16

ON JULY 27, 1988, TWENTY-NINE DAYS AFTER SUFFERING THE ONLY loss of his career, Michael stood inside Tavern on the Green, New York’s glitzy Central Park landmark, as waiters in sea-green uniforms served seafood and poured champagne. He was there to do what few other professional boxers had done: pull the plug on his career before it pulled the plug on him. He credited Butch Lewis with the decision, saying he’d always left his career in his promoter’s hands.

“Twelve years is quite a while to be getting swung at and having to duck punches,” Michael said to a gathering that included Lewis, Joe Frazier, and a roomful of boxing insiders and sportswriters. “It’s been a tough twelve years, but it’s been fun. I’m a happy young man today.”

Who could blame him? He’d gone off to war and come back physically and mentally sound. And though he didn’t understand Wall Street, he understood Butch Lewis, who managed his money and paid his bills, right down to doling out his spending allowances. Lewis told Michael he’d been investing his money, including the Tyson windfall, into conservative zero-coupon bonds. He said the stock market crash that had shaken the country eight months before the Tyson fight would have little effect on Michael’s retirement. Improbable as it may have seemed back at Prutt-Igoe, the thirty-two-year-old would never have to work another day in his life.

During his retirement speech, Michael looked at Lewis and said, “I can’t thank you and kiss you enough for all the wonderful things.”

He wept when he said it. So did Lewis.

“There was no other team like us in boxing, ever,” Lewis said. “Me and Slim, we’re like family.”

Lewis also made a point of injecting himself into Michael’s greatest achievements—even ones that occurred before the two had met.

“We did it our way,” he said. “We made history in Montreal when we won the gold medal. We became the first brother team to win gold medals and part of the first brother team to win world championships. We went on to be the first light-heavyweight to dethrone a heavyweight champion. Whatever it took to get the job done, we did it.”

Michael’s list of accomplishments was impressive, to say the least. He’d also been a dignified champion and a gentleman from start to finish. Yet, aside from the friends and newspapermen gathered at the Upper West Side restaurant, America had moved on. It had cast Michael aside the instant he’d walked into Tyson’s whistling right uppercut. In the end Michael’s retirement commanded about as much newspaper ink as the same-day passing of Frank Zamboni, the inventor of the ice-cleaning machine.

“Michael Spinks got a bad break in life,” Mike Tyson now says. “He has legendary victories under his belt, but his legacy is being beaten by me in ninety-one seconds. That’s not fair at all. He beat Larry Holmes twice, he beat Eddie Mustafa Muhammad, and he beat Qawi. He just got a bad break.”

Top Rank promoter Bob Arum limits Michael’s legacy to the light-heavyweight ranks. “Michael was heavyweight champion for a cup of coffee,” he says, “and that all got blown away with the devastating knockout loss to Tyson. So nobody considered Michael a real heavyweight. He was a great light-heavyweight, he was a terrific fighter, a dedicated fighter—he knew how to fight—but nobody looked at Michael as a heavyweight.”

Gerald Early, professor and author of The Culture of Bruising, says, “The public wasn’t as clued in to the light-heavyweight division as they were to the heavyweight division. People don’t pay much attention to it. The light-heavyweights are kind of like the Korean War, wherein the Vietnam War and World War II get all the attention, and nobody knows anything about the Korean War. I thought Michael was the greatest light-heavyweight champion of all time.”

Carlo Rotella, author of Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, sympathizes with the plight of a light-heavyweight tactician expected to carry the aura of invincibility that comes with being heavyweight champion. “I don’t know how you succeed in that climate, as a light-heavyweight champion who moves up to heavyweight, who isn’t going to be knocking people’s blocks off, who’s not going to be physically terrifying. That’s not the kind of thing people are incredibly impressed by. It’s kind of lost on the lay fan.”

In Tyson’s view Michael didn’t spend enough time creating a marketable persona. “He’s a very dignified person, very kind person, very respectful person,” Tyson says. “We don’t think much about those guys in this business…. People want a guy with charismatic flair who can give ’em great excitement.”

Douglas Hartmann, author of Race, Culture and the Revolt of the Black Athlete, agrees that Michael’s personality wasn’t the type to grab headlines. “Michael got lost in history,” he says. “He didn’t occupy our larger imaginations. He didn’t want to have any kind of persona…. He didn’t let himself be the all-American boy that he could have been, given his Olympic history and the story that you could have told around him.”

Michael’s ride in the ring was over. He had accomplished far more than he had set out to do. As he drove home to the quiet comfort of Greenville, Delaware, he wondered what lay ahead. One thing was certain: The days of Pruitt-Igoe were behind him. He had been one of the lucky ones. He had escaped and would never again be penniless.

Unfortunately, the same could not be said of Leon.

Leon hadn’t made it to Michael’s retirement luncheon, but the two brothers had been together five days earlier, on July 22, when Leon married his longtime girlfriend Betty Green. Michael paid for half the wedding, splitting it with Betty, and flew to Detroit for the celebration.

