8

OCTOBER 2, 1980. A CAPACITY CROWD OF 24,790 JAMMED THE outdoor arena at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Frank Sinatra, Tom Jones, and Paul Anka took their places in celebrity row. So did a couple of thousand high rollers whose credit lines started at twenty thousand dollars. The event was the stuff of legend. Muhammad Ali was back. After a two-year layoff, the retired champ was returning to the ring to take on WBC king Larry Holmes.

Holmes was undefeated in thirty-five fights, and since taking the title from Ken Norton two years earlier, had successfully defended it seven times. Yet, despite assuming the role of the people’s champ and boasting an impeccable record, he still felt upstaged by Ali. He had good reason: Ali’s shadow rivaled that of Paul Bunyan.

“Ali said he was the greatest and everyone said ‘Yeah.’ I said I was the greatest and everyone said ‘Yeah, right,’” Larry Holmes said in the ESPN film Muhammad and Larry.

Before the fight Holmes bitterly reminded the press that, as champ, he deserved top billing—the fight should be referred to as Holmes-Ali, not Ali-Holmes as most papers had been calling it. Tradition said he was right. The box office didn’t agree.

The star here was Ali. The ex-champ had been coaxed out of retirement by an eight-million-dollar payday plus the chance to win the WBC crown for the fourth time. Holmes was to earn $2.3 million, with the added bonus of having the opportunity to slay his personal Goliath. Boxing purists viewed the fight as Holmes’s shot at the lineal title. And virtually everybody involved saw it as Ali’s final hurrah.

In the two years since Ali had left the ring, speculation about his health had spread rapidly. Friends worried about his increasingly slurred and slowed speech and his deteriorating reflexes. Insiders spoke of pugilistic dementia and other ring-related conditions. His estranged physician, Ferdie Pacheco, had even gone public with a claim that he had seen a CAT scan showing small lesions on Ali’s brain.

Three months before the Holmes fight, the Nevada Athletic Commission insisted that Ali undergo a physical. The two-day series of tests took place at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

Ali assured the boxing world, “They put their best machines on me and said I’m one hundred percent. My kidneys are perfect, my brain is perfect, my blood, my heart, everything. They gave me their stamp of approval.”

The Nevada Commission released highlights of the report to the public. Dr. Donald Romeo accepted it on behalf of the commission and said the brain scan revealed “no trace of tumor or old clots” and dismissed the brain-damage rumors as “a bunch of bunk.”

Thomas Hauser obtained a copy of the doctors’ findings and disclosed them in his 1991 book, Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times. These are excerpts from the findings:

Other than occasional tingling of the hands in the morning when he awakens, which clears promptly with movement of the hands, he denied any other neurologic symptoms…. On neurological examination, he seems to have a mild ataxic dysarthria [the inability to control speech resulting from damage to the cerebellum]…. The remainder of his examination is normal except that he does not quite hop with the agility that one might anticipate and on finger-to-nose testing there is a slight degree of missing the target. Both of these tests could be significantly influenced by fatigue…. There is minimal evidence of some difficulty with his speech and memory and perhaps to a very slight degree with his coordination. All of these are more noticeable when he is fatigued.

The commission gave Ali the go-ahead to lace up his gloves and go toe-to-toe with Holmes. Perhaps those in power believed that an icon such as Ali had limits beyond those of a mortal man. Or maybe they didn’t care if he got killed.

Fans who came early saw the prelims, throughout which chants of “Ali!” rippled through the arena. The undercard featured Leon against the six-foot-four Colombian power-puncher Bernardo Mercado in a twelve-round title elimination bout. Mercado had won twenty-six of twenty-eight fights and in March had stopped Earnie Shavers with twenty-five unanswered blows in the seventh round. But even though he was facing a legitimate opponent, Leon was destined to spend the evening in the same manner as Holmes—eclipsed by the outsize shadow of Ali.

