Spinks

New Orleans, April 8, 1978: Leon Spinks was foot-loose again.

It was not on The Leon Spinks Calendar, the increasingly speculative chart of the new heavyweight champion's day-to-day appearances that his lawyers had plotted for him, but Spinks was gone.

Bulletins followed. Spinks, it was reliably reported, was in the Jacksonville, North Carolina, area, his precise whereabouts unknown. There was a woman involved.

Spinks's flight presented a problem. An agreement had just been reached in the negotiations with a group of New Orleans financiers. The Spinks-Ali rematch was set for September 15 in the Superdome. The problem was that Top Rank chairman Bob Arum did not want rival promoter Don King to steal his thunder.

King had scheduled a press conference in Las Vegas for that Wednesday, April 12, to announce his World Boxing Council title fight between Larry Holmes and Ken Norton. Arum wanted to stage his press conference the day before. That required Leon Spinks, Jr., to be there. The phone lines hummed.

On Monday, April tenth, die day before Arum's press conference, there was no change. Nobody had a fix on Spinks. With time running out, Arum made an unusual move. He asked Butch Lewis, Spinks's Svengali during the climb to the championship, who had recently been exiled from the Spinks camp for leaning on the champ a little too heavily, to send for Leon.

Dispatched to Jacksonville, Lewis located Spinks and transported him to New Orleans, apparently persuading him en route to let bygones be bygones.

On April 11, 20 minutes before the scheduled start of Arum's press conference, a Top Rank official discovered that room 1543 of the New Orleans Hilton was empty.

Since that was Spinks's room and since Spinks's wayfaring was by then a pattern, there was cause for alarm. But Leon, it turned out, was only tardy. An hour late, he finally arrived. As Leon entered, Muhammad Ali ducked under the table at which he was sitting, in a comic show of fear. Lured back out, he remarked on Spinks's tardiness.

"I'm important now, brother," Spinks rasped, his bloodshot eyes twinkling.

Ali inspected the champion's brown suit and the smartly knotted tie, turned to Lewis and said, "You done fixed his tie and everything, ain't you?" Then to Spinks, he said, "You used to be quiet and didn't dress up." Ali's voice took on an exaggerated tremolo, "You.. done ... chaaanged, man."

"You gave me my gusto, brother," Spinks quipped.

The crowd roared.

"You don't act the same no more," said Ali, pretending to be perplexed. "You used to be early. Now you late. Making everybody wait."

"Well, that the way it supposed to be. You got to let the smell come before you come."

"You crazy," Ali told him. "I ain't going to fight you."

In New Orleans, Ali adapted his wit to Spinks's rough-edged humor. The mood was cordial. The Ali ego did not rankle Spinks as it had some of his other opponents. Leon liked him. (After he'd beaten Muhammad, Spinks went to Ali's dressing room, kissed him on the cheek and said, "Good fight.") Ali, in turn, was not bent on unnerving Spinks. His reference to Spinks as crazy was meant as praise. He had not been able to psych Spinks during their Las Vegas title fight, a fact that colored the comic material Ali fashioned from his defeat. At one point during the New Orleans press conference, he interrupted Leon, saying, "I'll do the talking now"—a smile on his lips.

"Now, wait a minute. Shut up," Spinks said, acting cross.

"You tell me to shut up?" Ali shook his head and looked out at the audience with an aggrieved expression. "I got to take all this?"

"That's right," Spinks told him. "I'm champ now."

"Yassa, boss."

It was perfect timing that had Leon writhing in laughter, his curled tongue poking through his teeth. He reached for the microphone and said, "Ali is a wonderful person. He's a beautiful man. I love him. I love him with all my heart. Plus, he give me respect ... can't get that nowhere."

•

If Spinks was feeling that he couldn't get any respect except from Ali, he was probably just reflecting on some of the events that had taken place in the past few months.

Within six weeks of defeating Muhammad Ali, Spinks had been sued by a motel for unpaid bills; had been sued for back rent by his landlord in Philadelphia; had been arrested and then photographed in handcuffs for driving the wrong way on a one-way street and for operating a motor vehicle without a license in his home town of St. Louis; and had been discarded as heavyweight champion by the World Boxing Council in favor of the number-one challenger, Ken Norton. By then, the reeling Spinks could only say, "I haven't done anything for anyone to take my belt. I ain't disrespect no one."

And as if to add insult to injury, a look-alike of the new champion had turned up in Philadelphia. The dead ringer was, in Leon's term, "imposturing" him—signing autographs in public and encouraging local merchants to lavish complimentary goods on him.

For a couple of weeks, the man sampled the high times that Spinks calls his gusto. Then he prudently faded away.

The man may have known something. For by then, the pleasure of being the real Leon Spinks, Jr., was paling.

Nowhere was the pleasure more diminished than in Spinks's dealings with Butch Lewis of Top Rank, Inc., the champion's exclusive promoter. On the morning of March second—two weeks after he beat Ali—Spinks arrived at Top Rank's New York office to confer with Lewis, who had told him there was business to discuss at ten sharp.

When Spink's arrived, the Top Rank office was undergoing a paint job, which left its quarters cramped for seating space. Leon settled himself on top of a packing crate and waited for Lewis to appear. He was still waiting by early afternoon, when a Top Rank aide wondered if Spinks were hungry. Leon conceded he was and let the man buy him a ham and cheese on white.

Lewis appeared shortly afterward, saying he'd been trying to track down Spinks's accountant. That Spinks had been waiting half the day did not appear to trouble Butch. It disturbed the champion, though, who was beginning to reassess Lewis' role in his life.

