One Punch from the Promised Land

by John Florio

  By the sixth, Steward had seen enough. Leon was standing straight up—an easy target—and Qawi went at him like a plumber banging on a rusty pipe. Steward threw in the towel, and referee Mills Lane put an official end to the fight at 2:56 of the sixth round.

  As he walked away from the ring, Lane told ringside reporters, “[Leon’s] knees were beginning to buckle with each blow. He was not throwing any punches in return and he was getting hit with a lot of solid blows. There was no point in getting the kid killed.”

  After the onslaught had abated, Leon stood with his right hand resting on the rope, blood streaming from his lower lip, his eyes glued to Qawi. Perhaps he was upset at being mocked, because he had no problem with the premature stoppage of the fight.

  “What took you so long?” he said to Steward. “I could get killed with someone like you in my corner.”

  Years later Steward would recall, “I hate losing a fight, but I stopped it. Leon came over to me and said, ‘Don’t be so damn serious. Let’s go have a drink.’ I just had to laugh. That was typical of Leon.”

  Marv Haupt put on his game face and told the press that Leon had lost because he was too weak at 190 pounds. You’ll see Leon again, he said, but it will be as a heavyweight.

  That was pure spin.

  “If Leon would have been serious, he would have beat Qawi,” says Lafata now. “But it’s hard to explain Leon. He just never took anything serious. He just thought that he’s good enough to handle himself. But of course once he got in there, after being out all night, that was very, very discouraging, especially with the work that we put into him. And you couldn’t follow him around. He had his own way. Trying to keep up with him was physically impossible. People told me we should have [locked him up]. If we would’ve let him sit in jail, he would’ve kicked the hell out of Qawi. We should’ve locked him up and slept with him.”

  In his dressing room, Leon did his best to keep his career alive.

  “You still love me, dontcha?” he asked the few people still with him.

  “We still love you, Leon.”

  The truth was that his handlers agreed with Lafata. They figured that Leon had blown his chance—that he would have had an easy time beating Qawi had he stayed sober for even one week leading up to the fight. They weren’t going to watch it happen again.

  “After he showered, [Leon] came out in the casinos with a big smile on his face,” Lafata says. “Of course, we were ready to go home. I had had it. I said, ‘Leon, you’re on your own now. I really can’t handle this anymore. Not in this business.’ And he understood.

  “I have no idea how he ended up getting back from Reno. He got paid and I didn’t see him after that. I wanted no part of him. I was ashamed of myself for what I put Emanuel through. I honestly feel that he handled [Leon] just to help me out. He probably knew from day one that Leon didn’t have a chance.”

  Three months later Leon was back in the news when the Nevada State Athletic Commission suspended him for testing positive for the depressant phenobarbital following the loss to Qawi. According to Leon, he had taken the medication before the fight to alleviate stomach problems he’d developed after dropping twenty-three pounds to make weight.

  The suspension was of no concern to Leon’s handlers. They’d already moved on.

  13

  THE SPLINTERING OF THE HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE BEGAN WHEN THE WBC stripped Leon of his belt in 1978, and it hadn’t let up since. Cynics suspected payoffs. Fans blamed the promoters, particularly Don King, the cunning matchmaker with the gravity-defying hairdo, who seemed to double his fortune—legitimately or not—every time a title bout was signed. When Michael beat Holmes in September 1985, boxing had three champions: one each for the WBC, WBA, and IBF. Writing in the New York Times, Dave Anderson lamented, “The heavyweight division crumbled like crackers into alphabet soup.”

  Anderson now says, “That’s the beauty and the disgrace of boxing—you had three champions. The public may favor one of them, but the other two guys can say, ‘Well, but I’m the champion.’ Of course, they’re not. There should be only one champion. That’s what boxing was for years, going back to Jack Johnson and John L. Sullivan. But all of these alphabet organizations emerged because of television. There were three or four networks and each one could claim they had a championship fight.”

  In the eyes of the public, Michael was the legitimate titleholder—he’d beaten the lineal and most established champion, Larry Holmes. Plus, it was nearly impossible to follow the paths of the other belts.

  Here’s a recap.

