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ON FEBRUARY 16, 1978, WHEN THE MORNING EDITION LANDED ON doorsteps around the world, Leon Spinks was as famous as President Jimmy Carter. Maybe more so.

The New York Times: SPINKS DEFEATS ALI TO CAPTURE TITLE

The Montreal Gazette: ALI LOSES TITLE; BOXING WORLD IS STUNNED.

The London Times, below an oversize picture of Leon raising his fists in triumph: NEW WORLD CHAMPION

Leon had taken the WBC and WBA belts from Ali; he’d also become the twenty-fifth fighter since John L. Sullivan to win the lineal title, or as boxing fans would say, he “beat the man who beat the man.” As history shows, it took a certain personality to thrive under the spotlight—and not every champion had it.

In the 1930s Joe Louis had become an American icon. He was willing to play the part of a humble black man who knew his “place” in society. He was willing to adhere to a code of conduct furnished by his handlers, and the strategy paid dividends. Throughout America he was a role model to blacks and whites. It didn’t hurt that he stayed in peak fighting shape and held the belt for twelve years. In 1938 he won a symbolic victory over Nazism by beating Germany’s Max Schmeling. When America entered World War II, Louis joined the Army, raised money for war bonds, and recruited for the armed forces. He shilled for Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie, endorsed Chesterfield cigarettes, and kept himself relevant in popular culture. The public drank Joe Louis punch and Joe Louis bourbon, swung Joe Louis boxing gloves, and wore Joe Louis hair pomade. By the end of the war, the whitewashed Joe Louis had become the face of America.

Decades earlier Jack Johnson had confronted a far different set of circumstances. When he beat Tommy Burns in 1908 to become the first black heavyweight champion, celebrations were cast aside in favor of race riots; and boxing promoters scoured farms, factories, prisons, and coal mines for a white challenger who could beat him. The best they could come up with was ex-champion James J. Jeffries, who had swelled to 330 pounds and had retired to his alfalfa farm. Jeffries lost a hundred pounds to face Johnson in the first “Fight of the Century.” But shedding extra poundage didn’t turn back the clock: the “Great White Hope” was TKOed in the fifteenth round.

Following Johnson’s victory, the revised lyrics of an old Negro spiritual were circulated throughout black communities:

Amazin’ Grace, how sweet it sounds,

Jack Johnson knocked Jim Jeffries down.

Jim Jeffries jumped up an’ hit Jack on the chin,

An’ then Jack knocked him down agin.

The Yankees hold the play,

The white man pulls the trigger,

But it make no difference what the white man say,

The world champion’s still a nigger.

Unlike Louis, Johnson relished stoking the white man’s fire. Refusing to play lackey to white America, he took on the role of devil. One of the most well-known men on the planet, Johnson wore swanky clothes, married white women, flashed a set of gold front teeth, and flaunted his considerable wealth. Legend has it that when pulled over for a fifty-dollar speeding ticket, Johnson gave the cop a hundred-dollar bill and told him to keep the change, that he’d be coming back at the same speed. Eventually, the government ran Johnson out of the country on a trumped-up charge that he was transporting white women across state lines for the purposes of prostitution.

“Why was it such a big deal that Jack Johnson not be heavyweight champion of the world?” sportswriter Robert Lipsyte asks. “Because [the champion] really was this powerful role model. Why else would you care if this guy could beat up white men and fuck white women and taunt opponents and do everything he wanted except for the fact that this title has enormous significance?”

According to BET founder Robert L. Johnson, “The heavyweight division was a visible sign of escaping some of the indignities of being a black man. If you go back and look at the heavyweight championship, it gave, in the case of black Americans, pride that a black man—when put into a ring where the rules were pretty transparent—could stand up and defeat a white man. That was something you could not even think about in your regular day-today job. You’d get lynched or beaten up or whatever. So when you see Jack Johnson, then Joe Louis, and of course, Muhammad Ali, you see black pride being carried on inside those gloves.”

Leon didn’t represent black pride, but he did find himself in a similar predicament to Johnson’s. The “Galveston Giant” had had the nerve to take the title from a white man; Leon had had the nerve to take it from Ali. It was straight out of Faust. In beating the unbeatable, Leon was left with an even greater challenge: Replace the irreplaceable. To fill Ali’s shoes, he would have to become the voice for all that he represented: Pruitt-Igoe, the Olympics, the Marines, the blacks, and the have-nots. This was no easy feat for an inarticulate kid from the projects who had little guidance, an eye for the ladies, and a sweet tooth for cocaine.

