One Punch from the Promised Land

by John Florio

  Sugar Ray Leonard: “That’s true, Barry, but judging by the way Larry approached this fight, Larry was the aggressor from round one. I think you have to look at that as your criteria, the fact that Larry was very effective, he was able to land some sharp right hands that stunned Michael Spinks.”

  Holmes went to his corner and huddled with his handlers. Michael stood in the center of the ring; Leon, wearing a do-rag that hung out from under his black-and-gold cap, hugged him and yelled into his ear, “I love you.” Michael patted him with his gloved hand and walked back to his corner, where Butch Lewis was waiting.

  Chuck Hull grabbed the overhead microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, here is the decision of the judges. Judge Frank Brunette scores 144 Spinks, 141 Holmes.”

  The crowd cheered for Michael but quickly became silent. This was going to be a split decision.

  “Judge Joe Cortez scores 144 Holmes, 141 Spinks.”

  Now the crowd booed, fearing that their new whipping boy, Holmes, might have won back his title.

  “Judge Jerry Roth scores 144–142 for the winner by a split decision, and still the IBF heavyweight champion, Michael Spinks.”

  The crowd erupted into a single, joyous roar. Michael shot both arms into the air and his handlers danced wildly around him. Holmes said nothing; he shook his head. His facial expression was one of disgust. He’d just earned $1.125 million (Michael’s take was two million dollars), but for him, this was about much more than money. Michael went over to Holmes in a conciliatory manner, but Holmes rebuffed him. The big man turned away and slipped into his robe.

  Michael went back to his cornermen and yelled for his daughter. “Where’s my baby?” he shouted. “Where’s my baby?”

  Someone brought Michelle over to Michael. The toddler, oblivious to what her father had just been through, reached over and wiped the sweat from his arms and his face while watching him give an interview to Larry Merchant.

  “I knew from twelve on it had to be my fight,” Michael said.

  Then, when asked about the fourteenth round, he added, “I think the big right hand he caught me with, I didn’t know what happened, but I knew I was hit. All I knew was that I was stationary and sort of in limbo…. Right away my mind thought, ‘You’re here too long. I must be dazed, let me get the hell on outta here.’ So I dashed. And I recovered just like that.”

  Standing next to Michael, Lewis steered the interview in the direction he wanted it to go, which was away from Holmes’s punishing right hand and toward the big punches that Michael had landed in the later rounds.

  “You hurt him, too,” Lewis prompted Michael.

  “Oh sure, I hurt him a few times. I know I rattled him,” Michael told Merchant.

  Shortly thereafter Holmes was in a somber mood, icing his right hand in his dressing room. (It would later be revealed that he had fractured his thumb in the third round.) He told Merchant he was leaving the game, that there was no sense in chasing ghosts, that he’d be “walking around punched out and punch drunk” if he didn’t hang up his gloves. Then, he added, “I can still be proud of what I accomplished, and I can say to the judges, the referees, and the promoters to kiss me where the sun don’t shine—and because we’re on HBO, that’s my big black behind.”

  He’d done it again. The crotchety ex-champ was sticking to his guns. But was he right? Did the judges have it in for him? Had his fate been determined before the opening bell?

  Dave Anderson wrote in the New York Times, “On my scorecard, Spinks was ahead, 144–142, earning eight of the last ten rounds after Holmes burned out. Holmes’s hesitation in throwing another right hand in the fourteenth round Saturday night was typical of an old fighter whose reflexes weren’t there anymore. It happened to Muhammad Ali and to Joe Louis. And Saturday night it happened to Holmes, but he has preferred to think there was a plot to make sure he didn’t regain the title.”

  At the time, Jim Lampley was a commentator for ABC Sports. “My perception had been that Spinks’s two wins over Holmes had more to do with Holmes’s shot reflexes than with what Michael had done,” Lampley says, looking back. “But I didn’t give Michael enough credit for his calculated aggression and the way he measured distance—and how brilliantly he confused Holmes.”

  Harold Lederman, HBO’s unofficial ringside scorer, has little doubt as to the winner. “There’s no question Larry won the second fight,” he maintains. “But [Larry] didn’t endear himself to anybody. Whoever was working the fight couldn’t have been too pleased with him. If that made any difference, I don’t know. But Michael was the benefactor of some very questionable judging.”

