cummings, who then turned to Vickie Blain, another Top Rank employee, and said, ‘Go get Leon a cup for ice.’

  “‘Not that kind of a cup,’ Solomon yelled, ‘A cup cup, for God’s sake. A cup cup!’”

  Leon waited for the assistant to run to a neighboring dressing room. When the assistant returned, he handed the champ the only athletic cup in the house. It was the one Mike Rossman had just worn while taking the light-heavyweight title in a grueling thirteen-round TKO over Victor Galindez. Fresh it was not. Leon threw it on.

  Then Kay Spinks led the room in prayer, asking the Lord to bring victory to the better man. Leon kissed a small cross and put it in his right sock. Then he walked with his entourage into the jammed arena as the crowd of 70,000 rhythmically chanted Ali’s name.

  It’s no exaggeration to say that the Ali-Spinks rematch was one of the most anticipated fights in boxing history. It took in a record gate of $6 million, and drew what, at the time, was the second-largest television audience in history: ninety million viewers. Frank Sinatra, Rocky star Sylvester Stallone, and Lillian Carter were among those in the VIP row. Lillian’s son, President Jimmy Carter, tuned in at Camp David with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.

  “Leon had won the championship but he hadn’t convinced people that he was a great fighter,” says professor and fight scholar Gerald Early. “He hadn’t even convinced those who knew the sport that he was a good fighter. What he had convinced people of was that he was a lucky fighter, and that on the night he’d fought Ali, he was really up for the fight. He was perfect proof of the adage ‘I’d rather be lucky than good.’”

  Muhammad Ali told New York Magazine’s Vic Ziegel during the lead-up to the fight, “If I beat him the first time I wouldn’t of got no credit for it. He only had seven fights… the kid was nothing …. So I’m glad he won. It’s a perfect scene. You couldn’t write a better movie than this. Can the old champ regain his title for a third time? Think of it. A third time. And you know what makes me laugh? He’s the same guy. Only difference is he got eight fights now.

  “It will be no-o-o-o-o contest. I’ll bring out the amateur in the boy. Bet your money on Muhammad Ali”

  The oddsmakers believed him. Leon was the champ but entered the ring a two-to-one underdog. The odds probably would have been steeper had the handicappers known the extent of Leon’s prefight binge—or that Solomon and Benton were still at loggerheads, both insisting they were in charge of the champion’s corner.

  Meanwhile, Ali had spent months in the gym trying his damnedest to grow young again—impossible for anyone, but also risky for an aging fighter. Reports had been circulating that Ali’s speech was becoming slurred and that his reflexes were gone. He had come up with several excuses, the most questionable being that blows around his nose and mouth had closed his sinuses, causing his speech to thicken.

  Ali had worked hard enough that when the bell rang he was able to put on a reasonable, if slower, impersonation of his vintage self. He set the pattern for the fight: He bobbed, backpedaled, jabbed, and clinched. He’d obviously studied the first bout and wasn’t going to give away a single round this time. The famous rope-a-dope was shelved in favor of a dancing, picking, sniping offense. He peppered Leon with punches, never allowing the frustrated champion to get closer than a jab’s length away.

  As for Leon, his energy level was a far cry from that of the first fight. In Las Vegas he hadn’t bothered sitting between rounds until Michael convinced him, after the eighth, to take a breather. Now he was motioning for his stool when the bell rang to close the first round. When he reached his corner, he flopped down, exhausted. Then, searching for answers, he looked up to his cornermen—but had no idea which one he’d see. Solomon’s solution to the internal power struggle had been to rotate the command: He would speak to Leon after the first round, Benton after the second, Michael after the third, and so on.

  “I got up one round,” George Benton told the Washington Post, “I think it was the third, when I saw [Leon] doing nothing. Then I went up the next round to try and tell him something, but everybody was talking from all angles. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Fact is, one guy’s telling the fighter to shake and boogie and wiggle-wiggle. Stuff like that. I still don’t know what wiggle-wiggle meant. [At one point] one of the commissioners jumped up and said he was gonna fine us for [having] too many men in the corner.”

  Benton became so frustrated that after the fifth round he left the ring, showered, and returned to his hotel. “What can I do?” he said when departing. “There’s ten amateurs in there.”

  Years later Benton would tell William Nack of Sports Illustrated, “It was like watching your baby drown. There was nothing you could do about it. I had no more control of the guy. I was useless. All I could do was get the hell out of it.”

  Mr. T wrote in Mr. T: The Man with the Gold, “As the fight wore on, Leon grew weary. His eyes were all glazed and he didn’t even know where he was. He was just fighting out of instinct; his mind and reflexes were gone. Sam and Michael were hollering at Leon when he sat in the corner but he didn’t hear them—he was in another world.”

  In the tenth round Ali delighted the crowd with a brief Ali shuffle, the fancy piece of footwork he’d made famous in his yo
unger days. In the eleventh he fed Leon a steady diet of lefts. After the twelfth Solomon begged Leon to throw punches, to fight his fight, to avoid falling into Ali’s traps. He might as well have asked him to run a one-minute mile.

  ABC’s Howard Cosell told viewers in round thirteen, “Spinks desperately trying to score, desperately trying to get to the former champion but unable to. Look at that! Now Ali is having fun! A touch of the shuffle… dancing from side to side… sensing he’s in command… knowing that he’s got this. Now tying up Spinks in the clinch. Just a quick combination there, only one blow landed, now tying up Spinks again. Getting perhaps a little rest but still setting the tone of the fight with that left. Notice the way he’s clinching and tying Spinks up. He’s fighting with a cautious wisdom now, trying to preserve his apparent wide lead. Look at that left! And again! And again! And Spinks unable to get at him! Of course, he’s fighting, Spinks is, Ali’s fight.”

  “The whole world watched as [Leon] stumbled around the ring trying to hit Ali,” Mr. T wrote. “When the fight was nearing the end, Leon knew he had lost, so he just held on to keep from getting knocked down. When the fight was over, Leon was so glad that, if you didn’t know any better, you would think he won instead of Ali.”

  Going by the judges’ cards, which according to Louisiana rules were scored on the rounds system, the fight was nearly a shutout. Judge Herman Dutreix had Ali ahead 11–4. Referee Lucien Joubert and Judge Ernest Cojoe had it 10–4–1. The bout had been so one-sided that one of the few rounds Leon took—the fifth—came by way of default: Ali had been penalized for holding.

  Leon showed no sour grapes. The instant he was no longer encumbered with the championship, he walked over to Ali, and in the center of the ring where he had just lost the title, lifted Ali’s arm in victory. Leon says he did so out of respect. He must mean respect for Ali, because he never seemed to have had respect for the title when it was in his hands.