Leon had spent the past two years bouncing around the heavyweight division with no apparent direction. He’d taken on Gerrie Coetzee in Monte Carlo for a shot at Ali’s vacated WBA belt, but he hit the canvas more often than he hit Coetzee—three times within the first two minutes of the fight. The bout was over before the bell rang for the second round. Nobody was surprised. Bob Arum recalls Leon partying away his training time before the fight and being so irresponsible that he’d shown up five hours late for the press conference emceed by Prince Rainier.

Leon rebounded after the Coetzee fight and stopped Alfredo Evangelista in five rounds, but then could only muster up a draw against Eddie “The Animal” Lopez. (Had referee Mills Lane not taken a point from Lopez for head butting in the fifth, Leon would have lost a majority decision.) When Leon then TKOed the unknown Kevin Isaac in eight rounds, Don King matched him up with Mercado, the number-one challenger, and put the fight on the Holmes-Ali undercard. The winner of Leon-Mercado would get a shot at the winner of Holmes-Ali.

Leon tried his best to blow the opportunity, this time by nearly missing the previous day’s weigh-in.

“Leon Spinks, please report to the weigh-in,” ring announcer Chuck Hull said into the microphone. He read a similar announcement a few minutes later, and then a third after that. Still no Leon. Word began circulating that Leon’s car had been parked illegally and was towed.

When Leon finally entered the Sports Pavilion at Caesars Palace and approached the scale, he was nearly a half hour late.

“We couldn’t find a parking place,” he casually explained.

Leon wriggled off the hook and was permitted to weigh in. Now training under Del Williams, he was at 204 pounds and in excellent shape. When the opening bell rang the following night, he looked fast and strong. But like most of Leon’s fights, it didn’t take long for the contest to spiral into a street brawl. Mercado blasted Leon’s head with haymakers, but Leon absorbed them, got inside, and stayed there, hammering Mercado with an onslaught of body blows. Mercado never had a chance to breathe. Leon won nearly every one of the first eight rounds, and then, in the ninth, stunned his opponent with a left hook to the head. He followed with a flurry of blows, and when Mercado didn’t respond, referee Ferd Hernandez did. He stopped the fight with eight seconds to go in the round.

Leon earned $125,000, minus expenses. One of those deductions included a $5,000 fine imposed by the Nevada Athletic Commission because Leon’s cornermen had stood on the ring apron during the fight and cursed the officials.

It’s unlikely that Leon cared. He had looked good, and in his next bout, only his fifteenth as a pro, he’d be fighting for the world title a third time. He just wasn’t sure who would be in the other corner—Ali or Holmes.

The fans were hoping for Ali.

New York Times columnist Red Smith watched the fight on closed-circuit television with a standing-room-only crowd in Boston Garden. “Nothing could illustrate Ali’s sentimental appeal, his popularity bordering on idolatry, better than that howling crowd in Boston,” Smith wrote a few days later. “Even before Leon Spinks left the ring after the semifinal windup, they started a chant, ‘Ali! Ali! Ali!’ When the great man showed up, a big, grimy old hall 3,000 miles away trembled. When Larry Holmes appeared, booing rattled the tiles.”

To say that Ali fans were disappointed with the outcome of the fight is an understatement. What they witnessed was a lopsided disaster—the type of mismatch that causes commissions to be formed, or replaced. Ali looked every hour of his thirty-eight years, 259 days. He appeared lethargic, and compared to the healthy, lightning-quick Holmes, he seemed to be throwing his punches underwater, a slow-motion replay of his glory days. Even ardent fans could see that the rumors of his failing health had some validity. Worse yet, the thirty-year-old Holmes, cast as the villain by the Ali faithful, was in his prime. He threw steady jabs and right crosses with pinpoint accuracy. After Ali absorbed ten rounds of inhumane punishment, Angelo Dundee got word from Herbert Muhammad to put an end to it.

Red Smith wrote, “If it had been any fighter except Muhammad Ali, he would have been thrown out of the ring and had his purse withheld. Only a deity or a myth could get away with the performance Ali gave against Larry Holmes. It should have been declared no contest.