  The WBC belt: After the WBC stripped Leon for fighting Ali, the championship went to Norton. In his first defense Norton lost it in a barnburner to Holmes. Holmes then defended the belt sixteen times before dumping it and accepting recognition by the newly formed IBF. (He became the IBF’s first heavyweight champion and defended that belt three times before losing it to Michael.) Tim Witherspoon beat Greg Page for Holmes’s vacated WBC championship, but promptly lost it to Pinklon Thomas.

  The WBA belt: Ali had retired and vacated the title after taking it from Leon in New Orleans. John Tate won the vacated belt by beating Gerrie Coetzee but lost it in his first defense to Mike Weaver, who lost it in his third defense to Michael Dokes, who lost it in his second defense to Gerrie Coetzee, who lost it in his first defense to Greg Page, who lost it in his first defense to Tony Tubbs. Few people realized it—how could they?—but in October 1985, Tony Tubbs was the WBA heavyweight champion.

  So it stands to reason that when Don King showed up at Seth Abraham’s Greenwich Village apartment that October to peddle a Pinklon Thomas–Trevor Berbick WBC title fight, the HBO Sports president had zero interest.

  But King and Abraham had aired many fights together, and King wasn’t about to give up. He returned to Abraham’s apartment the following night to pitch the same fight. This time instead of dismissing the bout, Abraham used it as a springboard to a bigger idea.

  “[Don and I] were watching the World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Kansas City Royals,” Abraham recalls. “I said to Don, ‘So, let me ask you a question. Seven games, World Series, undisputed baseball champion. Could we use this Thomas-Berbick fight as the first bout in a heavyweight world series?’

  “Don stayed until about 2:30 in the morning; the game was long over. We sketched out the seven fights we’d need to unify the three different titles. I said to Don, ‘Come back and tell me the matchups and the license fees.’ If Don came back and said seven fights at $250 million, obviously it’s a nonstarter. But Don came back about a month later and the number wasn’t on Mars. It was on Earth. It was high, but it wasn’t out of the galaxy.”

  The number was $20 million. And the schedule was relatively straightforward. The tournament would start with three title fights, one each for the WBC, the IBF, and the WBA. After that the WBC and the IBF champions would fight mandatory title defenses. Then the WBA champ would fight the WBC champ, and the winner of that bout would fight the IBF champ.

  Negotiations between the fighters and their promoters began on December 24, 1985, at HBO’s offices in New York and wrapped up in mid-January in Atlanta. The talks may have gone more quickly if Butch Lewis had been sold on the idea that the tournament was in Michael’s best interest. But since Lewis represented the fighter generally considered the “true” champion, he’d had the luxury of waiting until he was all but certain Michael would be the last man standing.

  The series kicked off on March 22, 1986, at the Riviera in Las Vegas. In the opener Trevor Berbick took the WBC title from Pinklon Thomas in a twelve-round unanimous decision.

  Michael was up next. He’d be defending the IBF title on April 19. The bout? A rematch with the ex-champion who’d retired from the sport seven months earlier with his head held high and his foot planted defiantly in his mouth.

  Larry Holmes had held the title from 1978 to 1985, but he’d never captured the public’s imagination in the same way that Muhammad Ali or Joe Louis had.


  According to Carlo Rotella, author of Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, “Holmes fought his way up through the deepest, most dangerous heavyweight division of all time. He stood for pretty much every virtue that mattered to the working class in the first half of the twentieth century: craft, will, resilience, ability to perform at a high technical level for a long time, to endure suffering, to beat the best. The money was good; the adulation was good. But there was always, ‘You’re not Muhammad Ali.’ He was always second fiddle.”

  Perhaps that’s why Holmes had lashed out at the fighter whose win streak he had chased and missed. Whatever the reason, his diatribe against Marciano and Marciano’s family didn’t help his cause. He’d sounded petty, angry, and bitter, and although he had tried his best to undo the damage, his apology didn’t sway the court of public opinion.

  New York Times sportswriter Dave Anderson says, “I always found Larry Holmes to be a terrific guy in a quiet setting. But when you gave him a microphone in a press conference, you never knew what he was going to say. He realized he said the wrong thing about Marciano the next day, but it was too late. And it’s a shame because it tarnished him at the time.”