Throughout Spinks's brief but tumultuous pro career, Lewis had been in the midst of the struggle for control over Spinks. The earliest infighting had involved Lewis and Millard "Mitt" Barnes, a white Teamsters organizer from St. Louis who was Spinks's manager of record. Although Barnes would retain his 30 percent managerial cut of Spinks's purses, he quickly lost the influence he'd had when Leon was an amateur and Barnes was his benefactor, investing time and money in Spinks's boxing future.

It was through Lewis that Barnes first learned that his past contributions (according to Mitt, he gave Spinks more spending money than strictly permitted by Olympic regulations) had been devalued. After Spinks's first pro fight, Lewis told Barnes that Leon's wife, Nova, was consulting with attorneys about canceling Mitt's contract as manager—she wanted to be the manager.

Barnes began to feel a chill in Leon's attitude toward him.

Spinks's disaffection for Barnes apparently was not so deep-rooted that he had qualms about asking him for more money. On August 8, 1977, shortly after Leon suffered an eye injury in training, he phoned Mitt for $500. According to his Western Union receipt, Barnes wired the money at 4:35 P.M. that day. An hour later, Spinks phoned back and asked for $1500 more.

"I just wired you the $500," Barnes told him. "I got to come to Philadelphia—we've got a few things to discuss. So I'll just bring the $1500 with me." When Barnes went to Philadelphia, Spinks had already received the $500 and split.

In Barnes's place, Lewis had taken charge of Spinks, involving himself in every facet of Leon's career, even tracking the fighter down when he went A.W.O.L. from training.

Lewis, a 31-year-old former car salesman who had become a vice-president of Top Rank, had the animated style of his former calling and an inclination for the ornate gesture. In the Manhattan phone directory, he was listed as "Lewis, P. A.," the initials referring to the nickname he'd taken for himself—Park Avenue Butch—an allusion to Top Rank's prestigious address.

It was a flair that Barnes, a slow-moving, plain-talking man, distrusted. He suspected Lewis of promoting himself with Spinks at his expense. After several "incidents" with Lewis, Barnes began to think of consulting an attorney for the problems he anticipated.

Spinks's trainer Sam Solomon had a wary eye on Lewis, too; he did not take to Butch's idea of bringing in another trainer, George Benton, to assist him.

Solomon, a short, rotund man, 63 years of age, had fought in tent shows and social clubs as a semipro boxer, and also had been a catcher in Negro baseball. Solomon is usually an affable individual, but on this occasion he became angry at having his authority as trainer undercut. Lewis thought it was a justifiable move.

"Solomon did a good job," Lewis recalled, "of being with Leon and his brother Michael. [Michael Spinks had turned pro with Top Rank in February 1977.] He'd pick 'em up all the time, get them to the gym. I'd tell him they needed this or that—and he'd get it done. Never a problem. And it wasn't until early summer that I started to see that they really weren't progressing. Sam was just great for my overseer, but he wasn't great in training them. In fact, Mike and Leon were complaining that he wasn't teaching 'em anything.

"What happened is that one day in the gym, Leon went over to George Benton, who worked in Joe Frazier's gym. He saw George showing fighters things that he thought he should know. He went to Benton and asked him, 'Man, would you show me how to do that?' Later, Leon called me and asked, 'Can't we get Benton to work with us?' "

Benton was a former middleweight contender who was training Frazier's stable of fighters, which included Frazier's own son Marvis, a promising amateur. As a fighter, Benton had been a clever operator, with a knack for avoiding punches. A classic stylist.

"George himself came to me," said (continued on page 132) Spinks (continued from page 128) Lewis, "and said, 'Look, man, I don't want to start no trouble. I want you to know your fighter came over to me and asked me to show him a couple of tricks he saw me showing to some other fighters. I don't want to start no problems.' See, Solomon noticed what was going on ... and got a little pissed."

To avoid problems, Lewis held back on hiring Benton for the time being.

•

By September 1977, the in-house politics occupied too much of Leon's attention. There were Barnes's calls to re-establish old ties and the warnings from others to ignore him. There was Solomon's resentment to balance against the advanced techniques that Benton probably could provide. There was hard-sell Lewis, pulling and tugging and telling Spinks so many things that it was hard to keep them all straight. In the ghetto of St. Louis, Spinks hadn't had to worry about receipts for documenting expenses or about being on time.

The worst of it was Spinks's gnawing concern that he was being manipulated against his better interests. Two other Olympic boxing gold medalists, Howard Davis and Sugar Ray Leonard, had landed exorbitant guaranteed-income deals with the TV networks. By contrast, Top Rank's guarantee to Spinks of only $30,000 for eight bouts was a pittance.

If those elements were not sufficient to cloud Spinks's thoughts, Arum provided another twist. Although Spinks had fought only five professional fights (all won by knockouts), Arum signed him to box Ali for the heavyweight championship.

The original plan called for Spinks to qualify for the title fight—he was required to defeat at least one ranking boxer, against Alfio Righetti of Italy, on September 13. Spinks's eye injury caused the fight to be rescheduled for November 18. As a tune-up for that bout, Top Rank matched Spinks against a journeyman heavyweight named Scott LeDoux in October.

The LeDoux bout was what prompted me to begin looking into the Spinks story. It was not the fight telecast from Las Vegas or the news accounts that piqued my interest. It was what a deep-throat source I'll name Whisper reported. Whisper is a nondescript individual, given to the sort of tinted glasses Spinks himself wears. On Leon, it is for effect, a kind of flair. For Whisper, it deepens his seedy anonymity, his gray slouch of a figure. He is a boxing aficionado, though, with a computerlike memory for names, dates and the curious facts of the sweet science. He is also privy to all the intrigues and bent turns of the game.