The public was waiting. And the spotlight wasn’t going to shine long on an empty stage.

Jackpot. Leon had just earned $300,000—less Mitt Barnes’s 30 percent—and his next fight would bring him more than ten times as much. And that didn’t include endorsement deals. Butch Lewis was already fielding calls from the US Dairy Association, Coca-Cola, 7Up, and Prudential Life Insurance, and he hadn’t even warmed up yet. If Leon invested wisely, he’d be set for life.

To his credit, Leon often said the right things, telling the world he was just Leon, a product of north St. Louis—living proof that the American dream was possible.

“When I came out of the Marines and turned pro, it was life and death for me,” he told Pat Putnam of Sports Illustrated. “If I didn’t make it, I knew what I had to go back to, what was waiting for me. I came from poorness and I don’t want to go back to poorness.”

Spoken like a true champion, only it rang hollow. Within days of winning the title, Leon had assembled a full-blown entourage. Unlike other fighters who hired friends and relatives to accompany them around town—a practice started by Sugar Ray Robinson in the late 1940s—Leon barely knew his entourage. His payroll included two press agents, four trainers, three lawyers, a manager, an accountant, a valet, a personal physician, two promoters, a sparring partner, and a 247-pound bodyguard with a shaved head named Lawrence Tureaud, who preferred to be called Mr. T.

The spending didn’t stop there. It didn’t stop anywhere. Leon shelled out $45,000 on a white six-door Lincoln Continental limousine complete with color TV, bar, phone, and stereo; $18,000 on a Cadillac Seville to go along with the two-and-a-half-carat diamond ring he’d given Nova; $75,000 on a house in Detroit for him and Nova; and an undisclosed sum on a home in Des Moines for his mother-in-law. He also outfitted himself with a new wardrobe that included a pair of black and white mink coats, each with a matching mink hat.

It was evident that Leon had no plans to become any kind of role model. Maybe he didn’t know how. Or maybe he didn’t want the responsibility. More likely, he never even considered it. The one thing that’s certain is that ghetto culture had attached itself to his DNA.

Emanuel Steward was no stranger to poverty himself, having grown up the son of a coal miner. He was also no stranger to the plight of boxers.

“[Leon] moved across the street from where I live in Detroit,” Steward told the authors in 2011 (Steward died unexpectedly the following year.). “He hooked up with Ed Bell, a flamboyant lawyer. And so Bell enticed him to move to Detroit, where he could have more control over him. So [Leon] gets a beautiful house in a neighborhood called Rosedale Park, and a friend of mine invites me to go there for a party. I open up the door, it was just, to say it was off the hook was an understatement. They were doing some kind of train, everybody’s going through the whole house. Leon had his cowboy hat on, and a couple of guys are yelling, ‘C’mon, Coach, get on!’ So I get on with ’em. I see a football player from Pittsburgh, and he’s got a game the next day. It was unbelievable.

“That was the first time I got to see Leon personally. The whole house was rocking. When he would have parties, everybody’s house on the block would be moving. You’d call him and tell him to turn the music down. [He’d ask,] ‘Is it loud?’

“You gotta remember where he came from: the projects. He got started there early and it became part of his genetic makeup. Smoking weed, drinking beer. Some people outgrow it and are able to control it. He was never able to control it. He never did feel comfortable in a nice environment. He’s comfortable in a ghetto, low-income-type place. He has a low image of himself.”

Michael Conforti, clinical psychologist and pop culture analyst, sees Leon’s transition from poor man to rich man as understandably difficult. “You’re gonna take somebody like a Leon Spinks and all that they’ve been through—the ghetto, the wars, the fights, the family stuff—and ask him to live like a rich man? It’s insane. And it’s really cruel. You’re saying to him, ‘Hey, here’s the keys to your Maserati. Here’s the keys to your beautiful home. Enjoy the good life, the rich life, the cultured life.’ Of course his response would be, ‘Hey, you fuckin’ with me? This is not my world. I got a big house, I can have more pimps, I can have more prostitutes, more dope and all that stuff.’ Like Pig-Pen you carry your field with you.”

