One Punch from the Promised Land

by John Florio

  But Mustafa Muhammad was too smart to celebrate. He’d surely heard that Las Vegas had Michael as the favorite in the fight; he also realized he’d left a lot of strength back at the gym. Silently, he slipped on his white terrycloth robe, draped a towel over his head, and went up to his room to collapse.

  “I’m in my bed sleeping in the morning—and Leon comes in my room and wakes me up,” Mustafa Muhammad remembers. “‘Get up! Get up! Let’s go hang out. Whatever you and my brother got goin’ on, that’s between y’all.’ He didn’t care about none of that. I’m like, ‘Leon, get outta my room.’ The guy didn’t have a care in the world. He was a party guy, the most fun-loving guy that ever lived.”

  It’s unconfirmed how long Leon’s escapades lasted that morning, but when the opening bell rang later that afternoon, he was seated at ringside, rooting on his brother.

  The fight itself was not on anybody’s top-ten list; the first three rounds played as if they were in slow motion, with Michael awkward, off-balance, and uneasy. It was shaping up to be a tactical battle, interesting from a purist’s point of view but lacking in the fireworks department. The excitement was found only in the stakes: The belt was on the line and neither boxer was taking control of the fight. After seven rounds the title was still up for grabs. Mustafa Muhammad was ahead by one point on two judges’ cards; Michael had the extra point on the third.

  But in the eighth the fighters’ fortunes veered in different directions. Michael nailed the champ with a jab that shut his right eye, and when the eye stay closed, he pounded it with lefts for the remainder of the fight.

  “After that I was aiming for the eye but I don’t know how often I got it,” Michael told Jack McCallum of Sports Illustrated. “By the end of the fight I was just aiming for anything above the neck.”

  In the twelfth Michael decked the champion with a piston-pumping combo: two lefts followed by an earth-rattling right to the jaw that sent the champ down for an eight count. Once Mustafa Muhammad was back on his feet, Michael blasted him to the ropes with a fusillade of rights and lefts. By the time the attack was over, Michael had thrown two dozen punches to Mustafa Muhammad’s one lone counter.

  “My eye swelled,” Mustafa Muhammad says, looking back. “Michael stuck his thumb in my eye and my eye blew up. I had to hold my head up to see out of the other eye. With my head up like that, he just came right over and got me. He hit me hard, but I just got up and looked at him. But I made a plan. He was not gonna knock me out. We were gonna go fifteen hard rounds.”

  Mustafa Muhammad had followed his plan—the fight had gone fifteen rounds, and for him they were hard. Judge Duane Ford had Michael winning nine of the last ten rounds. Judge Chuck Minker had Michael taking eight of the last ten; Lou Tabat gave him seven of the ten. The final tallies were 145–139 (Ford), 146–138 (Minker), and 144–140 (Tabat).

  When the decision was announced and Michael officially became the WBA light-heavyweight champion, he and Leon wrapped their arms around each other in the ring. “We shed tears,” Michael told the AP. “We both wanted this.”

  It wasn’t what Mustafa Muhammad wanted. He bitterly complained that Michael had fouled him. To this day he says Michael’s combination was “one-two-three-elbow.”

  After the fight Mustafa Muhammad vented to the press. “The referee saw him repeatedly sticking his thumbs and elbows into my eye. He just didn’t do anything at all. Today was his day. You can’t beat an Olympic hero in America. He didn’t do anything but run.”

  Carlo Rotella, author of Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, sees Michael through a different lens. “Michael had a distinctive style and a distinctive rhythm as a fighter; the combination of angles and rhythms he gave an opponent was very different. The usual term is awkward. Awkward means you can’t hit him flush. That style made it very hard to engage him for a lot of fighters, especially accomplished fighters. So when fighters say ‘he ran, he was awkward’ what they’re saying is, ‘I couldn’t find a way to deal with this style. I couldn’t figure that guy out.’”

  Matthew Saad Muhammad crashed the press conference to stand up for his pal. While Michael was speaking to a group of reporters, Saad Muhammad interrupted to say the wrong fighter had gotten the decision. On that, he was in a minority of one.