"The thing about the LeDoux fight," Whisper said, "was what occurred outside the ring, not inside it. There was a craziness at ringside in the Spinks camp, particularly with this Butch Lewis fellow.

"Lewis sat down in the press row ... maybe 20 feet from LeDoux's corner ... middle of the ring. Into the ring comes Michael Spinks to fight in a prelim. And Butch stands up in the press row ... on the floor ... Michael is in completely the opposite corner ... and Butch hollers, 'Hey, Sliiiiim'—Slim—that's his nickname for him. The kid turns around. Butch hollers, 'Give me fiiiiive.' The kid dutifully walks across the ring and ... you know that give-me-five thing. Two gloves, palms down. And Butch gets his jollies. Same thing with Leon when he comes into the ring. 'Give me fiiiiive, big man.'

"Then the LeDoux fight starts. And LeDoux, of course, pulled every trick in the book—the elbows, the thumb in the eye, the head butts. Meantime, though, he's managing to bang home some legitimate punches, too.

"OK. Leon was under a little pressure. And here's where Lewis began shouting instructions from press row. I couldn't believe my eyes: Leon would turn toward this guy for advice instead of to his corner!

"Butch's screaming and ranting led a couple of people to start heckling him. And he's done this before ... at other fights, I've been told. 'You got faith in that white man up there? Bet $500!'

"The morning of the fight, I'd run into Joe Daszkiewicz, the trainer of LeDoux. He tells me, 'Whisper, you should have heard what went on yesterday. LeDoux is slaying on the same floor as Leon. We're going past the door to his room, we hear Butch Lewis inside, carrying on. Trying to psych Leon. "If you don't win the fight, you're going back to the ghetto. You've got to win or you're through." Really laid it on!'

"Toward the end of the fight, Leon is dragging. It's his first ten-rounder. The word was that he'd been partying pretty good a few weeks before. At this point, it's a close fight. The shot at Ali is on the line. All of Spinks's people are going crazy. And here comes Lewis, running up to the ring ropes and yelling at Leon: 'Remember the ghetto! Remember the ghetto!' Really weird stuff, but I'll give him this: Maybe it helped. Because Leon sparked up at the end.

"The fight ended in a draw. Afterward, Johnny Mag, of the Nevada Athletic Commission wrote Top Rank a letter of reprimand ... that this will not be countenanced anymore ... that Butch Lewis is to be kept out of press row. All that sort of stuff. A very stiff letter."

The unsettling atmosphere continued for the Righetti fight. Benton was in camp. Sensing Solomon's antagonism, though, he bowed out after Spinks beat the Italian, telling Lewis he wanted to avoid further hard feelings. Lewis, though, felt that George's expertise could help against Ali. He kept after Benton and eventually persuaded him to work with Spinks. It produced a triangular training approach that involved Benton, Spinks and Lewis' brother, Nelson Brison, who was an assistant trainer of Spinks.

"George," said Lewis, "would phone Nelson and tell him things that he should be showing Leon. And Nelson would then repeat to Spinks what George had told him. This is how it was done! OK.? This is how fucked up it was. And then, as the championship fight approached, I said, 'Look, George, we coming down to the wire. I need you down here ... if nothing else, to work the last week or so. To do whatever you can do. And if you have to do it, continue doing it through Nelson. 'Cause we can't afford to have any confrontations at this point.' "

In Las Vegas for the title fight, Benton had to continue to funnel his ideas through Brison. He showed him tactics for defensing Ali and explained a strategy he had. The key to the Benton strategy was for Spinks to pound away at Ali's left shoulder during the fight and tire the muscles that controlled Muhammad's jab, a weapon that had been crucial to Ali late in past fights. Benton also found a way to exploit Ali's energy-saving rope-a-dope tactic: When Muhammad covered up, bang away at the shoulder. When he opened up, throw the uppercut through his gloves to the chin.

"Then," said Benton, "the few times I'd see Leon alone, I never talked loud to him. Always talked soft to him. You can take a person who's excitable and talk him down by your tone of voice. I'd tell him, 'You're going to be champ. All you got to do is do the right things. Small things. Goddamn it, you'll be riding around in a Rolls-Royce. I can see you with the pretty clothes on.' And (continued on page 210) Spinks (continued from page 132) right behind that, I'd say something that would pertain to boxing."

But the dominant figure in training camp for the Ali fight was, of course, Lewis. He used his position like a gong: He was loud and insistent and sometimes got on people's nerves.

A sparring partner of Spinks quit camp after telling Lewis that he ought to learn to respect people. Eventually, Solomon, whom Lewis berated in public on more than one occasion, got to feeling similarly. One night, he told Lewis, "You acting like you want to fight, nigger. Treating people like they're nothing. I'm not afraid of you. I may be an old man. But I'll punch you right in the mouth." A similar threat was made by Top Rank PR man Chet Cummings when Lewis kicked at his hotel door to get his attention.

After Spinks won the heavyweight crown, Lewis was not overly modest about his role in the title coup. "What you all taking Bob Arum's picture for?" he'd ask photographers. "What you all doing that for? I'm the guy that brought Leon Spinks in." In Top Rank's office, Lewis continued to berate aides, sometimes in front of Spinks. And he could be just as pushy with the champion himself.

