5

FEBRUARY 1978. LEON DIDN’T STAND A CHANCE. THIS WASN’T SIXTO Soria. This was the world heavyweight championship. This was Muhammad Ali.

By now Ali had done it all. In 1964 he’d freed boxing from the clenches of the mob by beating the last connected titleholder, Sonny Liston, and used the heavyweight title as a stage from which to champion the Black Power movement. He joined the Nation of Islam, gained followers worldwide, and changed his name from the one listed on his birth record, Cassius Clay, to the one emblematic of his new religion. In 1967 he had polarized much of white America by refusing induction into the US Army, a news-quaking act of rebellion that resulted in his exile from boxing.

According to Douglas Hartmann, author of Race, Culture and the Revolt of the Black Athlete, “At that period Ali was especially influential for coming-of-age black athletes. That was the story of athlete consciousness in the sixties: that they needed to be more than athletes to take pride in their accomplishments, to represent their race. A lot of people really hated [Ali] because he was trying to call attention to discrimination and prejudice on racial and religious grounds, and Americans weren’t ready to hear that.”

Ali had returned to the national stage in 1971 after a three-and-a-half-year exile and took on the new champ, Joe Frazier. The event, billed as “The Fight of the Century,” was the Holy Grail: It marked the first time two undefeated world champions were meeting in the ring. After fifteen mesmerizing rounds Frazier retained the title with a unanimous decision, dealing Ali the first loss of his career. Ali regained the title in 1974 by knocking out George Foreman in Zaire, and successfully defended it the following year against Frazier in Manila. By 1978 America had changed and Ali was one of the biggest benefactors of its newly revised history. The new generation didn’t see him as an arrogant draft-dodger, but as a visionary who had guts enough to stand up for his beliefs.

In his second reign as champion, Ali had achieved nearly godlike status. He had come to be an ambassador of sorts—bringing title fights to countries around the world and meeting with foreign heads of state. He had become the voice of a generation—Leon’s generation. And like others before him, he had used the heavyweight title to vault himself into nobility.

Leon was the first to say he had spent his life worshipping at the altar of Ali. Back in Pruitt-Igoe he and his friends would watch the champ fight on Wide World of Sports and then spend hours in the gym imitating his moves.

“Ali was the guy we always talked about,” James Caldwell remembers. “We wished we could be him. It was amazing that a guy his size was so fast and could do the shuffle. He was fast enough to hit a guy, do the shuffle, and hit him again. That’s a bad son of a gun.”

Luther Boyd recalls, “Ali was the man. He was a beautiful man. He didn’t look like a boxer. He ran his mouth but he could back up his words. What we loved about him most was he told the government where to go in so many words. He stood up for what he believed in and it paid off.”

To this day sportswriter Robert Lipsyte sees in Ali an athlete of supreme conviction. “Ali sacrificed for his principles. He was the most important person in sports who ever did that,” Lipsyte says. “He sacrificed money, influence, and prestige for his religion. To white kids of that era, he said you’re not a coward or a faggot, no matter what people call you, for refusing to fight in this war. For blacks, he was the man who told the establishment to go to hell.”

According to Ali biographer Thomas Hauser, “Ali at that point was almost universally beloved in this country. He had gone through his rehabilitation. Gerald Ford invited him to the White House. He was the king. He was royalty.”

Michael Conforti, clinical psychologist and pop culture analyst, views Ali as an athlete who rose above his circumstances. “Ali incorporated aspects of a much bigger world, and he wasn’t a thug. He was elegant, well-dressed in Armani suits, praying, religious,” he says.

Professor and boxing writer Gerald Early echoes the others’ sentiments. “At his height Ali was not just the most famous boxer of his time, he was the most famous boxer in history. He was the most famous American athlete on the planet. Because of Ali, people were interested in boxing.”

Culturally, Leon was the antithesis of Ali. He wasn’t pretty; he didn’t care that he’d lost his front teeth. He wasn’t articulate, and he hadn’t shown any awareness of political or social issues. His service in the Marines scored him some points with old-timers, but the armed forces had become a nonissue to the younger generation. Leon was seen simply as an opponent, a payday, a wide-eyed ghetto kid walking into the lion’s cage with nothing in his pocket but a slingshot.

The Ali-Spinks fight defied all sense of fair play. At the age of twenty-four, Leon had amassed all of seven professional fights. Standing six-one, he weighed only 197½ pounds—barely a heavyweight. Ali outweighed him by twenty-seven pounds and held a four-inch advantage in reach. The Vegas casinos had the odds at 10–1, but most bookmakers wouldn’t even take the bet.