“There was a heaviness of disappointment, maybe a reluctant acceptance of the fact that the past was past and would not be recovered. There were some small hoots but no widespread derision of the demigod who was letting them down…. On the subway, a man said the next day, about half the riders agreed that Ali had faked the whole thing to set up a rematch for another $8 million. Better that than to believe everything was over.”

But for boxing fans, it was over. The new champion lacked Ali’s charisma, political passion, and rapier tongue, but that couldn’t stop the calendar from moving forward, the baton from changing hands. Despite the public’s lingering idolatry of Ali, Larry Holmes held the heavyweight division in the palm of his gloved hand.

And Leon was next in line for a shot.

Three months later Leon was back in the papers. On January 15, 1981, he told Detroit police he’d been hit on the head while leaving a bar on the city’s north side. He claimed he hadn’t seen his assailants but woke up five miles away, naked, in the Crestwood Motel, minus $45,000 worth of clothes, jewelry, and gold front teeth.

As is the case with most stories that come out of late-night bars and short-stay motels, Leon’s tale had some gaping holes.

Al Low, who promoted and managed Leon in the mid-1980s, heard the story this way: “He’d been drinking at Spears Bar on Woodward just north of Six Mile, and next thing he knew he was waking up in the motel without his stuff, including his gold teeth. But some eyewitnesses said he was drinking and playing pool at the Last Chance Bar on Woodward and Eight Mile, where he was known to hang out quite a bit, and left with one of the ladies who, ummm, quote unquote worked there.”

Jackie Kallen, boxing manager and longtime friend of Leon, says, “I was under the impression that [Leon] went back to his hotel room with a girl, and while he was there he got rolled. I was never quite sure if it was her or if she had an accomplice.”

Mr. T wrote in Mr. T: The Man with the Gold, “[Leon] kept on partying until one night some bitch set him up. He got high in a hotel room in January 1981 and she stole jewelry, his mink coat, money and drugs. He lied and told the police that he was robbed coming from a tavern. He said someone hit him on the back of the head and took his money and dragged him to a hotel, where they took all of his clothes. I tell you, Leon couldn’t even lie straight.”

If one is to believe Mr. T’s story (and there’s no evidence to the contrary), Leon may have been bending the truth to protect himself from Nova, who was running out of patience with his vagabond ways.

“One day I get a call from Leon,” Emanuel Steward recalled in 2011. “It’s the middle of the night and I answer the phone. ‘Steward! Steward!’ The voice is muffled but I knew it was Leon, so I say to my wife, ‘Something’s going on with Leon; I better go over there.’ I go across the street and he opens up the door. There’s some fighting going on, and an arm grabs him by the neck and pulls him back in. I look and there’s Nova. Nova’s about as big as Leon—six-one, six-two—and she’s the one pulling him back. She had a girlfriend there named Ayesha who was about six-two or six-three, and they grab Leon and drag him to the kitchen and they throw him on the floor and say, ‘Don’t your ass move.’ [Leon] looked at me and he said, ‘Steward, you gotta help me.’ And Nova said, ‘Don’t you dare. This motherfucker, we just caught him, he gave a car to some girlfriend. I was at the bank and I heard some shit and that bitch is driving around with my car. And we waited for him to come home and beat his ass.’ Then [Nova] told me, ‘Emanuel, get your ass on outta here. You got nothing to do with this. This ain’t no boxing business.’ And they were sitting at the table eating fried chicken, and I looked at them and said, ‘Fuck it,’ and went on back home.”

On February 17, 1981, Leon filed for divorce. Nova’s attorney requested that the circuit court judge of Wayne County, Michigan, order Leon to carry the mortgage on their house in Rosedale Park; pay tuition for Nova’s son, Charles; and pick up five thousand dollars of Nova’s legal bills. The lawyer also asked for Nova’s $375 weekly alimony check to be bumped to $500 should Leon take the title from Holmes.

The divorce became final in 1982. The bills went unpaid.

Nova’s attorney may have had his eye on Leon’s upcoming fight with Larry Holmes, but few fight fans did. In their view Leon had virtually no shot against the champion, and it didn’t help when rumors surfaced that Leon had suffered a broken nose in training camp. Most agreed that Holmes took the fight simply to stay active. He had done much the same two months earlier when he defended the title against Trevor Berbick. These no-contests were keeping him sharp while he waited for a payday with rising star Gerry Cooney.