On the evening of March second, Lewis told Spinks he wanted him to attend the Mike Rossman vs. Alvaro "Vaqui" Lopez light-heavyweight fight at Madison Square Garden. This followed Leon's nearly daylong wait for Lewis in Top Rank's office. When Spinks declined to see the fight, Lewis insisted. He said that as champion, Leon owed his public such appearances. Later, Spinks would complain about being badgered yet one more time. On that night, however, what made it more galling was that, with Nova back home, Leon had been looking forward to spending the evening with a lady he'd flown up from North Carolina. That was personal turf. And it made it one push too many.

By then, he'd suffered Lewis' dervish style too long. One sticky situation after another. Never a moment's peace. Now, as heavyweight king, he thought he'd earned the right to an orderly reign. And if his old mahatma, Lewis, was not built for that, then Spinks was prepared to go elsewhere.

The morning after the Rossman-Lopez match, Leon met with a 49-year-old former Wayne County, Michigan, circuit-court judge named Edward F. Bell. Bell, a tall, thin man of dignified mien, was now a practicing attorney in Detroit. Spinks told Bell that his affairs were chaotic and needed changing.

Bell impressed Spinks. The attorney had a cool, understated manner that contrasted sharply with the klaxon style of Lewis.

Indeed, later on the same day that Spinks met with Bell, Lewis again showed the champ surprising contempt—and disrespect. Fearing he'd miss an airplane flight, Butch hurried into a limousine on Park Avenue that had been hired for Leon's use. "Grab yourself a cab," Lewis told Spinks, as he commandeered the limousine and sped to the airport.

A few days later, in Detroit, Spinks announced that Bell now represented him. With Bell, he hoped, would come a semblance of order.

•

March 30, 1978: In suite 840 of Detroit's Buhl Building, where the law firm of Bell and Hudson maintains its office, the Spinks watch was on its third day.

Spinks's attorneys, Bell and Bell's colleague Lester Hudson, had sent a former Detroit police officer, who also tracked down bail junipers, out to St. Louis to find the heavyweight champion.

The ex-cop, who had just hired on as a Spinks bodyguard, had left Detroit, saying, "If the motherfucker is there, I'll find him."

Bell and Hudson hoped so. They had Arum on the phone daily, talking to him about a deal with a group of Africans (who were later replaced by the New Orleans people) on the Spinks-Ali rematch. The negotiations soon would require their flying to New York in the company of Spinks.

Bell and Hudson were not the only people who wanted Spinks in Detroit. Richard J. Smit did, too. Smit was a car salesman who had driven up three days before from the Johnny Kool Oldsmobile agency in Indianapolis. Indiana, in a 1977 custom-built white Lincoln Continental limousine that he meant to sell to Spinks for $35,000—$5000 down, a ten-month lease and a final "balloon" pay-out.

The vehicle went with the new image that Bell and Hudson were insisting soon would fit their client Spinks as snugly as the three size-42 tailor-made suits that had been hand-delivered three days earlier by a clothier from across the border in Windsor, Ontario.

For those three days, Bell and Hudson had been talking persuasively into my tape recorder of the mechanisms that they had set up to ensure that Spinks's career would run smoothly and that he would rise up as a Palookaville do-gooder, a shining example to the youth of America. It was the image Leon talked up, too: "He'p the kids, gotta he'p the kids," he'd say—an ambition that somehow always was being waylaid.

The mechanisms were supposed to change that. Like G.M. and Howard Hughes, Leon was now incorporated in Delaware, so he could enjoy that state's liberal corporate advantages. Spinks Jr. Organization Inc.: At that date, Spinks was its only officer. The setup provided him tax relief, as well as a sense of his own future. He had, it turned out, taken to carrying an attaché case, prompting a gag:

Q.: What's that you got in your hand?

Spinks: That my office.

In fact, though, a real office, carpeted and with a view of Detroit's Congress Street, had been cleared for Spinks in suite 840.

Downstairs, in the National Bank of Detroit, an account for Spinks was set up. What remained of his cash was transferred from New York banks. Temporary checks were issued. Spinks's taxes were brought up to date. In 1977, his first year as a professional boxer, he had twice missed making quarterly tax payments on his fight earnings. When Top Rank sent him to a New York accounting firm, Leon showed up with a shopping bag full of cash receipts. But Spinks was now supposed to be catching on to fiscal complexities. When Bell and Hudson's tax specialist had asked the high school dropout if he understood why he had to document expenses more carefully, Spinks had answered, "You're talking 'bout my business partner [Uncle Sam] ... looking over my shoulder ... comin' in, saying, 'I'm not gonna let you get away with this.' "

Arrangements were made for Spinks to pursue a general-education degree. To improve his speech, he'd bought a tape recorder ("Not a little bitty box," he'd say, "a big box ... made by Pioneer ... that I know I can get the whole sound of my voice into it"), so that he could hear himself and learn from it. And then there was The Leon Spinks Calendar.

On white cardboard the size of fight posters, Spinks's monthly itinerary was recorded on The Leon Spinks Calendar. In Bell's office, and Hudson's, a calendar was prominently displayed. At a glance, either lawyer knew what the champ was doing.

Spinks's future engagements were marked in red and black inks—red for tentative and black for solidly booked dates. In the month ahead, Spinks was to receive the Ring magazine championship belt (4/4) in New York, lay over a night at the Hilton and travel to Philadelphia, where he would be honored by the city of Philadelphia and would tape The Mike Douglas Show (4/6). Then:

April 10–15 Miami, Fla. training

April 16–22 Carribean [sic] exhibition tour

April 23–29 Carribean [sic] exhibition tour

It was an impressive-looking document, except for one thing: its efficacy. Leon Spinks, who had only to catch a plane to Detroit, hadn't been up to it for three days running, a fact that jibed less with the blue-skies future that Bell and Hudson foresaw for Spinks than with events of the past weeks.