  “I didn’t mean to cut you off,” Michael said to the WBC champ, “But I was talking. Will someone please remove this man from the premises?”

  Saad Muhammad left without incident and took the WBC title with him. If the paths of those two belts were going to converge, it wasn’t going to be soon.

  10

  BY 1983 MICHAEL HAD ESTABLISHED HIMSELF AS AN ELITE LIGHT-heavyweight. He’d won all twenty-two of his fights, and in the two years since beating Eddie Mustafa Muhammad, he had defended the WBA belt five times. He was now the only member of his Olympic team to hold a title. But in the minds of boxing fans, he was still one hurdle away from greatness. That hurdle stood five-five and change, possessed a forty-one-inch chest, was as cuddly as a fire hydrant, and went by the name Dwight Muhammad Qawi. A year earlier Qawi had upset the fearsome Matthew Saad Muhammad to win the WBC light-heavyweight championship.

  With twelve knockouts to his credit, Qawi owned a record of 19–1–1. He’d successfully defended his title three times in two years, knocking out Jerry Martin, Saad Muhammad a second time, and Eddie Davis. None of those fights went the distance.

  By meeting in the ring, Qawi and Michael would be unifying their division—making it only the second such division in the sport. (The other was the middleweight division, which was ruled by Marvin Hagler.) Better still, they’d be bringing fight fans a dream match: a lean, gawky, unorthodox boxer with a seventy-six-inch reach versus a steam engine in shorts that would sooner take a bullet than give up an inch of canvas.

  The fight hadn’t come cheaply. Butch Lewis had booked the pricey 14,000-seat Convention Hall in Atlantic City. He’d also guaranteed each fighter $1.2 million, with add-ons bringing their purses to $2.1 million. It was more than either man had ever earned in a single bout, and the fattest purse the division had ever seen.

  But signing fighters was one thing. Capturing the public’s imagination was another. Insiders had high hopes that this bout would vault the light-heavyweight division out of irrelevancy. Could Michael Spinks and Dwight Muhammad Qawi finally carry the division into the big time?

  Born Dwight Braxton, Qawi had joined the Nation of Islam in 1975 and changed his name five years later (although, for publicity purposes, he kept Braxton for this fight). Unlike Michael, Qawi hadn’t thrown a single punch as an amateur. He hadn’t even begun his pro career until the age of twenty-five. He’d spent his youth on the unforgiving streets of Camden, New Jersey, and after being convicted of armed robbery, spent his early twenties inside a concrete cell at Rahway State Prison. He walked out of Rahway in 1978 with nothing to offer except a crunching jab, a jaw-splitting right hand, and the aura of an ex-con who’d seen far tougher battles than those regulated by a referee.

  Qawi and Michael weren’t strangers. They had sparred back in 1980 when Michael was training to fight Dave Conteh, whom he went on to stop in nine rounds.

  “We did eight five-minute rounds a day,” Qawi remembers. “You could hear a pin drop when we were in the ring. Michael was very safe, methodical, sneaky, but I was eating him up every day.”

  Michael agreed that their sessions were tough, but he told Phil Pepe of the New York Daily News, “There were a couple of times when I jabbed him to death for eight or nine rounds, but neither of us really got the better of the other.”

  When hyping the fight, trumpeted by Butch Lewis as “The Brawl for It All,” the media preyed on those sparring sessions, particularly the enmity that had supposedly developed between the two fighters. Michael told Sports Illustrated that he had lent Qawi $45 for a radio, and after two years the debt was still unpaid.

  “I’ll send you the money in a first-aid kit,” Qawi wisecracked. It was one of countless one-liners from the Camde
n Buzzsaw. Here’s another: “I’ll roll out the red carpet for Michael to come down the stretch. Only the carpet will be made of his blood.”

  When Qawi is reminded of those taunts, he waves his hand, dismissing them as nothing more than gate-building trash talk. But Michael didn’t take them lightly. He brought in the legendary Eddie Futch to help his regular trainer, Nelson Brison (Butch Lewis’s brother), prepare him for the fight. Futch came up with a strategy designed to unravel Qawi.