  According to Richie Giachetti, “The judges, they said Holmes’s comments didn’t bother them, but in the back of your mind, you think about something and you react to it. He called the judges blind and crooked and it more or less turned people off.”

  Tell that to Jerry Roth. “I was one of the judges and it didn’t affect me one way or the other,” he says now. “From a judging standpoint, it’s a three-minute round. I watch the round, I judge that round on the three minutes, and that’s it. I don’t care about [a fighter’s] comments—that doesn’t enter my mind at all. As a professional judge, you’ve got to eliminate those kinds of things from your mind.”

  Author and boxing scholar Carlo Rotella says, “[Michael] won two unscorable, complicated, unsuccessful matchups with Holmes. I say ‘unsuccessful’ because those two guys never found a way to settle who was the better fighter. You couldn’t score those fights and say Holmes won, and you couldn’t score them and say Spinks won. These are exactly the kinds of fights you can’t score on TV because you don’t know how hard they’re hitting.”

  Jerry Izenberg wrote in the Newark Star-Ledger, “You could have wound up scoring the fight with twenty different arithmetical combinations and who is to say you’d be wrong? You could have given it to either fighter or called it a draw and thrown your scorecard up in the air and suggested everybody start all over tomorrow.”

  A month after the fight, Holmes began a short-lived crusade to clean up boxing, testifying for ninety minutes before the Assembly Independent and Regional Authorities Committee in Newark, New Jersey. According to UPI, he “painted a picture of corrupt boxing judges, lackadaisical physicians, exploitative promoters, and unsafe equipment.”

  One of Holmes’s accusations targeted the competency, although not the integrity, of Frank Brunette and Jerry Roth, the two judges who’d been responsible for his second loss.

  It should come as no surprise that in Holmes’s efforts to clean up the sport, he made no mention of Joe Cortez, the ref who scored in his favor. Nor did he take issue with any of the controversial decisions that had tipped his way throughout his seven-year reign as champion. Apparently, every corrupt official in boxing was targeting Holmes.

  In the end the ex-champ’s crusade had virtually no effect on the sport, and even less on Michael.

  The quiet, gangly boxer from Pruitt-Igoe was still unbeaten, still the lineal champion, and still wearing the IBF belt.

  And the heavyweight division was waiting to be unified.

  14

  TO BE THE LAST MAN STANDING IN THE HBO TOURNAMENT, MICHAEL would have to win his next three fights. The first would be a tune-up against a handpicked opponent. The second a mandatory defense against the IBF’s number-one contender Tony Tucker. Then Michael could sit back and watch the fireworks between the WBC and the WBA champs and take on the winner in a final unification match.

  The first of those three fights took place on September 6, 1986, at the Las Vegas Hilton. Michael’s opponent was Norway’s Steffen Tangstad, the unknown European champ who had compiled a 24–1–2 record against a grab bag of mediocrity. He had little power in his left hand, less in his right, and no speed in his hands or feet. A substitute teacher by trade, Tangstad had mortgaged his cottage and gone to the United States when Norway banned boxing in 1981. Michael Katz quipped in the New York Daily News that if the Norwegian were to win, “boxing might
be banned in this country, too.”

  Tangstad entered the ring looking the part of a champion—he stood six-two and weighed a solid 210—but the threat ended there. Michael, an 8–1 favorite, had an easy night, hammering at Tangstad with hard left jabs in the second, knocking him down with a right cross in the third, and flooring him twice—each time with a left hook—in the fourth. After the last knockdown, referee Richard Steele asked Tangstad if he’d had enough. Tangstad said he had.

  “There was a buzzing sound in my head,” Tangstad recalls. “I knew that I could maybe catch Spinks with another good punch, but if he caught me with another good one, I would have been out, and I had never been out in my life. I didn’t like that feeling. And I wanted to go back to another life. So that was my last fight. I retired.”

  Ticket sales for the Spinks-Tangstad fight had been weak, in part because American boxing fans had no awareness of Tangstad, but also because they still hadn’t accepted Michael as a true heavyweight. It didn’t help that Michael continued to shy away from the spotlight. To a public accustomed to headline-hungry champions, he defied the myth. He was a wallflower in a roomful of tough guys.