  Holmes issued an apology in his 1998 autobiography, Larry Holmes: Against the Odds. “[I said things] to Peter Marciano and Rocky’s kids that were uncalled for and simply wrong. Somewhere in there I must have realized I’d gone too far because in my fashion I tried to apologize. I said, ‘Rocky was one of the greatest fighters of all time. For anybody to accomplish forty-nine victories, even if they were all bums, is some kind of record. If I didn’t think he was a great fighter, his pictures wouldn’t be on the walls of my motel near Easton.’ But, of course, it was too little, too late. As they say, ‘The insult is halfway around the world before the apology gets its boots on.’”

  The Spinks-Holmes rematch was scheduled to take place in Las Vegas, and Holmes had few allies left. He sent a letter to Bob Lee, president of the IBF, appealing to Lee’s sense of fair play. In the note he listed the judges that he felt were off-limits. According to Holmes, Lee sent back a reply that said Holmes had been treated fairly the first time around and would be treated the same way again.

  That wasn’t enough for the fuming ex-champion. A week before the fight, Holmes lifted his moratorium on interviews and targeted the very officials who held his future in their scorecard-wielding hands. He told the press he didn’t trust the Nevada judges, that they were “incompetent” and “must have been drunk” when they scored the first Spinks fight.

  Just when Holmes had been trying to endear himself to the press and the public, he dug himself a bigger hole than the one he’d put himself in earlier.

  April 19, 1986. When ring announcer Chuck Hull introduced Larry Holmes to the full house at the Hilton, the ex-champion was hit with boos and catcalls. Judging by the steely look in his eye, Holmes was focusing on settling his scores with Michael, the Vegas judges, and a legion of sportswriters he felt had never warmed up to him.

  Following tradition, the champion, Michael Spinks, was introduced last.

  “And in the blue corner,” Hull proclaimed, “now fighting out of Wilmington, Delaware, weighing 205 pounds, he is undefeated in his professional career, twenty-eight wins, no defeats, nineteen knockouts. He is a former undisputed light-heavyweight champion of the world, the current IBF champion of the world: Michael Spinks.”

  The crowd of 8,300 cheered as Michael raised his gloves in response. It was no accident that Michael’s sculpted body seemed as solid as the ring posts; Mackie Shilstone had put him on a training regimen even more intense than the one he’d designed for the first Holmes fight. This time around Michael had trained in bursts. He’d broken up 440-, 880-, and 1,320-meter runs with one-minute breaks to simulate the pattern of a fifteen-round fight. He worked out with weighted gloves to replicate late-round fatigue. And he leapt sideways on and off plyometric boxes to strengthen his legs (while simulating his signature lateral boxing style).

  Despite Michael’s conditioning and his championship status, he was still the underdog against Holmes—just as Leon had been when defending his title against Ali in New Orleans.

  Before the fight HBO commentators Barry Tompkins, Larry Merchant, and Sugar Ray Leonard put the onus of the match on the big man, wondering whether he’d finally pull the trigger on his powerful right hand.

  Tompkins said, “So, we’ll watch the right hand of Larry Holmes. He didn’t throw it in the first round of the last fight.”

  “What we have to see here is if Larry Holmes is going to be the aggressive fighter he says he’s going to be and sustain the pace that that requires,” Merchant added.

  Leonard predicted, “I would be surprised if Larry doesn’t jump on Michael right in the first round.”

  As Leonard forecast, Holmes went right at Michael as soon as the bell clanged. He punched, bullied, and manhandled the smaller man. Then, shortly into the round, he threw Michael to the canvas.

  “Get up,” Holmes snarled.

  Michael got to his feet. To Mills Lane he said, “It’s OK, ref. It’s OK.”

  Holmes’s thuggish behavior set the tone for the first four rounds, and Michael spent those twelve minutes ducking, dodging, and dancing out of harm’s way. He turned and twisted his body back and forth, holding up his hands to protect his head, and rarely threw a punch. His awkward defensive antics seemed to anger Holmes all the more. The big man swung hard and often—clearly looking for a knockout. He landed a number of solid shots but missed with just as many. Michael withstood the tidal wave of anger and adrenaline gushing out of the ex-champ, but there was no doubt that Holmes won those rounds big.