  He saw Qawi as a crouching puma with an arsenal of devastating combinations—kind of like Joe Frazier with a pinch of Archie Moore. Qawi cornered his opponents, worked inside, and countered right hands with a lethal right of his own.

  At the prefight press conference, Qawi emphasized his in-your-face style. “I’ll be so close to him that people will think we’re Siamese twins, with my head connected to his chest. He’ll be looking for a breather, but he won’t get one.”

  Futch’s solution was to jab, jab, jab, jab, jab. Lead with the left. Remain in the center of the ring. Stay an arm’s length away at all times. Jab, jab, jab, jab, jab.

  In layman’s terms, Futch wanted to turn Michael into a different fighter for the next fifteen rounds of his career. He couldn’t have had a more disciplined pupil to work with. But Michael’s training was about to be interrupted by a chain of events that neither he nor Futch could have seen coming.

  By 1983 Michael had been with Butch Lewis for six years. He saw him not only as a promoter and ad hoc manager but also as a friend and brother, and even a father. Leon had dropped the responsibility of being Michael’s role model on the streets of Pruitt-Igoe years ago. It was now in the hands of Lewis.

  “That’s the closest I’ve ever known of any fighter and manager in history,” Emanuel Steward said in 2011. “Michael was a very insecure person and Butch represented strength, just the opposite of what Michael was. He depended on Butch for everything. Michael found somebody that was successful and he attached to him like an older brother or a daddy, and that’s where he stayed. Leon never had that and I don’t think he could have had that. His mental makeup is different. Michael is what you call a scary fighter [fearful in the ring]. That’s why he gravitated to a guy like Butch, a strong-personality-type person.”

  Sportswriter Wallace Matthews remembers working on a story in Lewis’s Manhattan apartment. “[Michael] called him for some advice, and I could hear [the conversation] from Butch’s side. It was like he was talking to a fifteen-year-old. Michael was going to fly somewhere. If I remember, Butch was saying, ‘Now, listen, Michael, don’t you park that Benz at the airport.’ It was something my father would have told me. It struck me as, like, this guy takes an unusual interest in his fighter. Most managers and trainers, they don’t give a fuck. It’s like whatever. It’s your problem. And it just seemed to me that they were very close. And he spoke about him, you know, very affectionately.”

  Never did Michael need his friend’s support more than during the months leading up to the Qawi fight.

  On Wednesday, January 5, 1983, two months before the bout, Michael took his twenty-year-old brother, Leland, for a ride through Philadelphia in his new Mercedes. At about 1:45 a.m., he passed a red light as he turned a corner. Flashing police lights suddenly lit up behind him.

  “We didn’t think the lights were meant for us,” Leland later explained to Calvin Fussman in Sports Illustrated. “Before we knew it, they were following us and there was another [police] car coming toward us.”

  There are differing reports as to exactly what happened next. According to two police officers, they chased Michael—who had been weaving in and out of traffic on City Avenue near Fifty-Second Street—for twenty-five blocks with their sirens wailing and flashers cranking. Michael disagreed, claiming there was no high-speed chase. Both sides agree that Michael was pulled over on Wynnefield and Parkside Avenues.

  “I saw the flashing lights,” Michael told various reporters at the time, “but they were so far behind me, I didn’t know if they were police or an ambulance or a fire truck. When I realized they wanted me to pull over, I did.”

  “They jumped on us,” Leland told Fussman. “They said, ‘Get out or we’ll blow your heads off.’”

  Michael and Leland obeyed. As they were getting out of the car, one of the officers spotted a .45 caliber revolver resting on the floor of the front seat. The gun contained six spent shells.

  “It was a gift,” Michael told police.

  The excuse was so unimaginative it almost had to be true. Michael explained that the gun was a keepsake given to him by a fan in Montreal after the Olympics. The shells were spent, he said, because he’d taken the pistol out of his house and fired a celebratory round into an open field six nights earlier on New Year’s Eve.

  It turned out the gun had been reported stolen in Toronto in 1975. Michael was charged with possession of an unlicensed weapon and released after signing a $1,000 bail bond. Butch Lewis was there to support him upon his release. Lewis was also by his side three months later when Michael appeared in court to plead guilty and pay a $1,770 fine.