Then there was the information from my Spinks source, Whisper, that had the jagged feel of self-destruct:

"Leon is still Leon. That's the amazing thing. Still irresponsible. Wants to do exactly what he wants to do. He's got ... something a little loose there,! think.

"Like, he doesn't have a driver's license and yet he continues to drive. A couple of days after he was arrested for driving without a license, he drove a guy I know to the airport. Like, it didn't faze him at all. With Leon, these things just happen. Very spontaneously. And he goes with it.

"Then last week, his bodyguard was expecting his wife to fly in to St. Louis from Des Moines. Since the wife was staying with Nova, Leon says there's a possibility that Nova might be on the same flight. If Nova's on the plane, Spinks says, the guy is to call up. It's like a little game with Nova and Leon. OK? Leon flies out of town. She follows him. She never sees him. Leon flies out of town again. She follows him. Like Marlene Dietrich in 'Morocco.'

"Sure enough, Nova's on the plane. The guy calls up to find out what to do. The problem here is that Spinks has a broad staying with him. So? What's the answer? Take the broad and stash her in another hotel? No. Too easy. They put Nova in the room Leon had stayed in. And Leon gets another suite, two flights up. Same hotel. Nova thinks he's not even in the building. The way it went, Nova's downstairs. The girlfriend is upstairs. And the news guy is trying to get Leon to sit still for an interview.

"Spinks, my friend, is going to drive you crazy."

That same afternoon, waiting in Bell and Hudson's office with car salesman Smit and others, I wondered if I would go crazy, as Whisper had prophesied. What I did know for sure was that I had a bad case of the fidgets. Three days of waiting to talk with the heavyweight champion.

The hoped-for vision of order was clearly down the tubes. Where was the artful dodger? Late that afternoon, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter heard that Spinks was signing autographs in the ghetto and phoned Leon's bodyguard with the address. At that point, Nova and the bodyguard slipped away from the ex-cop from Detroit and went looking for Leon.

Spinks was where he was said to be. The bodyguard saw the silver Chrysler New Yorker that Leon drove when he was in St. Louis and told Nova that he'd retrieve Leon. Instead, he told Spinks, "Your wife is here, man," which gave Spinks and his St. Louis woman the chance to drive away. Back at the hotel, Nova knocked on the door of the ex-cop's room and told him that the bodyguard had screwed up.

At the time this was occurring, Smit was emerging from attorney Hudson's office in Detroit to say, "They're contacting a guy with the St. Louis police who knows Spinks. To see if he can dig him up. The word is: Be discreet."

A smile flickered across Smit's lips. Each screwy twist of waiting for Leon was a perverse entertainment for him. But that was ending. Smit left Detroit that afternoon, regretting he hadn't had a chance to try his pitch on the heavyweight champion.

'Cause I know Spinks is a buyer," Smit said. "All I got to do is stick his ass in the seat. Boom! Thirty-five Gs. Cashier's check, it you please. All I need is five minutes."

On the chance that Spinks would slip into Detroit in the near future, Smit left the limousine with a relative of a fellow employee and made arrangements to have it driven back to Indianapolis if it turned out that Leon was on a sabbatical.

As for me, I thought of catching a flight to St. Louis but had the paranoiac vision of Spinks's plane passing mine in the night, with Leon flashing me a demonic jack-o'-lantern grin.

I took an evening flight to New York.

•

On his own, Spinks flew to Detroit the next day.

He hadn't much to say, except about the limousine. On that item, he did not appear to need Smit. Never mind the informed spiel on gear ratios or rear-axle options. Spinks saw the white Lincoln Continental limousine with the gold striping. He saw the AM/FM stereo cassette player, the small-screen color TV, the digital clock, the bar, the sun roof, the phones for in-car communications and the two back rows of facing seats in crushed velour. He saw all that and knew what he knew. As Leon put it:

"That my motherfucking car. I'm buying."

•

From St. Louis, Nova phoned Detroit later that day.

"You tell Leon," she said, "that I'm going to sue him for divorce. I'm going to take all his money. And you tell him if he wants to discuss it, I'm going to my parents in Des Moines."

As she hung up, though, Nova, a woman of more than 200 pounds, winked at the photographer from the Post-Dispatch and said, "I'm going right to Detroit. Just said that about Des Moines to throw him off my tracks."

•

When Spinks won the championship, the press wrote traditional copy about the ghetto fighter's transcending deprivation. A few unkind reporters carped about the slurred speech and fractured syntax and the dearth of feeling the new champion had for the press. Ali backlash, so to speak. But by and large, Spinks was warmly depicted.

The fact was, though, he was not O.J. black, not the establishment's kind of colored. He had the discomforting sound of the back-alley, muscatel-swigging black man, and a hard-edged look to go with it. So when incidents began to occur, the press was not disposed to go easy on him.

That did not surprise Spinks. From the start, he'd met resistance as champion. In some quarters, he was still regarded as a man whose triumph over Ali was a freak of timing, a fortuitous conjunction of fate and Muhammad's middle age. In dreams before the title match, Spinks had conjured up the image of his arms raised in triumph, but he never imagined the thorny times that would follow.

