Marvelous Marvin Hagler once said that if you sliced open his head, you would find a big boxing glove inside.
”That`s all I am (a fighter),” he said. ”I live for it.”
Inside the head of Michael Spinks, things are not nearly so simple. The boxing glove is there, but it is smaller, lighter, less noticeable. Michael Spinks does not live for fighting.
”I feel a need to have people relate to me as a person, not as a boxer,” Spinks said. ”I mean, how does a boxer act? How is a boxer supposed to act?”
Spinks, 31, does not act like the stereotypical boxer, the guy who thumps his chest and proclaims himself the best in the world. He is quiet and gentle. He says he cries ”at the drop of a hat,” at a movie or a family reunion or a birthday party for his daughter. There are even times, he said, when he wants to cry in the gym.
”Sometimes, for one reason or another, you just don`t feel sharp in the gym,” he said. ”You try, and you try, but you just don`t have it. Sometimes, it almost brings me to tears. I walk around with my head down, but I have to deal with it. I have to keep trying.”
When Spinks was a teenager in his home town of St. Louis, he heard stories about punch-drunk fighters, guys with broken noses and ears that resembled items in the produce section of the supermarket.
”We had just finished working out in the gym one day,” Spinks recalled. ”A bunch of the guys were talking about Joe Louis, about how this great champion got cheated out of most of his money. I thought, `Oh, my God.` It struck me that people don`t think very highly of boxers.”
No, Spinks does not know how a boxer is supposed to act, but he thinks the public does. He thinks the public views a boxer as a stiff who shuffles down the street, shadowboxing, snorting, jerking his head to the sound of a bell that rings only in his mind. The fighter, according to this stereotype, is as pitiful as he is penniless.
”I was about 12, and I went into the gym and learned how to box, how to protect myself,” he said. ”I loved it, but something funny happened. After I learned how to fight, I didn`t think it would be right to go around using that talent on the street. So I just tried to stay out of trouble.
”I just have to be myself. When I started boxing professionally, I told myself I didn`t want to end up broke, like so many fighters I had heard about. I promised myself, when I was a kid, that I would never shadowbox in public. I`m a person first, a fighter second.”
That may be true, but Michael Spinks the fighter is becoming more and more prominent, placing Michael Spinks the person in the background, if only temporarily. He has begun using phrases like ”dogfight,” ”death match,”
”all-out war,” and the reason for this violent imagery is simple. Spinks is getting ready to meet the most intimidating fighter in the sport, undisputed heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, on June 27 at Convention Hall in Atlantic City.
”I`m already getting excited about the fight,” he said. ”I`m already stepping into the role of a fighter. Anyone who knows me realizes that I will come to fight. Tyson is a tremendous challenge, but I won`t be out there running.”
Dwight Muhammad Qawi, who lost his light-heavyweight title to Spinks in 1983, is now serving as a sparring partner for the challenger.
”Michael is a down-to-earth person, a very nice person, and that throws a lot of people off,” Qawi said. ”Tyson is presumed by everyone to be a vicious animal.
”Michael is a warrior. He may even initiate some of the action from the beginning. I think it will be a super fight.”
When one considers that Spinks never envisioned a career as a professional boxer, the thought of his participation in a ”super fight”
seems almost incredible.
”You have to remember something about Michael,” said Butch Lewis, who manages and promotes Spinks. ”He won the gold medal in 1976, but he was never a media darling. His goal was not to win the gold medal and turn that medal into money in the professional ranks. His goal was to represent his country. He wanted to win the gold medal and come back and find a good job. That`s all he wanted.”
Ken Loehr, the boxing coach who trained the teenaged fighter at the 12th and Park Recreation Center in St. Louis, said the gold medal never spoiled Spinks.
”Some guys get success, and they don`t want anything to do with you,”
said Loehr, 56, who still teaches boxers at the recreation center. ”Not Michael. He was still the same, easygoing guy he was before.”
After he won the gold medal, Spinks found work at a chemical company in St. Louis. It was not the ”good job” he had envisioned. Wearing a white mask to keep from inhaling the fumes in the plant, he emptied trash cans, mopped floors and cleaned toilets, duties that made professional boxing seem more appealing.