Even Ali had thought the match was a crazy idea.

“I can’t fight this kid,” he told Butch Lewis when Top Rank had first suggested putting the fight together. “It would make me the laughingstock of the world.”

But Ali realized he needed a laugher. His recent fights had taken their toll on his thirty-six-year-old body. After dispatching Richard Dunn in five rounds, he’d met Japanese wrestling star Antonio Inoki in a mixed-martial-arts exhibition. The farcical event took place in Tokyo in June 1976 and was so overhyped that wrestling promoter Vince McMahon Sr. was able to sell 32,000 ten-dollar tickets to a closed-circuit telecast at Shea Stadium.

The contest had near-tragic results. Because the agreed-upon rules had outlawed basic wrestling moves, Inoki spent the entire fight on the floor, kicking at Ali’s shins, ultimately sending him to the hospital with blood clots in his legs. Ali’s personal physician, Ferdie Pacheco, insisted that Ali’s mobility never fully recovered.

Bob Arum, who promoted the match, called the encounter “terrible” and “embarrassing,” and years later described it to TheSweetScience.com this way: “Ali is bleeding from the legs. He gets an infection in his legs; almost has to have an amputation. Ali could’ve been a cripple for the rest of his life.”

In September 1976, three months after the Inoki fiasco, the exhausted champion was back on his battered feet, eking out a decision against Ken Norton. He then sleepwalked to a unanimous decision against Alfredo “The Spanish Omelet” Evangelista, followed by fifteen bone-crushing rounds with Earnie Shavers. So when the champion saw that Leon could only muster up a draw against the mediocre Scott LeDoux, his wheels started turning. Fighting Leon would be the rough equivalent of taking a weeklong vacation in Vegas—Ali just needed a way to justify the bout. After weeks of deliberation, he found his answer hanging around Leon’s neck: Olympic gold. Ali, a gold medalist in 1960, had beaten Olympic stars Floyd Patterson, Joe Frazier, and George Foreman. With a little salesmanship, he could pitch Leon as the next in line. Should anybody accuse him of handpicking the ripest tomato can in trunks, he had a precedent. In 1957 Floyd Patterson’s manager, Cus D’Amato, had agreed to give the previous year’s Olympic gold medalist Pete Rademacher a title shot against Patterson in his first pro fight. Rademacher hit the deck seven times before the fight was stopped in the sixth round.

Ali got Lewis on the phone. “Butch, I want him,” he said. “I want your boy bad.”

To Lewis and Arum, Top Rank’s contracts made the fight a win-win. If Ali kept the title, Top Rank would retain control over the world’s most popular athlete. If Leon somehow came out the winner, Top Rank would have contractual rights to Leon’s first three defenses, with an option for the next three.

The only glitch was a World Boxing Council (WBC) rule requiring the challenger to be a top-ten contender—a practice presumably adopted to stop champions from wreaking havoc on untested opponents. Leon hadn’t yet cracked the top ten—he hadn’t cracked the ratings system at all—so Lewis and Arum held a closed-door meeting with WBC president Jose Sulaiman. When the door reopened, Leon had his shot. He would fight Italian heavyweight champion Alfio Righetti and the winner would then challenge Ali. Nobody questioned that Righetti wasn’t ranked any higher than Leon (although his name did magically pop up as the number-nine contender after the Sulaiman meeting). Righetti was so obviously handpicked that if anybody had bothered digging, they might well have found Arum’s fingerprints all over the WBC files. Righetti, a traffic cop in Rimini, Italy, had not been defeated in twenty-seven bouts, but those opponents had a collective record of 444–283, which averages out to 16–10. Not exactly world-class contenders.

Lewis later recalled in Thomas Hauser’s Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times, “Leon beat Righetti in a [10-round decision]; they both looked awful. But I figured Leon, if he trained right, would be respectable against Ali, because Ali was slipping; he was slipping a lot.”

Slipping enough to lose to Leon? Leon’s own mother was skeptical.

“You’re small potatoes compared with Ali,” Kay had warned her son. “You’re crazy, Leon. You’ll get wiped out.”

Nobody disagreed. Not even Leon.

Leon sat a few rows back of ringside. He was shrouded inside a hooded sweatshirt and yelling up at Michael, who was trading blows with Tom “The Bomb” Bethea, a meaty slugger from New York.

“Wiggle!” Leon yelled, urging his kid brother to move his head. “Wiggle!”

Michael wiggled on cue.