"Like, I remember," he said later, when we finally connected, "the first time I went back to St. Louis after I won the championship. I was in a club. I was supposed to meet the manager of the place. I was waiting there when a guy ran up to me, point a finger in my face, say, 'You ain't shiiit. You ain't nothing.' And, like, I almost went at him. You understand? 'Cause somebody say that ... that's just like saying, 'Let's get it on, let's fight.' I got a heating sensation in my body. A burning sensation in my chest and neck. Like what I used to get when I'm out on the street. But I thought, No, man, that ain't you. Look at you now. I mean, even though he's hollering about how much he hates you ... and whatever ... a lot of people around here do love you. Like the people in the club—they said to the guy, 'Who in the hell is you, nigger, to come to our champ like that?' "

The encounter in St. Louis was the first of several instances in which strangers accosted Spinks and bad-mouthed him to his face. His correspondence contained a percentage of hate mail, too, mostly provoked, it seemed, by his victory over Ali, of whom he was genuinely fond. "What a joyful man Ali is," Spinks had said before the fight.

Compared with Ali, Spinks lacked the easy grace in public. At times, he could be a sunny soul, breaking into a grin that looked nearly equine in the closeups that photographers snapped. At other times, he was perplexed by the people he encountered, particularly those who stared dead in his face without speaking. For those cases, Spinks had acquired a line—"What's wrong with you, you ill or something?"—that had proved helpful. "When I say it, then everybody start laughing. Whatever." Whatever. It was not easy being the heavyweight champion.

For Spinks, the problem was compounded by a lack of education that had been exploited before. Barnes said that when Spinks joined the Marines, he was under the impression that it was for a two-year hitch rather than the four-year term stated in his papers.

Once, to clarify whether or not Spinks's brother Evan had an S at the end of his name, I asked Leon to spell it. He took two faltering stabs at the spelling and gave up with an exclamation of "Oh, wow!"

Spinks's ingenuousness invited an atmosphere of conniving and intrigue and produced the internal confusion that was built into the heavyweight champion's operation. Even friends tried to take advantage.

"Some of them," Spinks said later, "try to hit me up for money. I tell 'em, 'Well, I fought hard and I worked hard to get where I got. Don't take away my gusto, 'cause you ain't got none. All you got to do is to make it for yourself and then you have some gusto. And then you ain't gotta ask nobody for anything.' "

Spinks is a creature of contradictory pieces, eluding easy labels. Although he hasn't the glibness of Ali—his sentences often lurch and sputter—he sometimes strikes a rough poetic note with his words. "I broke out in a thousand tears," or "Nobody really finds hisself, 'cause if he finds hisself, he knows the future." Similarly, though he takes his image with what sometimes seems undue sobriety ("I don't want nobody to see me just like a Tom, Dick and Harry. I want to always keep an image as a nice neat man"), he reacted with boyish hilarity when TV had a laugh at his expense.

"What's that man," he asked, "that tells jokes ... on The Gong Show ... has a bag on his face? Yeah. Unknown Comic. He made a joke on me one night. Said, 'I'm going to do an image of Leon Spinks.' Turns around, took the first bag off, put another bag on his face. Had the whole front of the bag black, with two teeth missing. And he turned back around, changed his face mask back, said, 'You didn't know I was two-faced, either, did you?' That gassed me, man. I die laughing. I went in and holler out to my wife. Said, 'This fool is doing an image of me.' "

One moment Spinks would yank a cork from a bottle of champagne with his teeth. The next, he'd clutch a pillow to his chest or suck his thumb as he sat for an interview. The word man-child has been applied to him. Even Nova has been quoted as using it. It is a good word, evoking the contradictory forces within Spinks that make him difficult to pin down.

The odd angles at which Spinks sometimes carries his hands—reminiscent at times of the singer Joe Cocker—are part of a repertoire of body quirks signaling his moods. A bounce to his step indicates that he is in good humor. At those times, his erect carriage has a dancer's lithe quality. In foul moods, he draws in his neck and cocks his head to the side, which has an ominous effect.

But he can be sweetly attentive, too. "You know what I like?" he asked. "Meeting the mommas. All the mommas are big and fat. They get excited when they see me. They be grabbing on me"— Spinks twists his shoulders from side to side in recollection—"la de la, la de la la la."

Flying to Detroit from Boston, Leon met a little girl, about seven years of age, who had had a series of operations on her throat that left her unable to speak at the time of the flight. "Her parents," Spinks said, "had just picked her up from the hospital. And her birthday were coming up. So I sung Happy Birthday to her. Yeah, I sung it to her. And I gave her my autograph. And then we sit back there and ... we writing notes. We was talking to each other ... through notes. We just talked about anything and everything. Anything that she asked me about, I would tell her. She asked about boxing. She asked how a guy could get hit on the face like that. I said, 'Well, baby, it's all in the job.' "

Spinks is a visceral person who is not afraid to express himself. To the anonymous benefactor who'd flown his mother to the Montreal Olympics, Leon said, "You know, it's the nicest thing that's ever happened to us. We just love you for it." When confronted by LeDoux's dirty tactics, Spinks had asked in the ring, "Why you cheat?" a remark that had struck LeDoux by its ingenuous inflections.

The most striking instance of man-child expressiveness occurred the night Spinks talked to me of his ghetto up-bringing, the anguish and humiliation of which apparently were vividly felt. At one point, as he paced his room in the Las Vegas Hilton, growing more agitated, he stopped and, with a stricken expression, said, "Get me out of here, get me out of St. Louis," which really only meant he wanted to change the subject.

Spinks has what seems an obsessive tie to his past. His very speech reflects it. His words do not falter or get jammed up at the beginning of sentences when the subject is ghetto travail. It's as though he's had the same thoughts many times before. "I was the type of person who was quiet," Spinks said. "People could do different things to me and I'd come by and make my momma think everything was all right. I would lock everything inside myself. Because the hurt I felt, I always kept it to myself. I never did try to explain to people what hurt I had went through."