The newly christened Mr. and Mrs. Leon Spinks were making ends meet in a spare three-bedroom brick house in Franklin Park, which lay three miles south and a couple of socioeconomic rungs below Leon’s former neighborhood of Rosedale Park. Cloned houses rimmed the streets, each fronted by a square patch of grass; the neighborhood conjured up images of little plastic houses on a Monopoly board. Leon’s business manager, Al Low, struggled to impart to his client some basic financial horse sense, but Leon’s portfolio failed to grow beyond his two main accounts: the few dollars in his pocket and the spare change he had sitting on the bar.

For three days the marriage went relatively smoothly. On the fourth day Leon was served with papers claiming he and his ex-wife Nova owed $187,000 in back taxes. Things went downhill from there: Betty would be in and out of her job on the assembly line at General Motors, and Leon would rarely be employed for more than a week or two at a time. He would spend most days in front of either a TV or a bar. He still made occasional headlines by smashing up cars—usually Betty’s—but he had long since moved off the front page. By now, newspaper copy about the onetime heavyweight champion had grown shorter, the incidents more pathetic, his name less and less relevant.

Having vowed yet again to rebuild his life and his image, Leon took to spending Sunday mornings at church with Low, an active member of the Baptist church. Attending mass at various congregations in and around Detroit, Leon would penitently walk up to the front of the faithful and dedicate himself to God. But by the time the pews had emptied, Leon was back to being Leon.

Low scratched together whatever work he could find for his client. He had him signing autographs, competing in kickboxing events, and taking another turn at wrestling. At one match Low choreographed a scenario that culminated in Betty’s getting in the ring and angrily swinging her purse around. The staged conflict wasn’t all that far from the truth.

“I had many two- and three-o’clock-in-the-morning calls,” Low remembers, “[usually] the result of partying and [heavy] drinking. Leon and Betty would drink pretty good. I’d get a call from Betty, ‘Leon’s doing this.’ Then from Leon, ‘Betty’s trying to run me over with the car.’ [One] night I went over. Leon was up on the porch and Betty had driven the car up onto the lawn. She was asleep and Leon was passed out.”

Betty blamed the stormy marriage, her drained bank account, and her wrecked cars on Leon—particularly on his drinking, drugging, and philandering. For his part, Leon promised Betty she’d never see him drunk again, and in his defense, he spoke the near truth—because he would disappear for months. He’d go on prolonged binges, seen not by Betty but by his old St. Louis friends when he’d pop up in the bars and on the street corners he used to frequent. Every so often he’d pay a visit to his father, who was still in St. Louis and now dying of cancer. Although the two never reconciled, Leon had buried his anger in the rubble of Pruitt-Igoe.

Perhaps Leon had come to understand his father. He himself barely knew his own sons, Leon and Darrell, and had never met Cory. All three of his boys had taken up boxing—lured into the ring by the famous Spinks name. Their mother, Zadie Mae, had seen what Leon and Michael had accomplished between the ropes and encouraged her sons to join the gym, hoping they too could punch their way to riches. On their journey into the ring, the boys had come under the wing of Charles Hamm, the plumber who had once trained Leon and Michael, and who still trained neighborhood kids out of his Northside Bombers Boxing Club. The storefront gym on West Florissant Avenue was so ramshackle it lacked a front door and indoor plumbing. But that didn’t bother the kids who frequented it. The place may have been short on amenities, but it did have the kindhearted Hamm, who lived with his wife Jeridean one flight up from the gym. Hamm had turned many of his novices into competent boxers, and if the local legend is true, developed more than a handful of young plumbers in the process. He could still be found cruising north St. Louis in a rusted van, doling out boxing and life skills to the teenagers who had the smarts to listen.

For the younger generation of Spinkses—Leon, Darrell, and Cory —Hamm had stepped into the shadow their father had left behind.

“You would think they were my kids, I was around them so much,” Hamm says. “I was a father figure to them, so they didn’t miss having a father too much.”

Darrell Spinks says, “Mr. Hamm was a coach-slash-father to me, Cory, and my brother Leon. He took care of me. I would walk around with busted shoes; he would buy me shoes. He would do everything. For a while Mr. Hamm didn’t even know that Leon Spinks was our daddy ’cause we never did tell him. When he found out, he called my father and talked to him. My dad didn’t know we was boxing.”

Cory also found a substitute father in Hamm. “Charles Hamm did so much for me. I love him to death,” he says. “I looked up to him as being a dad. He’s a terrific man.”

In the mid-1980s, upon Betty’s urging, Leon invited his three sons to Detroit for the summer. Zadie Mae agreed to let the two older boys go, but said that Cory, who wasn’t yet ten, was too young.