What many fans didn’t realize was that Holmes had another reason for agreeing to the fight: He harbored a genuine dislike of Leon. In his 1998 autobiography, Larry Holmes: Against the Odds, written with Phil Berger, Holmes said Leon was the first opponent he “truly wanted to hurt.” He also took issue with how Leon had disrespected the heavyweight title.

“He’d acted like a buffoon of a heavyweight champion,” Holmes wrote. “He was a loose cannon, a guy who exposed himself as a dumb bastard the more you saw of him. I knew he’d end up a jive ex-champ, driving a Cadillac with about three bucks in his pocket and a brain like cornflakes.”

According to Holmes, the friction had heated up in 1980 at a dinner held in Las Vegas for Joe Louis. Leon had gotten drunk and was going from table to table, plucking souvenir boxing gloves from the centerpieces and throwing them around the room. When he approached the table at which Holmes’s wife, Diane, was seated, she and Leon had a bit of a tussle. It wasn’t long before Holmes’s posse was going at it with everybody in Leon’s camp, including Mr. T.

Holmes’s trainer Richie Giachetti attended the dinner and recalls, “Spinks was mouthing off, he wasn’t conducting himself the right way, and he embarrassed himself. It was a shame to see it.”

According to Holmes’s autobiography, “He was loud and obnoxious, and bothering Diane…. I didn’t want to muddy [the event] with violence, so when Spinks let go of the souvenir, and both he and Mr. T relaxed their threatening posture, I backed off. But I marked Spinks for a good butt-whupping, deciding right there I’d try to get him in the ring as soon as I could. Get him in the ring and beat him bad. Hurt him.”

Boxing fans were far less enthusiastic than Holmes. A week before the “Motown Showdown,” scheduled for June 12, 1981, ticket sales had produced a mere $500,000. Half the seats at Joe Louis Arena were unsold. To spur sales, the fight’s promoter, Don King, dropped the price of the cheap seats from fifty to twenty-five dollars.

Holmes and Leon tried to build interest in the nonevent. But Holmes was no Ali when it came to hyping a fight. And Leon, despite growing up on the streets, had never learned to talk trash.

Holmes told the press that Leon had “the perfect style to make me look great” and that beating Leon would be considered his most meaningful victory. He also borrowed one of Leon’s most popular phrases, repeatedly dismissing Leon as “Freaky Deaky” Spinks.

Leon asked the Associated Press to “tell Larry Holmes he’s got my blessings and I wish him the best of luck, and tell him I’m comin’ for it. I see him at the end of the rainbow with the pot of gold.”

Holmes responded with, “Who’s he ever beaten? He caught Ali on an off night and won a decision and then Ali got in shape and cleaned up on him in the rematch. He got himself knocked out and he’s beaten nobody since then. If I hit him as many times as Mercado did in their fight, they’d have to carry him out of the ring. Besides, I can’t allow myself to be beaten by Leon Spinks. I wouldn’t be able to show my face back home. I just bought a new Rolls Royce, and I won’t be able to drive it down the street.”

Continuing the uninspired exchange, Leon told the press, “I’m going to fight him like I fought Muhammad Ali the first time. I’m going to cling to him like a T-shirt. He’s a boxer and I’m a puncher. Holmes is going to try and dance and I’m going to try to keep him from dancing. I’ll just be trying to win. Whether it’s a knockout or not, I don’t care. I just want to win the title back.”

None of it was enough to bring out the fight fans. On the night of the bout, just three years after Leon had dethroned Ali, ten thousand people filed into the 21,000-seat arena to see him challenge the heavyweight champion of the world.

This time around Leon had his own cup for the fight. He sat in his dressing room at Joe Louis Arena with his cornermen and his mother Kay, showing no signs of braggadocio. He had to be thinking what the rest of the boxing world already knew: The odds that he’d beat a peaking Larry Holmes were far slimmer than his tackling an over-the-hill Muhammad Ali.