”He felt he had been let down,” Lewis said. ”I approached him. I said: `You have been blessed with a talent. Take advantage of it.` He finally said, ”Okay, I`m going to give it a shot.` He turned pro in 1977 and has never regretted it.”
One of seven children, Spinks grew up in the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Development in St. Louis, a network of 33 buildings that housed approximately 12,000 people. Lewis described it as ”one of the worst ghettos in the country.”
”Please don`t take me back there,” Spinks said, in response to a question about his childhood. ”I want to forget it. Times were hard, very hard.
”I remember my sister and I were running down the hallways one day. We found a piece of cornbread on the seventh floor. A beautiful piece of cornbread. We took it back to our place and put a little water on it. Then we stuck it in the oven. We put some peanut butter on it. . . . It was delicious.”
Spinks also remembers the neighborhood gangs, led by kids so violent that he thought they were insane. Some of the gang members were barely old enough to shave, but they wielded chains and flashed switch blades that seemed as long as their arms. They always ”meant business,” Spinks said.
”I was jumped one night,” he recalled. ”I had this bald head, and this kid jumped me and thumped me on the side of the head-thwaaap. I broke for it, but this gang started chasing me. I tried to hop into a moving car, but they caught me.
”One of them said, `Hey, this is little Spinks. Is Leon your big brother?` I said, `Yeah,` and-pow-he hit me in the jaw. As long as Leon wasn`t around, they weren`t afraid of him.”
It was Leon who, time and again, rescued Michael from beatings on the street.
”I adored Leon,” he said. ”I wanted to be just like him. He was boxing as an amateur before I got into it, and he was knocking out everyone around. He was gaining a lot of respect in the neighborhood.”
Leon Spinks won the heavyweight title after only seven professional bouts, defeating Muhammad Ali on Feb. 15, 1978. He recognized that he had beaten a legend, and he seemed both proud and modest afterward, saying, ”I`m not the greatest. I`m just the best.” He was not the best for long: He lost the title, and what he had assumed to be a vast army of friends, when Ali defeated him in the rematch only seven months later.
Michael Spinks went on to win the light-heavyweight title, disposing of so many opponents afterward that he finally realized the division was a dead end. Then, with his historic defeat of Larry Holmes on Sept. 21, 1985, he became the first light-heavyweight champion to dethrone a heavyweight champion. He lost his crown last year, not to another fighter, but to the International Boxing Federation, which stripped him of the title for opting to fight Gerry Cooney instead of Tony Tucker, the No. 1 contender.
”We`ve been waiting for Tyson for a long time,” Lewis said.
And so the man who never wanted to be a professional fighter will participate in what may be the richest bout in boxing history, with the gross revenue estimated to reach $100 million, according to the promoters.
Spinks, who dropped out of high school to pursue the gold medal in the 1976 Olympics, said he wants to resume his education.
Spinks said he would like to study psychology as a tribute to Sandra Massey, his fiancee who was killed in an auto accident on Jan. 7, 1983. She had told him, just before her death, that he was ”good at figuring people out.” Their daughter, Michelle, was only 2 years old at the time.
”It was very tough,” Spinks said. ”I was a grown man, and you could see where I would be able to make it. . . . But a little, bitty girl. . . . It was very tough.
”Michelle lives with her grandmother, Sandy`s mother. It would have done no good for her to live with me, staring out the window and wondering when her mama would be coming up the walkway.”
Spinks said that his daughter, now 7 years old, had expressed concern about the fight with Tyson.
”She said she didn`t want me to get hurt,” Spinks said, smiling. ”She said she didn`t want to see Mike Tyson hit me. I have to admit I got a little upset at that.”
Before Michael Spinks knocked out Cooney on June 15, 1987, Leon climbed up to the ring, embraced his brother and began to sob.
”That Leon,” Michael said, laughing at the memory. ”I love him. He`s always crying. He`s so emotional.”
If Leon cries on June 27, the Spinks camp hopes the emotional display comes not only before the fight but also after-at the victory party.