  On Friday, January 7, two days after the gun incident, Michael’s fiancée, Sandy Massey, was heading home in her new 1982 Ford Mustang, a gift from Michael. While on the Schuylkill Expressway just outside of downtown Philadelphia, she crashed into an oncoming Buick Regal that had crossed into her lane. The head-on collision sent the driver of the Buick, sixty-year-old Joseph McCormick, to the hospital with chest injuries, a broken hip, rib fractures, and facial lacerations. Sandy wasn’t as lucky. She was pronounced dead at 4:52 a.m.

  Funeral services took place at the Sanctuary Church of the Open Door on the city’s west side. Dwight Qawi sent flowers and his manager, Rock Newman, attended.

  Butch Lewis managed the press, as did Eddie Futch, but neither one could hide their fighter’s grief. Michael wept openly during interviews. He wept openly during workouts. And he wept privately in his dressing room.

  “You’re alone and you want it to end,” he told the Boston Globe. “You want this whole thing to be over with so you can join the rest of the world and the rest of your family.

  “I don’t know what an average person goes through in a lifetime, but I’ve been through a lot up to now—and I have lived life as cautiously as I possibly can. My life hasn’t been a bowl of cherries.”

  Michael had always found solace inside the ropes. And so he tried desperately to concentrate on the battle in front of him, training with Futch on the skills he needed to beat Qawi.

  “Michael went to pieces,” Futch told Sports Illustrated. “It was hard for him to get his mind on the fight.”

  Michael may have had trouble focusing on the match, but that was not true for the rest of the boxing community. Boxing writers across the country were heralding the fight, which was to air on HBO, as the bout that would finally put the light-heavyweight division on equal footing with the heavyweights.

  The only person who wasn’t ready for the attention was the WBA champion.

  The twinkling lights of the Atlantic City Boardwalk belied the squalor around it. While tourists were plunking down more than a billion dollars at the casinos in 1983, much of the rest of the city was in decay. Those who ventured off the boardwalk saw boarded-up storefronts lining the streets, hookers working the corners, and vagrants camping out in doorways. Comedian Alan King famously said of the place, “It looked like Fantasy Island on the inside and Beirut on the outside.”

  On the night of the Spinks-Qawi fight, twenty-three-mile-per-hour winds ripped through Atlantic City as a rainstorm drenched the East Coast. Still, more than nine thousand ticket-holders braved the elements to make it past Dock’s Oyster House and James’s Saltwater Taffy to Convention Hall.

  Walk-up sales were a different story. Butch Lewis had to chew on five thousand unpunched tickets, but his spirits were surely buoyed when he collected the $956,375 gate. HBO reported a healthy viewership even though foreign TV sales were underwhelming. The jury was still out as
to whether the division was ready to carry the burden of the public spotlight.

  Columnist Jerry Izenberg of the Newark Star-Ledger wrote, “Light heavyweights are sort of the parsley of the boxing world. Everybody acknowledges that parsley has a use but no one quite knows what it is.”

  Of course, neither Michael nor Qawi had signed on to resurrect the division, nor did they have much interest in the size of the gate. Each fighter aimed to leave the ring as the sole champion of his weight class.

  Both faced obstacles. Michael was in a raw emotional state. Qawi had been fighting a cold for nearly two weeks.

  “I remember at one point during training camp [Dwight] said he was feeling flat,” manager Rock Newman remembers. “So [co-trainer] Quenzell McCall told him to take a glass of beer and put a raw egg in it. Dwight is obsessive, so he started to obsess on that, and it wasn’t good. He put on quite a bit of weight drinking a beer or two a day. It was not an ideal situation. So there was a struggle with his weight.”

  Quenzell McCall told Sports Illustrated, “We kept him off his feet as long as we could. We loaded him up with grapefruit and orange juice and gave him aspirin and plenty of rest. And a doctor gave him penicillin. We were concerned that he might develop a fever, but fortunately he didn’t.”

  Qawi insisted he was ready to go. As for Michael, his resolve was tested shortly before the opening bell when his daughter Michelle came into the dressing room.