When Kay Spinks reassured her son that he’d conquer Holmes, Leon said, mildly, “Aw, Mom, shut up. I’ll just do the best I can.”

He walked out to the ring to the cheers and jeers of the crowd, which included Kansas City Royals baseball players Larry Gura, Frank White, and Amos Otis. They were in town to play the Tigers, but the major league baseball players’ strike suddenly freed up their schedule.

As champion, Holmes entered the arena after Leon, and to greater fanfare. Decked out in a white satin robe with red trim, he crossed the ropes and danced on his toes. Leon, draped in a burgundy robe, bounced in his corner, stretched his neck, and threw punches into the air. Michael stood next to him, wearing a black shirt, brown vest, white bow tie, black cowboy hat, and sunglasses.

Leon looked fit, much as he had when he won the title. When the bell rang, he did his best to replicate that miraculous showing. He rushed at Holmes in typical Leon Spinks fashion, trying to get inside, but the champion’s five-inch reach advantage kept him away. Leon swung regardless.

In his autobiography, Holmes said, “Spinks was charging at me, bobbing and weaving like a disco dancer in a frenzy, trying to get inside my long reach. But he was also firing away like some damn kamikaze in boxing shorts.”

At the outset, few of Leon’s punches landed, but in the second round he began slipping Holmes’s jab and working the champion’s body. At two minutes and thirty-five seconds into the round, the timekeeper accidentally rang the bell and Holmes eased up, assuming the round was over. His corner even rushed into the ring with their stool. Leon didn’t hear the bell and kept on wailing with wild rights and lefts, but the ring-savvy Holmes protected himself until the bell officially clanged.

By the third round, though, Holmes adjusted to Leon’s awkward style. He picked at Leon with his world-class jab and then began following it with his right.

Gerry Cooney sat ringside. Going into the fight, he was convinced that Leon was too small for Holmes and that a fighter of Holmes’s stature would overwhelm him.

“Holmes is an old pro,” Cooney now says. “When Spinks tried to be the aggressor, Holmes knew how to cover up, take care of himself. He took the fight out of Spinks and then started catching him.”

Holmes fired off combinations and each punch hit its target. He trapped Leon in the corner and rained blow after blow on his head. When a straight right from Holmes crunched Leon’s jaw, Leon tumbled facedown onto the middle rope, rolled over, and landed hard on his back. Somehow, he got to his feet at the count of nine. Referee Richard Steele asked him if he was OK, and Leon said he was, despite having clearly lost his senses. He was so defeated, even Holmes may have felt compassion for him.

Holmes said in his autobiography, “I suddenly began to feel sorry for Spinks in spite of the way he had insulted Diane. I stepped back from [him] and yelled at Steele, ‘Stop the goddamned fight. You want me to kill this man?’”

No one who was ringside that night claims to have heard Holmes cry out to Steele, and no such dialogue appears on the videotape of the fight. Regardless, Steele allowed one more exchange before coming to his own conclusion: Leon was finished. It didn’t matter because Leon’s trainer Del Williams was in the midst of throwing in the towel, and Michael, his face wet with tears, was rushing up the ringside stairs, desperately screaming to stop the fight. The end came at 2:34 of the third round.

A dazed Leon was led back to his dressing room as the crowd booed mercilessly. When the door shut, Leon sat for a postmortem with his inner circle. Nobody in the room would say it, but he’d probably just had his last shot at the big time.

The New York Times’ Michael Katz reported the following exchange between Leon and Del Williams: “‘I’m not giving up,’ Leon said. ‘We just got to go back to the drawing board, right Del?’

“‘Yes,’ Williams said.

“‘We got to correct those mistakes.’”

Williams agreed again, though it was unclear if Leon was trying to convince himself or Williams.

After shooing away reporters and remaining behind closed doors for more than an hour, Leon emerged. He got into a waiting yellow limousine, swearing he’d get back to basics, train hard, and resurrect his career.

A few days later he was arrested for carrying an unregistered .357 Magnum in the glove compartment of his car.