His father is at the core of his pained memories. Leon, Sr., separated from the family when the boy was young. What contacts Spinks had with him afterward were mostly disappointing—he remembers being ridiculed and whupped—and filled him with a desire "to be the man my daddy wasn't."

There is a darker side to Spinks that possession of the heavyweight title seemed to provoke. Whisper had a story in that regard:

"I knew George Foreman before he knocked out Joe Frazier. A real gung-ho nice kind of kid. Now, the morning after he knocked out Joe Frazier, he walked in to the press conference ... and like this: 'Hey, get the hell off that couch, man.... You, I don't want you silting there.' He's rearranging the room. How to sit. How to take pictures. And you know who did the same thing the day after he won? I swear. Leon Spinks. 'Get off the couch,' he told news guys. He's barking commands as to who sits where. 'Clear that couch. Get out of the way.' Uncanny. Absolutely uncanny. Almost to the T."

The title conferred an elaborate celebrity of a peculiarly American kind, with its mix of grand and tawdry attentions— headlines and hotel suites and the National Enquirer asking Leon to by-line "Why I Love America."

Being the heavyweight champion mattered. People simply did not worry about the "image" of champions in other weight divisions. The almighty shazam belonged to the heavyweight king. And with it went the recognition, concern and gaudy fanfares inherent. Snubbed at the door of Manhattan's chic Studio 54 when he was a challenger, Spinks was "olee olee in free" as the champion.

For Spinks, though, some measure of his newly acquired fame was the motion and commotion he could trigger. Bodies snapped to. That could be exhilarating for a young man whose background was filled with mockery and rejection. Spinks's whirlwind days, especially the ones he lived when he bolted, had people dashing about, worrying and wondering about him. That might appear selfish from close up. By the long view, though, it was a pay-back on a hard, cold past. As Spinks once said, "See, my dad said I'd amount to nothing. He would tell people that. And it hurt me to hear him say it. It stayed in my mind. Why'd he say that? What for? Call me a fool out of the blue. Not to my face but to people who'd tell it to me. And that became my thing—to be somebody."

Underlying all contradictions, it sometimes seemed, was a mad pleasure in the inappropriate moment, the attraction to which brought unanticipated twists: Spinks would experience seizures of laughter in the midst of a sober account of one of his St. Louis driving busts or while he analyzed his impromptu disappearances. They were great gurgling sounds—laughter shot through with an unhinged quality.

At those times, the phrase "inappropriate response" had flashed in my mind like the TILT light on a pinball machine, the laughter suggesting a self-destructive impulse of the kind that made tragic heroes.

Was Spinks's gusto just a bit bent? "He's got ... something a little loose there, I think," Whisper had said of him. The words applied, though, to the whole shebang—the Spinks High Times and Soul Aplenty Caravan. It was a hard scene to get a fix on. There was the continuing sense of the whole works' being slightly out of whack, bent in a way no orderly vision could possibly straighten.

•

Welcome Leon Spinks Heavyweight Champion of the World, read the marquee outside the DiLido Hotel in Miami Beach. It was April 11, the day of the news conference with Ali. I had accompanied Spinks from New Orleans to Miami.

Situated on the ocean, with its front entrance on Collins Avenue, the DiLido is a high-rise hotel with a spacious L-shaped lobby and walls covered with pastel murals of boats and trees and monkeys and birds. The aura is art-deco daft—a movie set out of a Thirties comedy. It appeared to possess the right cockeyed charm for the Spinks entourage. The mood was high on arrival.

During the press conference in New Orleans, Leon had had this exchange:

Newsman: At the airport, you said you'd have something to say after you signed the contract. What do you have to say now?

Spinks: Santa Clans.

He growled the words with a loving Satchmo sound, grinning as he did. Santa Clans: shorthand that meant the getting had been good—Spinks's signature assured that millions of dollars would be made. The pleasure remained. At the airport in Miami, when a TV sportscaster asked Spinks to describe how it felt to whip Ali, he smiled and did a soft-shoe routine, at the finish of which he extended his hand and said, "Like that."

Later, in Miami Beach, he walked Lincoln Road Mall, where he signed autographs, mugged for cameras, kissed women and shopped.

"How much those shoes?" he asked, pointing to a pair of size-12 Pierre Cardin loafers.

"Not too much," the salesman said.

"Then I'll take them."

From a thick wad of currency, Leon peeled off a $100 bill for the salesman.

"And what are these?" Spinks asked.

"Money clips."

"Will they hold a lot of money?"

"Yes, Mr. Spinks."

"OK. Gimme one."

Spinks tried to insert his roll of bills, but it was too thick to fit inside the clip.

Spinks spent a sunny day in Miami Beach, grinning, dancing across streets, quipping to young women ("Whaddaya say, momma?"). That night, Spinks, a welterweight named Roger Stafford and I stood by a low stone wall at the end of Lincoln Road, watching the ocean break against the shore just below. Spinks was in a form-fitting maroon shirt and cream-colored slacks. He and Stafford were drinking California pink champagne. A gentle breeze blew.

"It gonna be good to hit some mother-fucker again," said Spinks, putting his glass on the wall and inhaling a smoke.

"Yeahhhh, I know," said Stafford, setting his drink down, too.

Spinks struck a fighting pose, bent at the knees, and let his hands go.

"Whap! Whap!" Stafford said, as he watched. Then Stafford was moving punches through the air, emitting small grunting sounds as he did. "That's the way I did it to that dude," he said, referring to a preliminary bout he'd fought that weekend on national TV. "All over the motherfucker."