Leon jumped and shouted for all eight rounds of the fight, whooping especially loud when Michael rested his lethal right hand and pelted Bethea with left hooks.

Once the decision was announced and Michael had claimed his seventh victory in as many fights, Leon scampered back to his dressing room. It was time to have his hands wrapped for the biggest fight of his young career.

At the Hilton Pavilion the chants had been sparking all evening. When Leon crossed the ropes to the Marine Corps anthem “Semper Fi” they spread like a forest fire.

“Ali! Ali! Ali!”

In the ring Leon shadowboxed on the balls of his feet, letting off enough nervous energy to power the overhead lights. Of the 5,298 spectators surrounding the ring, at least three were pulling for Leon: his mother Kay, who clutched the worn leather-bound red Bible that sat on her lap; his brother Michael, who sat near Leon’s corner; and his wife, Nova, who claimed that the ABC producers, much like the Spinks family and Top Rank, shunned her because she was over six feet tall, had a bleached blonde Afro, and tipped the scales at two hundred pounds.

The music switched to “Pomp and Circumstance” and the crowd roared, knowing it was about to see the self-proclaimed “Greatest.”

Ali emerged from his dressing room surrounded by a parade of cornermen, hangers-on, and sidekicks. He made his way to the ring, a somber face peeking out from behind a white hooded robe. The noise inside the Pavilion reached fever pitch as spectators rose to their feet, cheering, shouting, clapping, chanting. Even Leon applauded as the champion crossed the ropes and entered the ring.

Leading up to the fight, the major dailies had already begun running stories on how Ali had gone from invincible champion to aging fighter. Ferdie Pacheco had quit Ali’s corner a year earlier, insisting that the champ was risking neurological damage by continuing to take punches to the head. According to Pacheco, Ali should have called it quits after defeating Frazier in Manila three years earlier. While many fight fans were arguing whether the sport should let Leon into the ring with Ali, Pacheco was convinced it shouldn’t have let Ali into the ring at all.

While the champ had been diagnosing himself fit to fight, Leon had been in the Catskills following his usual training regimen of hard work and harder partying. Michael had joined him in camp and buoyed his spirits, but there was little he could do to keep his brother in check.

“Leon was a problem right from the beginning because he was so undisciplined,” Bob Arum says now. “We started making fights for Leon and he would get drunk before the fights. So we knew that he didn’t have a very long life as a top heavyweight because of how he was abusing himself.”

Nobody was more frustrated than Sam Solomon, Leon’s sixty-two-year-old trainer, who had worked with the likes of Sonny Liston, Ernie Terrell, and, for a short time, Ali. Solomon was a disciplined, punctual man, a streetwise cornerman who’d spent the 1930s and 1940s barnstorming in tents and local social clubs as an amateur and semipro welterweight. He’d also spent a few seasons as a catcher in the Negro National League, pocketing $7.50 a game.

Solomon told Sports Illustrated’s Pat Putnam, “To get [Leon] to the gym, I have to wake him at noon to get him there by three. For roadwork, I gotta get up at five to get him running by eight. He has no conception of time. And sleep? Man, does that boy sleep. He’ll fall asleep just sitting on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. Or he’ll walk in circles for a while and then sit down and fall asleep. When he goes to the bathroom and he don’t come out after a while, you know he’s fallen asleep. But when he does get awake, there’s no stopping him. Out all night. Loves to dance. Jumping from one thing to another. Even when he trains he goes overboard. Can’t get him to quit.”

Roger Stafford, Leon’s Marine Corps buddy, remembers that nobody was able to stop Leon from being Leon. “Alcohol, marijuana, cocaine. You name it, Leon did it.”

And, according to Stafford, Leon indulged right up until the bell rang.

“I was the only one besides his brother that knew what Leon would do,” Stafford says. “But Michael couldn’t hold him back. I tried to keep him in line before the fight against Ali. These pimps in Las Vegas had these houses and lots of girls and a lot of drugs. They told Leon they were having a get-together and they invited him. I pleaded with him not to go.

“Leon couldn’t pass the drugs by. He said, ‘If you ain’t going with me, I’m going by myself.’ So I had to go with him to watch out for him, to watch they wouldn’t steal nothing from him. And Leon got tore up, he was so intoxicated, and this was two days before he fought Ali. He didn’t get hooked up with no women. All he was thinking about was getting drunk and full of drugs. I was just sitting there watching him and they were fixing drugs on him.