  The pattern began to shift in the fifth. Holmes had said before the fight that he was going to take punches and wear Michael down. But Michael’s strategy of staying away started to pay off, and Holmes was the one wearing down. Michael began unleashing stinging punches. Jab, jab, right hand. The crowd broke out into chants of “Mi-chael! Mi-chael!” as their fighter came alive. Jab, jab, right hand. Holmes took the punches without retreating, but he lacked the adrenaline of youth.

  Tompkins told the HBO audience in the sixth, “Very, very slowly, you have the feeling that the momentum of this fight is switching to the champion. Almost imperceptibly.”

  As Holmes’s energy continued to wane, Michael began showing the confidence of a fighter who knows his opponent can’t hurt him. Jab, jab, right-left-right-left. It wasn’t pretty, it was tactical, but Michael was putting points in his column.

  Judges Frank Brunette and Jerry Roth gave Michael the fifth and sixth rounds. They also awarded him every round from the eighth through the thirteenth. Joe Cortez agreed on all rounds except the fifth and the ninth, both of which he gave to Holmes. After the thirteenth Michael had a slight edge on two of the three official scorecards, but the bout was still up for grabs and neither fighter had much juice left. The early rounds had worn Holmes down, and thirteen rounds of running, dodging, and counterpunching had sucked the energy out of Michael. The remainder of the fight would be fought between two depleted and desperate champions.

  Richie Giachetti told Holmes after the thirteenth, “Ya gotta keep throwing punches. Look at him. Look at him over there. Look at the ice and everything on him. Let’s go, dammit. Ya gotta want it. You gotta go get it, baby.”

  Michael kicked off the fourteenth with a flurry of pinpoint blows and took control of the ring for the first two minutes of the round. But just as his fans were figuring he could cruise to the bell, Holmes pounded him with a right that sent his knees to within an inch of the canvas. Remarkably, he sprung back up (he would later give credit to the plyometric boxes), but he spent the final sixty seconds of the round on Queer Street. One more punch from Holmes would surely finish him, but, inexplicably, that shot never came.

  HBO’s Barry Tompkins: “Larry Holmes himself said, ‘I don’t want to leave this to the judges,’ and now he’s got a chance and he’s not pouncing on Michael Spinks.”

  Mich
ael stumbled away from Holmes, threw a couple of lackluster punches, and walked sideways with a facial expression that said he was no more certain he was battling for a championship than walking home from a grocery store. When the big man finally advanced, Michael let loose with a hail of blows that kept Holmes from landing another one of his right-fisted hammers.

  Tompkins: “Spinks just trying to brawl Holmes to keep him off of him.”

  Leonard: “[Holmes] had [Michael] out on his feet. And now Spinks showing the heart he has as a champion and he’s trying to come back.”

  When the bell rang to close the round, Michael thrust his gloves above his head. That he was still on his feet no doubt gave him a sense of victory. He might have felt differently had he known that HBO’s unofficial judge, Harold Lederman, and the network commentators had Holmes winning the fight by four points. (Michael was still narrowly ahead on two of the three official judges’ cards.)

  The fourteenth round had been the most aggressive of the twenty-nine fought between the two men, and the fifteenth topped it. Both swung heavy punches. A small contingency of Holmes fans chanted “Lar-ry! Lar-ry!” but the rest of the house overpowered them with shouts of “Mi-chael! Mi-chael!” Both sides felt their man was getting the better of the other, and both could make a case for their position. As the clock ran out, Holmes and Michael emptied their war chests, and as the bell rang, Michael landed a solid right cross. The fight was over and destiny was exactly where Holmes didn’t want it: in the hands of three Nevada judges.

  Tompkins on-air to Sugar Ray Leonard: “So this one has come to an end…. You have to think Larry Holmes is the winner of this fight. That’s what Larry Merchant had on his card, that’s what Harold Lederman had on his card. You and I saw the fight that way. But again, I harken back to many fights that you and I have done here in Las Vegas, Ray, and I’ve seen some awfully strange decisions.”