“It was supposed to be two months but it ended up being one month,” Darrell remembers. “My brother Leon didn’t talk to my father. He stayed out of his way. He was angry. He say, ‘We stay in the ghetto and we got a rich father.’ My brother never did forgive him.”

At one point during the visit, the two Leons went into the backyard for an impromptu sparring session and the young Leon held his own against the ex-champ. Later that day the two got into it when the youngster asked his father for money for gym shoes. The argument spilled onto the windowed front porch.

“The next thing, I heard the glass break,” Betty recalls. “I jumped up and ran to the porch to see what was going on. Big Leon had pushed Little Leon in the chest, and he fell against the glass. Big Leon started saying, ‘Don’t let that sparring session go to your head thinking you can whip my ass.’”

The wedge between the two Leons was deeper than ever.

What makes Leon’s case especially frustrating is that he blew opportunity after opportunity. There was never a shortage of people willing to help him get back on his feet.

“[Managing Leon] sometimes felt more like a babysitting job than it did anything else,” Al Low explains. “It was a daunting task, but it was one that you really wanted to do ’cause you wanted to help him so much. Leon was a good guy with such a good heart.

“He wanted to please people and he wanted people to love him. I remember we were in Vegas one time and he handed the fellow who took us up in the elevator a hundred dollar bill. So I said, ‘Lee, why did you give him a hundred dollar bill for taking us up?’ He said, ‘Oh, I just wanted him to remember me and think good of me.’ I said, ‘Well, Lee, he knows that you were the heavyweight champion of the world. He’s not going to forget that.’

“He went through a lot of money in a very short time. He was just handing it out to entourages, and for parties. But he would just smile and go on. It just didn’t make any difference how much he lost as long as he was OK tonight. If he had enough money in his pocket for that evening’s activity, then life was good and everything was fine.”

Boxing manager Jackie Kallen said she “wanted to help Leon out any way she could.” She convinced her dentist to replace Leon’s missing front teeth for free. She also worked with Al Low to find Leon a steady job. Kallen and Low approached Al Balooly, the owner of Jovans, a restaurant in the upscale Detroit suburb of Birmingham. They thought Leon could make money simply by shaking hands and telling stories.

The value of employing retired sports celebrities wasn’t lost on Balooly, who had already hired former Tigers pitcher Denny McLain to entertain patrons at the electronic keyboard. McLain, too, was down on his luck. Two decades past his baseball prime, he had served prison time for an assortment of federal offenses. McLain had shed many of the 330 pounds he’d weighed only a few years earlier, and at Jacques, the bar side of Jovans, he earned a thousand dollars a week playing such pop standards as Misty and Yesterday. Balooly offered Leon far less, and Leon took it gladly.

For Balooly, the experiment proved to be an instant success. The place was jammed nightly with customers eager to share a drink with a couple of former sports stars.

For Leon the job was a dream come true. He’d gone to bar-tending school in the vague hope of someday setting up his own joint, and when the chance came to pour drinks at Jacques, he took to the job with gusto. He’d show up on time, flashing his gleaming new front teeth, and sporting the last vestige of his glory days: a full-length mink coat. He would shake hands, pose for pictures, and on request pop out his dentures to reveal his famous toothless smile. For three months Jacques was the hottest spot in town. Newsweek and Time showed up. So did local television and radio stations. Everyone wanted to celebrate Leon’s latest comeback.

Denny McLain remembers, “Anybody could talk to [Leon]. He’d sign autographs all night. [And he’d] tell the same stories every night, one after the other. I never heard him get mad; I never heard him wallow in self-pity.

“One night, Leon lost his teeth for a couple of hours. Everybody in the place was on their hands and knees trying to find the damned teeth, like looking for a contact lens. Eventually, I think, it had fallen behind one of the bottles in the well and when they went to use that bottle of liquor or whatever, they found the teeth.”

The problem was that Leon’s job came with temptation. McLain recalls, “Every person he signed an autograph for bought him a drink, then another drink, and another drink.”

Emanuel Steward remembered stopping in one night, “I go in there. Hey, look at that. It’s Leon. ‘What in the fuck are you doing?’ He’s behind the bar all dressed up. So I ask for a Chardonnay and I get a glass filled [to the rim].

“I said, ‘What’s this?’

“He said, ‘Go, go, enjoy yourself.’

“Then he grabs another glass and says, ‘That looks so good I gotta have a fuckin’ glass too.’”

The customers, many of whom shared a glass with Leon, loved him. Yet he and Balooly parted ways after a few short months. When asked why he let Leon go, Balooly says the novelty had run its course. McLain backs the story. But Al Low doesn’t.

“The night Leon was let go, Denny called me,” Low remembers. “I picked [Leon] up and took him to dinner down the road and talked to him. He’d been sampling some of the steaks, and I think he was going to take a couple home with him. He was very embarrassed and sad. I told him that the job wasn’t his niche and that we needed to find another direction to go.”

But Low soon realized that Leon was running out of options.