“It was early in the morning when we got back to the Hilton. It was time for us to put on our sweats and run. Leon was in the best shape of his life. This guy could run, I swear. He was an animal. That’s what they called him. Butch Lewis called him Leon the Lion.”

The stories surrounding Leon’s exploits prior to the Ali fight don’t end there. As Ali was leaving the hotel to do his roadwork at four in the morning, Leon was coming in from an all-nighter, and, according to Ali’s business manager Gene Kilroy, was dressed to the nines right down to his “playboy alligator shoes.”

“Hey, Muhammad Ali!” Leon called out. “Heavyweight champion of the world!”

Ali didn’t answer, but instead of taking to the road, he went into the coffee shop, turned to Kilroy, and said, “What am I doing here? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world and this kid is nothing.”

So when the bell rang, Leon the Lion, high from a party that had started in Pruitt-Igoe and still showed no signs of slowing down, ran to the center of the ring and met up with “The Greatest.”

Leon went after Ali with a vengeance in round one, hitting the champ with everything but a two-by-four. This was not a surprise. Leon’s reputation preceded him.

It was more surprising that Ali was out of shape—noticeably so. His punches were sloppy and lacked zip. He willingly handed Leon the first three rounds by relying on his self-styled “rope-a-dope,” which he had used so effectively against Norton, Shavers, and, most famously, Foreman. But Ali’s strategy of covering up against the ropes was quickly looking as worn out as the champion himself. Designed to exhaust Leon by seducing him into letting loose with relentless, energy-sucking punches, the “rope-a-dope” wound up doing the opposite: It weakened Ali. Leon’s cornermen deserved the credit. Solomon and assistant trainer George Benton, whom Butch Lewis had brought in before the Alfio Righetti fight, figured that Leon’s youthful body had a far deeper gas tank than any of Ali’s previous opponents. They instructed Leon to target his assault at Ali’s biceps, thereby tiring the champ’s aging arms, slowing his jab, and forcing his hands to drop.

Throughout the first six rounds, the plan seemed to be working. But either due to battle fatigue or a cocaine hangover, Leon tired in the seventh. Running out of steam, he reverted to his old habit of standing straight up, which made him an easier target.

Angelo Dundee, Ali’s longtime trainer, had spent the night exhorting his fighter to get off the ropes. Now he saw Leon sucking in gallons of air through his open mouth. Before the bell rang to start the eighth, Dundee urged Ali to finish off the young challenger. Leon had made Dundee nervous ever since the night Dundee saw him do away with Pedro Agosto at Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis.

In his memoir, My View from the Corner, Dundee recalled spotting Leon at five o’clock on the morning of the Agosto fight. “I caught Leon getting out of a cab, kissing his lady friend of the evening, or morning, or whenever, goodbye, and then taking a swig out of a bottle—no glass, mind you, that would have wasted a step, just straight out of the bottle. That night he went into the ring and cold-cocked his opponent, Pedro Agosto, in one round. Now that’s tough.”

Dundee shouted at Ali before the bell. “He’s starting to stand up, this kid. That’s his style, you’ll nail him.”

Ali responded by staying light on his feet throughout the eighth, stinging Leon with laser-like jabs. The thousands of fans who had paid a total of $756,300 to pass through the Hilton Pavilion turnstiles were now on their feet, whooping and bellowing.

But Leon had a reserve of energy and weathered the storm. When the bell rang for the ninth round, he glanced over at Michael for reassurance and then returned to his electric bob-and-weave agenda. Ali leaned against the corner post and covered up as Leon fired a seventeen-punch salvo of hooks, crosses, and uppercuts. He didn’t slow down until the final seconds of the round, when Ali let loose with a combination that staggered Leon. But that didn’t stop Leon from giving Ali an affectionate pat on the butt as the bell clanged and Leon headed back to his corner.

Ali’s handlers were encouraged by the champion’s late burst.

Bundini Brown, Ali’s ever-present sidekick, was one of them.

“Beautiful,” Brown said as Ali slumped down on his stool, trying to regain his breath.

“He’s ready, he’s ready,” Dundee told Ali. “Let’s go to work. Bury him. The left will take him out.”

But Ali couldn’t bury Leon. The best the champ could do was back him up and bombard him with combinations. Ali took the tenth and eleventh but Leon was still pumping in the twelfth. For every punch Ali threw, Leon retaliated with at least one of his own. Neither fighter gave an inch. At the end of the twelfth, the bout was even: Judge Harold Buck had it 114–114; Judge Lou Tabat had it 115–113 for Leon; and Judge Art Lurie had it 116– 112 for Ali.