Professor and boxing writer Gerald Early says, “It takes a certain kind of mentality to be able to maintain yourself as champion and to be able to control your entourage—and control yourself. And Leon never seemed like he was in control of himself. In some respects, he got a genie and didn’t know how to deal with it.

“Leon represented the kind of uncouth black guy from the ghetto. He brought to the fore the whole set of so-called pathological behaviors typically associated with inner-city black males. Leon couldn’t have been what white America wanted in a heavyweight champion even if they wanted Ali to be defeated.”

According to Carlo Rotella, author of Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, “In the Seventies there were tons of models of black masculinity from the ghetto. If you look at popular culture, there’s Shaft, Superfly. There are a million versions of this character but Spinks, I think, embarrassed everybody. He was not Ali. He was emphatically not Ali. And he didn’t fit any of the other handy, available slots. And the one slot available was embarrassing to everybody.”

Ali biographer Thomas Hauser says, “[Leon] didn’t know any better. He didn’t really understand what society thinks of as the responsibilities that come with being heavyweight champion of the world. Even if he understood those responsibilities, I’m not sure that he had the personal resources to carry them out.”

In an interview with the Washington Post in 1978, Bob Arum said that Leon was the “distasteful product of a ghetto environment. He has all those ghetto speech patterns and there’s a lack of discipline about him. He sleeps late. He’s not too concerned with keeping appointments. He’s not all that quick when he talks. Whites are uneasy with him and so are middle-class blacks. They look at him—the champion—and all they see is a ghetto black that they’ve learned to shun, to fear.”

According to Douglas Hartmann, author of Race, Culture and the Revolt of the Black Athlete, “In a lot of ways Leon was the stereotype that a lot of educated, more self-conscious black athletes were the most afraid of. [They were] trying to run from that. He wasn’t a figure that many people really wanted to associate with anymore—the almost cartoonish character who had no place in society outside of black culture, for sure not in mainstream white America.

“Before the Sixties, simply being a great athlete [like Joe Louis or Jackie Robinson] was seen as a real contribution to the civil rights movement, the struggle for black justice and equality. But that wasn’t the case anymore. The Spinks brothers gave the [pre-Sixties] narrative, or that was the narrative that was constructed around them.”

Bruce Newman wrote in July 1978 in Sports Illustrated, “Last month, while Leon Spinks was dancing in a discotheque with quarters jammed in his ears, Ali was in Moscow, deep in conversation with Leonid Brezhnev at the Kremlin.”

Leon told Newman, “People may be disappointed because I’m not Ali, but times change and the world changes. Now I’m the champion. People want the heavyweight champion to fit a certain image, and they’re afraid I’m nothing but a dumb nigger. But I’m just Leon.”

Leon’s being Leon meant that he was an accident waiting to happen. And each accident was a publicist’s nightmare.

Three weeks after winning the title, Leon took a ride down to Camp Lejeune to visit his old Marine Corps buddies.

Tony Santana remembers the day. “I’m on the third floor and he calls my name out, ‘Saaaantaaaaana! Saaaantaaaaana!’ I look out the window. ‘Hey, Leon!’ Then he yells to Hosea Sprewell and the three of us get in his new car and we go downtown. We’re walking down the strip, and this guy across the street says, ‘You didn’t beat Muhammad Ali. You ain’t nothing.’ We had to hold Leon back because he was gonna go after him. Here he is, the champion of the world, and he’s ready to fight this guy.

“And then we went to this chicken shack and this old lady says to him, ‘Are you Leon Spinks, champion of the world?’ He says, ‘Yeah, I’m Leon Spinks, champion of the world.’ And he’s sucking his thumb. He’s sucking his thumb! He’s the champion of the world and he’s sucking his thumb!”

The guys continued to cruise the strip until the police stopped them for a minor traffic offense. When Leon failed to produce the car registration, the cops escorted him to the local precinct.

“Me and Sprewell go to the precinct, but Leon wasn’t there,” says Santana. “He must’ve bailed himself out or they knew who he was [and let him go]. But we knew where to find him. We could always find him across the tracks.”

In the seven months after taking the title, Leon was arrested five times—once taken away in handcuffs after driving the wrong way on a one-way street. He was stopped for smashing up his Lincoln Continental in Detroit, crashing his Corvette through a fence in Ohio, speeding in North Carolina, and possessing one-hundredth of a gram of cocaine in St. Louis. The coke had a street value of $1.50, yet it landed a photo of a handcuffed Leon on the front page of nearly every major daily. Goodbye, endorsements. Hello, laughingstock.

Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show: “The American Dental Association chose its poster boy today: Leon Spinks.”

Garrett Morris on Saturday Night Live, portraying Leon in a caricature uncomfortably close to the lazy and slow-witted roles of black actor Stepin Fetchit: “I’m world heavyweight champion now and that be a psychological advantage.”

Comedian Richard Pryor in concert: “Bad luck be tipping up on Brother Leon. That’s what gives him such heart to fight. Leon’s saying, ‘I ain’t got nothing to lose—I ain’t got no money, I ain’t got no teefus, and I definitely ain’t got no driver’s license. So what the fuck can you do to me?’”

In the same breath that Pryor used to ridicule the new champ, he also exposed the heavyweight title for the myth that it was. “Only thing, I don’t like to hear when white people be saying, ‘He dumb, ain’t he?’ And niggers be agreeing with him. That’s what tickled me. Be happy for any nigger doing anything. ’Cause nobody ever said the heavyweight champion had to be no anthropologist anyway.

“I say, ‘Leon, what do you do?’

“‘I knock motherfuckers out.’”

Butch Lewis told Sports Illustrated’s Calvin Fussman, “People would come up to [Michael] and make fun of Leon. Everybody had a Leon Spinks joke. [Michael] would want to punch those people in the mouth. He was confused. He wasn’t sure if that’s what happened when you became champion or if Leon was bringing it on himself.”

Michael met with sportswriter Jerry Izenberg in Detroit soon after Leon’s victory and voiced his concerns about his brother.

According to Izenberg, “[Michael] said he was gonna have a few fights and then stop fighting. He said, ‘I have to go with Leon. Leon has some problems,’ which I took to mean he was retarded.

“And I said, ‘You mean you’re gonna put your career on hold?’

“He said, ‘Yeah, well, I want to be with him. I want to take care of him and make sure he gets his money. You know, I’m not the smartest guy in the world but I can count. And Leon can’t.’”

Bob Arum remembers the brothers in much the same way. “Michael always seemed so logical compared to Leon,” he says. “It seemed to me that Michael had some sense. Leon never had any sense. He was just not very smart. And he was irresponsible. You could’ve had Einstein advising him and it wouldn’t have mattered.”

But Leon had no intention of shutting down the party. The only problem was that he had a title to defend. And the more he partied, the farther he drifted from training camp.

The big money was in a rematch with Ali. The public knew it, the promoters knew it, and Leon’s handlers knew it. All of which posed the question: Who exactly were Leon’s handlers?

Bob Arum and Butch Lewis said Leon was “their boy.”

Mitt Barnes claimed he was Leon’s manager and accused Arum and Lewis of trying to steal his fighter.

Milton Chwasky, a Butch Lewis–appointed lawyer who had filled in as Leon’s attorney before the Ali fight, was supposedly representing Leon for his first defense.

Ed Bell and Lester Hudson, two Detroit attorneys, later replaced Chwasky.

Who actually had Leon’s signature on paper? It’s possible they all did. But it didn’t matter.

Nova Spinks told People in May 1978, “From the moment Leon won the championship, it’s been hell. Have you ever seen two or three dogs pulling on a rag? Well, Leon’s the rag.”

Arum took the lead in the Leon sweepstakes, producing the signed contract that proved Top Rank had control of Leon’s first three title defenses and an option on the next three.

At that point Don King entered the picture and things got even stickier. King offered Leon two million dollars to defend his title against Ken Norton instead of Ali. Norton, a King fighter and the number-one challenger, had been passed over when Ali signed to fight Leon.

When Leon turned down King’s offer, WBC president Jose Sulaiman (a personal friend of King) ordered Leon to fight Norton. If Leon failed to do so, Sulaiman told him he’d be stripped of the WBC title.

Arum knew Top Rank would make more money if Leon fought Ali, so he threw Norton a lowball offer of $200,000, assuming he would turn it down.

But Norton took it.

“They thought my ego would be so big I’d say no,” Norton said at the time, “but every fighter is hungry for the title. I want that title.”

Ali wasn’t getting any younger and much preferred to fight Leon. He issued a statement at a news conference that aired as part of CBS Sports Spectacular.