  “Michael didn’t have the attitude to be a heavyweight,” says Holmes’s trainer Richie Giachetti, “the attitude that you’re the baddest guy in the world. Michael never run off his mouth. He never talked the trash talk.”

  The executives at HBO noticed the same thing, at least as far as the trash talk was concerned. Ratings were low, and the network craved the kind of electricity generated by more flamboyant champions. Only a few weeks before the Tangstad fight, lightning struck.

  “I started paying attention to [Mike] Tyson when he was fighting on the USA Network,” recalls former HBO Sports president Seth Abraham. “He was fighting in upstate New York, in the Catskills area, at the time. He wasn’t a champion, he wasn’t even in the top ten, but here he is with a string of one-round knockouts. So Michael Fuchs [then chairman of the board and chief executive officer of HBO] and I got the idea of signing him to a series of fights at HBO’s expense and then giving him to the promoters, free, if you will, with HBO paying his license fee to [Tyson’s managers] Bill Cayton and Jim Jacobs. We put him on a couple of undercards and he exploded in terms of talent. Then we realized that it would look very phony to do this heavyweight series with Tyson out of it. [So we negotiated] a very complicated deal that put him into the series.”

  HBO added Tyson’s fight against Alfonso Ratliff to the undercard of the Spinks-Tangstad match. Even Tyson couldn’t fill the 9,000-seat arena, but he did boost the tally to a respectable 6,000. The public knew that the Tyson-Ratliff matchup was more ludicrous than Michael-Tangstad. The casinos wouldn’t even take bets on who would win the fight; they’d only give odds on when Tyson would win it. The over-under was five rounds.

  The smart money was on “under.”

  “Tyson fought my old sparring partner from Chicago, Alfonso Ratliff,” Tangstad says. “He was way over the hill. He had no chance against Tyson. After he sparred with me, he was kayoed by Tim Witherspoon. He was a pushover for Tyson and he had nothing left.”

  Tyson put Ratliff out of his misery midway through the second round. The victory brought Tyson’s record to 27–0 with twenty-five knockouts and earned him a shot against Trevor Berbick for the WBC belt.

  Michael was on a collision course with the media magnet from Brooklyn. Spinks-Tyson was the type of matchup that made for a big-money fight: the lineal champ versus a seemingly indomitable rising star. But since the bout would be part of the HBO tournament, Michael would get only a fraction of what Butch Lewis felt he deserved for such an event. The promoter’s wheels started turning. In order for Michael to cash in on the title before taking the marquee fight against Tyson, he’d have to consider matchups outside of the series.

  That’s when all hell broke loose.

  In November 1986 Tyson fought Berbick in the HBO series, taking the WBC belt from the Jamaican-born champion in a second-round KO that turned Berbick’s legs to noodles. At twenty years and four months, Tyson thus became the youngest heavyweight champion in boxing history.

  HBO now had a compelling storyline and its twenty-million-dollar outlay was looking more and more like a shrewd investment. But Butch Lewis was trying to fill the pockets of his fighter, not of the network executives. He’d already begun talking with Dennis Rappaport and Mike Jones about setting up a fight between Michael and their fighter, Gerry Cooney, outside the series.

  Rock Newman, who’d left Qawi’s camp and taken a public relations position with Butch Lewis Productions, witnessed the negotiations. “With Butch and Dennis you had two of the most mercurial, egotistical maniacs going at each other,” Newman says. “Dennis always had a limo to greet him and a guy to wait for him all the time. I remember a negotiation going on until three in the morning, or so, which is not uncommon for Butch’s style. He’s a night owl. Up all night long. In Butch’s office, three o’clock or so in the morning, enough cigarette smoke to kill an elephant, and Scotch, you know, alcohol, and ‘motherfucker’ and ‘fuck you’ and ‘kiss my ass’ and ‘suck my dick.’ And Dennis finally broke it up and said, ‘That’s it, we’ll never talk again.’ And I’m like, ‘Hold it, Dennis! Dennis, wait!’ And Butch is like, ‘Let that motherfucker go. Fuck him.’ Dennis went to the elevator. I went to the elevator after him. We rode downstairs and probably talked a half hour, forty-five minutes. And he comes back up and the stuff starts again. At one point we looked out the window and it was getting light outside.”