"Yeahhhh," said Spinks.

"I whupped that dude good——"

"Hey. My man." Spinks interrupted, addressing me. "Hey, you ain't gonna put in the ar-ti-cle that I smoke, is you?"

"Heyyyy," I said, with an elaborate shrug that was not quite an answer.

" 'Count of my image," Spinks said.

Spinks thought about it and then forgot about it and began to move sinuously, reducing his shadow punches to a stoned dance.

"Women," said Stafford. "Got to get women."

"Women," answered Spinks.

"Got to."

"Sweet nothings?" I asked.

"No. Lies," said Stafford. "Tell 'em lies."

"Liiiiees," crooned Spinks, his body rocking as he grinned. "Tell em liieees."

Stafford swayed in answer. "Liiieeees."

"Tell 'em liieeees."

They doubled over in laughter, Spinks making plashing sounds with his mouth.

"Liiieees."

"Tell 'em liiieeees."

Minutes later, Spinks was gliding through the DiLido lobby, still sipping champagne, when a team of women bowlers from Terre Haute, Indiana, recognized him. Out came the cameras. Spinks obliged by posing for snapshots, drinking champagne refills as he did.

"Get outa my pitcher," a pretty young black woman said. "Just me 'n' the man."

A bowler in pin curlers arrived. "We was dressed for bed and they come up and said Leon Spinks."

"Leon," a heavy-set woman said, "let me show you a picture of my grandchildren. They triplets."

"Where's the champagne?" another bowler wondered.

"It's on me," Spinks said, moving toward the hotel restaurant, waving his arm when the women hesitated. "Come on, ladies."

Soon after, the Spinks caravan was on the move. Up the road it went to Place Pigalle, a Miami Beach club whose all-girl revue and X-rated comedienne, Pearl Williams, were the attractions. Tuesdays, though, Williams was off. So, for this night, the strippers would do.

The Leon Spinks Calendar had called for Spinks to spend this second week in April training for his Caribbean tour. But the good times would roll instead. The sun was coming up when the heavyweight champ made it back to the DiLido.

•

A few days later, there was another incident that still lives in my mind. Spinks was standing in the DiLido penthouse number one, his $100-a-day lodgings, idling for a moment before plunging into another day. The sun streamed through a space in the drapes. His step had a loose, easy swing. Then suddenly he was holding up the index finger of each hand and, with a rhumbalike motion of the hips, he began to move, chanting in a comically falsetto voice, "Penthouse number one, penthouse number one"—and smiling. The style was Carmen Miranda's, but the pleasure was all Spinks's. Penthouse number one: top of the world, momma.

But with Spinks, the pleasure of being up there was never far removed from the trick impulses that could bring him down. And as the week progressed in Miami Beach, there were troubling notes. Complications caused the Caribbean tour to be pushed back a week, creating a gap in The Spinks Calendar that left Leon susceptible to demon whispers. A call from Lewis also augured problems. As he hung up, Spinks muttered, "One thing after another. Shit. Shit. Shit."

And a few days later, as Nova arrived in Miami Beach, Leon was on the run again, headed for St. Louis. There were problems there with Barnes. Barnes had agreed to take less than his customary 30 percent of the purse for the Spinks-Ali rematch, but he had grievances that could threaten the bout.

Lewis was to meet Spinks in St. Louis. Before Lewis left, he phoned the DiLido to check on Spinks's whereabouts. In penthouse number one, Nova picked up the phone, heard Lewis' voice and hung up. She figured he was to blame for Spinks's latest abrupt departure.

Lewis found Spinks and told him that a meeting in New York was planned to straighten out details of the Spinks-Ali rematch. The various interests—Barnes, Bell, Arum—would be there. Spinks agreed to the trip but kept delaying.

On Wednesday, April 19, Lewis urged him to leave St. Louis. Spinks seemed inclined to but asked, "Can I take my baby with me to New York?"—a reference to his St. Louis woman. Lewis told him he could do what he wanted—just be on the flight to New York. Spinks's woman said she had to get her clothes. Lewis waited at the airport. When Spinks did not appear, he gave up and flew back to New York. That was on Thursday.

On Friday, April 21, he heard on the radio that Spinks was busted again.

"Has been released on a $3700 bond. Spinks was taken into custody on charges involving suspected drug violations ... and failure to produce a driver's license. He was booked on suspicion of two counts of violating the Missouri controlled-substance law by possession of marijuana and cocaine. Police say warrants will be sought later today. Arrested with Spinks was a 26-year-old woman companion."

A later report stated that torn $10, $20 and $50 bills were found in the trunk of Spinks's car.

With the heavyweight champion involved, guilty or innocent hardly mattered. Wheels would turn, deals could be made. In fact, the drug charges were later dropped. But....

Whisper called the next day.

"Buttling Siki," he said.

"Who?"

"Battling Siki, my friend. Real name Louis Phal. A Senegalese Negro. Won the light-heavyweight championship in 1922. Knocked out Georges Carpentier in six rounds. Paris, France. Siki was called the Singular Senegalese. And he came here a raw fucking African. We're going back over 50 years. Loved his wine, women and song. And belting guys in the chops. And wearing the grass-skirt-and-top-hat kind of thing. He's buried here in New York. Out in Flushing, Long Island. A couple of years ago, a boxers' association put a tombstone up.... Died in a fucking bar brawl in New York City. December 15, anno Domini 1925. Look it up."

And he clicked off.

"The worst of it was Spinks's concern that he was being manipulated against his better interests."

"Leon was incorporated in Delaware, so he could enjoy that state's liberal corporate advantages."