“Mr. Ken Norton says he deserves the first shot,” Ali announced, “but I’m truly the number-one contender in the eyes of the people of the world. My mail is ten-to-one in favor of Leon Spinks and myself getting together again…. The world is waiting for it. It’s tradition. The first defense goes against the ex-champion. Leon Spinks should fight me.”

It was then that Chwasky got involved. As Leon’s lawyer, Chwasky announced that during the fight with Ali, Leon had aggravated a nagging rib injury that could delay the rematch. Skeptics pointed out that Leon had been seen a week after the Ali fight dancing at a New York discotheque until the wee hours, showing no signs of injury. They felt the whole thing reeked of Arum and that perhaps Leon’s supposed injury was merely a stalling tactic to frustrate Norton into signing against a different fighter. Regardless, the Nevada State Athletic Commission slapped Leon with a ninety-day suspension for not disclosing the alleged injury before the first Ali fight.

Dave Anderson of the New York Times wrote in March 1978, “Ever since [Norton] called Arum’s bluff and accepted the $200,000 offer in good faith, Arum has been acting in bad faith, first by staging Ali’s nationally televised plea for a rematch and then announcing the Leon cartilage damage.”

Arum now explains, “By that time Leon had gotten an advisor, some black lawyer from Detroit, I forget his name… yeah, Ed Bell … and he said he didn’t give a shit what the rules were, he was gonna do a rematch with Ali because that was the most money to be made. Yeah, I did what I could to get Ken Norton out of the picture so the rematch could happen.”

All of the jockeying, posturing, and angling was lost on Leon. The WBC edict meant nothing to him. Ali had given him a shot and he wanted to return the favor. And so he granted Ali the rematch.

Sulaiman held true to his word and stripped Leon of the title, handing it to Norton. The rematch would be for the WBA belt only, and of course, the lineal championship, which no sanctioning body could take away from Leon.

Arum offered Leon and Ali five million dollars each for the rematch, predicting the fight would be TV’s highest-rated event. The agreement also produced a prizefight of sorts outside the ropes: Bob Arum vs. Don King. Their ring was the Washington Post.

King: “[Arum] is one of the most devious and evil individuals I have ever met, who builds a success road on deviousness.”

More King after calling Leon a “totally illiterate black man”: “[His illiteracy] is an indictment against the school system in the black ghettoes of the big cities of the United States. The teachers that passed Leon Spinks to the eleventh grade should be tied to a post and flogged.”

Arum: “It was very unfair of King to say Spinks is illiterate. He is not illiterate. The kid can read very well. I have seen him read documents and newspapers. That is nonsense. He was in the Marine Corps. You can’t get in the Marines if you are illiterate.”

King: “[Arum] has a slave master’s mentality of thinking he can treat people of color to do whatever is right for him. [He’s treating Spinks] just like in the slave days when the house nigger could do anything against another nigger and get away with it. Here’s a white man leading a black man into the paths of destruction.”

Arum: “[King’s comments] are beneath my dignity. Everybody knows what King is—a total charlatan. I’m a real ‘slave master.’ In his ninth pro fight, Spinks is going to earn five million dollars. I’m really treating him badly.”

America didn’t care who won the Arum-King slugfest. The real story was Leon, but there was nothing to write about because he was nowhere to be found. Throughout this entire mess—and even now that a rematch with Ali had been set for September 15, 1978, in New Orleans—Leon was still being Leon.

Given a quarter of a million dollars for training expenses, Leon made sure not to hang on to a penny of it. He and his twelve employees—including Sam Solomon, Marine coach Art Redden, Gunnery Sgt. John Davis, Lester Hudson, Ed Bell, Roger Stafford, Mitt Barnes, full-time bodyguard Mr. T, part-time bodyguard Jerome Tunstall, and sparring partner Leroy Diggs—were put up at the Sea Pines Resort, an oceanfront getaway in Hilton Head, South Carolina, complete with the latest amenities and round-the-clock services.

When camp opened on June 1, everything was in place. The back room of the Hilton Head Community Playhouse had been outfitted into a training camp, and a personal chef was on hand. Staff members stood at the ready, each one decked out in a light-blue “Leon Spinks World Heavyweight Champion” jacket.

Leon’s publicists fed the press the standard line: The champ was hard at work, running in combat boots, chopping down trees, eating up sparring partners. The truth was they had no idea where he was.

“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.