  As it turned out, money wasn’t the only stumbling block to making the fight. Michael’s contract with HBO allowed him to defend his title against a nontournament fighter, such as Cooney, provided that Cooney join the HBO series if he were to win. This ensured that HBO would wind up with an undisputed champion. But Cooney wanted no part of the tournament under any conditions. That left Lewis scrambling for a way to make the payday without jeopardizing Michael’s agreement with HBO. It’s called having your cake and eating it too.

  “Word started filtering around the boxing grapevine that Butch was in negotiations with Gerry Cooney,” Seth Abraham recalls. “At first he denied it. He was hoping to pull out of the series and keep the IBF belt. But he clearly got legal advice that he had a much better chance of [pulling out] if he gave up the belt.”

  The advice Lewis received addressed the specificity of the contract’s language. The agreement had been worded in a way that bound “Michael Spinks, IBF champion” to the series but made no such demands on “Michael Spinks, heavyweight.” So, if Michael were to give up his title, he could leave the series and fight whenever, wherever, and whomever he wanted.

  Once shown the loophole, Lewis, with Michael in tow, ran through it. Lewis announced that Michael would not defend his title against the number-one challenger, Tony Tucker, and, as expected, Michael was stripped of his IBF belt. It made little difference to Michael. He had Lewis’s negotiating skills as well as basic mathematics on his side. The Tucker fight would have earned him $500,000; the Cooney bout would land him seven million dollars.

  “To me, the fact that Butch would say, ‘Hey, I can get more money fighting Cooney,’ is irrelevant,” Seth Abraham says. “He signed a contract. If you buy an apartment and the seller comes back and says somebody just offered me $250,000 more, I’m gonna sell it to them, what are you going to do? [You’re going to sue.] Well, somebody offered Butch more money for the apartment, except he had signed a contract, as did Michael, to sell the apartment to HBO. It’s no different.”

  Lewis was indeed blinded by the large payday with Cooney. But it’s also likely that he remembered how his old friend Joe Frazier had taken Ali’s vacated title in 1968. Frazier’s manager, Yank Durham, had pulled his fighter out of the eight-man WBA heavyweight tournament, choosing instead to have Frazier step in at the end and take on one man—Jimmy Ellis—for the championship.

  In this case the maneuver led to HBO’s suing Lewis and Michael. The court sided w
ith Michael, allowing him to leave the HBO tournament with impunity.

  Ross Greenburg, then executive producer of HBO Sports, recalls a meeting held around that time in the HBO offices. “I can vividly remember sitting there in a semi state of panic as Butch Lewis and Don King went after each other from across the table calling each other MFs, and the bombs falling verbally, and the fingers pointing. It was like watching two people on the verge of a confrontation on a street corner. It was ugly. Butch was a fiery guy who lost his temper and you could see in his eyes a kind of sinister anger, very similar to King. They often went toe-to-toe, but this went to another level.”

  “They were actually going to go at each other using the conference room tabletop as the ring,” Abraham says. “I won’t repeat the epithets that were being thrown around. It was end-of-the-world stuff. As I stood there, I couldn’t decide if they wanted HBO to stop them or if they didn’t. We took about an hour break to let everybody cool down.”

  When Michael pulled out, the IBF title was vacant and HBO had a hole in its schedule. Abraham says they did the best they could under the circumstances. “We took the number-one and -two ranked heavyweights—Tony Tucker and Buster Douglas—and had them fight. Was it ideal? No.”

  Ross Greenburg remembers, “[Michael’s departure] didn’t feel like as much of a loss because Tyson was on such a roll; the Tyson train had left the station. Tyson had actually overwhelmed Spinks publicly. If Tyson had left the series, it would’ve been devastating.”

  As it happened, the HBO series did go on, costing the network more money as a result of having to add more fights. But the HBO execs knew they’d get it back, because the Tyson locomotive was definitely gaining momentum.

  Steve Lott, Tyson’s cornerman, recalls the whistle-stops. “Don King got champion after champion after champion in the ring, and the objective was to make Mike [Tyson] look good in each fight, and that’s what happened when he fought those former champions. All of those fights came with a lot of pressure because [Tyson] was not only expected to win, he was expected to win spectacularly.”