It all came down to the final three rounds. Ali knew his way around this part of a match; he had taken bouts from the likes of Frazier, Norton, and Shavers in the so-called championship rounds. For his part, Leon had never gone more than ten.

It’s no wonder the Hilton crowd was stunned when, in the thirteenth, Leon blew in like a tornado. The spectators weren’t privy to the exchange in Leon’s corner before the bell sounded. Neither were the viewers at home, since CBS had cut to a commercial while keeping its cameras rolling. After the fight, replays of the raw footage revealed a curious scene.

“You’re doing it, baby! You’re doing it!” the balding, moon-faced Solomon could be heard shouting at Leon. “But I want you to keep that left hand going.” Then, while holding an unmarked brown bottle, he told Leon to spit out his water so “I can give [you] some juice.”

Nobody will ever know for certain what was in that bottle—although it’s reasonable to assume it was more refreshing than lemonade. Leon’s pals from the DeSoto suspected it might have been honey water, an innocuous mix of sugar water and mint used by Kenny Loehr to relax his fighters’ stomachs during a fight. Veteran trainer Emanuel Steward watched the fight and had no idea what was in the bottle, although he’d heard of cornermen juicing their fighters with a home brew of orange juice, honey, and cocaine. Years after the fight, Milt Bailey, the legendary cutman who worked Leon’s corner that night, admitted to mixing some quasi-legal concoctions for his fighters, one of which was a mixture of ammonia, water, and peppermint schnapps.

While the exact contents of the bottle remain a mystery, there’s no doubt that Leon’s punches in the thirteenth and fourteenth regained the potency they’d been missing in the middle rounds. Leon threw sharp combinations and took it to Ali.

With three minutes left, Dundee tried desperately to wake up his fighter.

“This is the ballgame,” he implored Ali. “You got to go out and win this round big, real big. Look at him over there; he’s out on his feet; he’s shot his bolt. Hit him and he’ll go.”

Across the ring Solomon was in his fighter’s ear, pumping him with words of encouragement. He was sure Leon could take the title if he ended the night on his feet.

“Don’t get careless now, understand?” Solomon shouted at Leon, his voice smothered by thunderous cheering.

Leon nodded, sweat drenching his face, neck, and shoulders. Don’t get careless. Stay off the ropes. Wiggle. Had Solomon stepped aside—and maybe he knew not to—Leon may have lowered his guard at the sight of Ali slumped on his stool, an almost lifeless figure succumbing to the forces of gravity.

Solomon wasn’t the only one to sense an upset. The crowd, fearing the end of Ali’s mythic reign, was on its feet trying to will its hero to victory.

“Ali! Ali! Ali!”

Millions of television viewers were doing the same in their living rooms. By now CBS’s share of home viewers had risen to 71 percent in New York, 62 percent in Chicago, and 60 percent in Los Angeles. Before the fight a CBS executive had approached Ali and asked him to let the fight go a few rounds so the prime-time audience would have something to watch. The network had been billing Leon as the real-life Rocky Balboa. Word was out that it might be true.

Solomon’s advice didn’t stick with Leon for long. From the moment the bell rang to start the fifteenth, he and Ali were both swinging for knockouts. Some called the round a phenomenal display of heart; others called it a street brawl. For Leon, it was risky. He didn’t seem to care that he was battling an experienced champion. He had only two speeds—turbo and sleep—and he opened the throttle. He was “The Wild Bull of Camp Lejeune.”

The Bull landed cutting blows—all of them zeroing in on Ali’s head—but the champ unloaded vicious combinations of his own. Leon stumbled from an Ali right, but quickly recovered his footing and snapped back with a two-fisted assault. The energy in the ring amped up as quickly as the clock wound down. Ali tried to put Leon away, to pummel him back into obscurity. But Leon seemed to gather strength as he and the champ slugged their way deeper into the round.

More chants of “Ali! Ali! Ali!”

No doubt, Ali saw the openings. But some insidious, invisible opponent—most likely age but possibly Solomon’s brown bottle—made penetrating those openings an uphill battle.

Leon launched haymaker after haymaker. A hard left staggered the tired champion. Ali looked as if he might tumble to the canvas, but he righted himself and came back with a perfectly executed combination. A minute later Leon connected with a left uppercut that stopped Ali, but again the champ retaliated with a flurry of his own.

When the bell rang, Ali patted Leon on the shoulder and then trudged back to his corner and collapsed on his stool, a far more humble man than the godlike figure that had entered the arena sixty minutes earlier.

Leon’s handlers rushed to congratulate their fighter. Michael tore through the ropes, joining in the celebration. Leon’s circle was obviously convinced the decision would go their way. This was quite an assumption. No contender had taken the heavyweight title by decision since 1935, when James J. Braddock dethroned Max Baer. Not to mention that Ali’s fights had become notorious for questionable outcomes, usually favoring the champ.

The frenzy died down when ring announcer Chuck Hull stepped to the microphone.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a split decision.”

A spike of moans and boos bit into the air but then quickly melted away.

“Judge Art Lurie scores 143–142, Ali.”

A few cheers rang out but then the arena grew anxiously silent again as Hull read the two remaining scores.

“Judge Lou Tabat scores 145–140, Spinks.”

Again, the crowd let out with a smattering of cheers and boos.

“Judge Harold Buck scores 144–141.” Hull then paused before declaring, “The new heavyweight champion of the world, Leon Spinks.”

Screams rang out, arms shot up in the air, tears gushed. Leon had pulled off the impossible. He’d been given nothing in life other than a pair of fists and he’d used them to pummel his way out of Hell and into the Promised Land.

Cornermen, insiders, and newfound friends piled onto their hero like a swarm of ants on a breadcrumb. They hoisted the new champion onto their shoulders; in midair Leon thrust his still-wrapped hands to the sky and turned his face to the heavens, his black hole of a mouth stretched open, his eyes squeezed shut as if in rapturous prayer. His sculpted body glistened under the blinding lights, a diamond bouncing on a blanket of red velvet sweat suits.

Boos and catcalls rang out from Ali fans, but they were merely background noise to the real party going on.

In post-fight interviews Ali’s team came up with a litany of excuses: The champ hadn’t trained, he had spent too much time on the ropes, he’d been robbed by the judges. In a few hours they would also cry foul about Solomon’s magic bottle.

Ali, though, took the defeat with class. As he made his way through the crush of Leon’s well-wishers, he congratulated the new champ.

“You upset the world tonight,” he said to Leon in the center of the ring.

“Just like you used to,” Leon said. “Thanks for the shot.”

Leon meant every word. After the fight he went to the ex-champ’s dressing room, kissed him on the cheek, and told him “good fight.”

Then he headed back to his hotel room, only to find seventy-five reporters and celebrity seekers squeezed into the modest two-bedroom suite.

Hiding his swollen eyes behind a pair of oversized sunglasses, Leon lacked the bravado usually associated with champions in the testosterone-driven sport. About Ali he said, “He’s still the greatest. I’m just the latest.”

Then he answered questions as best he could, but he had never been good with words and wasn’t about to change simply because he’d won the title. I want to be the best. He didn’t think I was as strong as I was. I want to retire while I’m young. Clichés, sentence fragments, rambling thoughts. It wasn’t what the world expected from the heavyweight champion. Then again, the world had gotten used to Ali.

Still, boxing’s rainmakers happily embraced Leon as the new champion. CBS executive Robert J. Wussler had big plans for him, figuring that Leon’s refreshing candor, crude brawling style, and up-from-the-ghetto success story would make him more of a people’s champ than Ali had ever been. But to get at Leon, Wussler would have had to cut through a thicket of shysters and charlatans that had already encircled him. As one sports columnist put it, Leon arrived in Vegas alone, but left “surrounded by smiling thieves.” Michael was painfully aware of the predators that instantaneously descended on his brother. Years later, he would recall how the “bad things” started the minute the fight ended.

Those bad things surely included a festering power struggle in Leon’s corner. Veteran sportswriter Jerry Izenberg, who’d just finished covering the fight for the Newark Star-Ledger, ran into George Benton at the Hilton coffee shop. There he heard the extent of the infighting.

“It’s about one o’clock in the morning,” Izenberg recalls. “George is sitting alone having a sandwich. So I walked over and sat down, and we were talking about the fight. George said, ‘It was a fuckin’ miracle. The other guy didn’t try very hard tonight and I was able to help Leon a little bit. But you know what I had to do to [duck Solomon and] help Leon? I took him into the bathroom of Caesars Palace [the day before the fight] and showed him how I wanted him to throw a jab. And we stood there and I’d say to Leon, ‘Now you do it.’ So whatever help Leon got to win the world heavyweight championship came in the bathroom with George Benton.”

As for the new champ, he was in his hotel room strapping the WBC and WBA belts across his waist, the way champs do when they pose in Ring magazine. He stood in front of the mirror and repeated the words whose meaning he may never have fully grasped: I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.