One Punch from the Promised Land Read online

  ONE PUNCH FROM THE

  PROMISED LAND

  Leon Spinks, Michael Spinks,

  and the Myth of the Heavyweight Title

  JOHN FLORIO AND OUISIE SHAPIRO

  LYONS PRESS

  Guilford, Connecticut

  An imprint of Globe Pequot Press

  ALSO BY JOHN FLORIO

  Sugar Pop Moon

  ALSO BY OUISIE SHAPIRO

  Bullying and Me: Schoolyard Stories

  Autism and Me: Sibling Stories

  Batter Up!

  Copyright © 2013 by John Florio and Ouisie Shapiro

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, PO Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

  Layout artist: Sue Murray

  Project editor: Ellen Urban

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN 978-0-7627-9767-7

  This one’s for Bill, Grot, Phil, Slim, Rick, and all the other guys who gathered around the TV at Applegates on fight night.—JF

  For Ken Hartnett, who taught me the ropes.—OS

  CONTENTS

  Copyright

  A Note to the Reader

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  Acknowledgments

  Interview Subjects

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Authors

  Photo Inserts 1

  Photo Inserts 2

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  In an effort to present Leon and Michael’s story objectively and accurately, we have relied on first-person interviews and archival material. Quotes from our interviews, which we conducted over a two-year period from 2011 to 2012, appear in present tense. When quoting from secondary sources such as books, newspapers, and magazines, we have provided attribution within the narrative.

  1

  IT STARTED AT A DEAD END IN ST. LOUIS.

  One block from the rats, roaches, and junkies roaming the Pruitt-Igoe housing project, dozens of kids exercised in a square one-story brick building with broken plumbing, finicky heat, and a makeshift boxing ring set up on a volleyball court. This was the DeSoto Rec Center, and a glance around the room revealed the usual faces: Jesse Davison skipping rope, Harold Petty smacking the speed bag, James Caldwell sparring in the ring. Another regular, an eighteen-year-old with a thick neck, strong back, and nose for mischief, was pummeling the heavy bag. He hammered it so ferociously that the rest of the kids wouldn’t dare get in the ring with him. His brother, a lanky teen three years younger and an inch taller, quietly shadowboxed in the corner. He had the look of a young pony learning to take its first steps. Leon and Michael Spinks had come to the DeSoto for the same reason as the others: to learn how to defend themselves on the streets they called home.

  Pruitt-Igoe was no ordinary housing disaster. It was Mean Streets and New Jack City, circa 1971. It was an urban-American Lord of the Flies. And from the day the ribbon was cut on the first twenty of its thirty-three towers in 1954, it had been a lie.

  The complex was a mile from the Gateway Arch, the city’s iconic centerpiece, and had come with a promise direct from the St. Louis Housing Authority: Pruitt-Igoe would mark the end of the urban slum.

  The cluster of nearly identical eleven-story glass and concrete erections was supposed to replace the decrepit row houses that had become an eyesore. The hype machine was cranking. The ads for Pruitt-Igoe presented a community straight out of Ozzie and Harriet and interiors worthy of Better Homes and Gardens magazine.

  “Bright new buildings with spacious grounds,” the ads read. “Indoor plumbing, electric lights, fresh plastered walls, and other conveniences expected in the 20th century.” It wasn’t long before other major cities—Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston—were modeling their own urban-renewal projects on the Pruitt-Igoe prototype.

  But the developers had been skimping on materials from the start. Pruitt-Igoe was falling apart before the tenants had a chance to move in.

  Worse yet, racial conflict was pulling at the seams of St. Louis, and Pruitt-Igoe only heightened the tension. The project itself was segregated: Pruitt Apartments were meant for black residents, Igoe Apartments for whites. Only when the Missouri Federal District Court ordered the desegregation of St. Louis public housing in December 1955 did the city tear down the project’s invisible walls. Faced with the prospect of living in an integrated complex, white tenants backed out en masse. Black tenants with any other option followed. Only the poorest of black families remained.

  When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, two years and ten months into office, his successor Lyndon Johnson vowed to carry through Kennedy’s social programs, which were designed to address the very issues plaguing Pruitt-Igoe.

  President Johnson addressed Congress in March 1964: “I have called for a national war on poverty. Our objective: total victory … Because it is right, because it is wise, and because, for the first time in our history, it is possible to conquer poverty, I submit, for the consideration of the Congress and the country, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. The act does not merely expand old programs or improve what is already being done. It charts a new course. It strikes at the causes, not just the consequences of, poverty.”

  Johnson didn’t stop there. His administration was behind the Civil Rights, Food Stamp, and Fair Housing Acts. It introduced local health-care centers and nationwide urban-renewal projects. And it pushed through an unprecedented amount of anti-poverty legislation, including Job Corps, VISTA (Volunteers Service to America), Upward Bound, Head Start, Legal Services, and the Neighborhood Youth Corps.

  But none of these programs made it to Pruitt-Igoe. North St. Louis offered its residents only two significant employers: the Brown Shoe Company and a General Motors plant that turned out the Caprice, the Impala station wagon, and the Corvette. Both factories systemically shut black workers out of skilled trades and confined them to menial jobs such as porters, sweepers, and material handlers. As such, unemployment among blacks in north St. Louis hovered at 19 percent. The only tangible impact Johnson’s dream of a Great Society had on Pruitt-Igoe residents was that they now had a new label: the hard-core poor.

  By the late 1960s drug dealers commanded the street corners, desperate junkies habitually ripped copper pipes from the walls, and armed vandals controlled the common areas. Residents ran for their lives, leaving two-thirds of the apartments empty. Life in Pruitt-Igoe became so precarious that cops patrolling the area stopped answering emergency calls coming from the tenants. The gangs grew stronger and the murder rate in north St. Louis soared, soon doubling that of New York City and eclipsing that of the rest of the country. The press reported crime in Pruitt-Igoe as black versus black. A more accurate description may have been gangs versus anybody left.

  Michael and Leon lived the way most everybody who was stuck there did:
in fear. How bad was it? For starters, the original plan called for skip-stop elevators, so by design, the lifts stopped at every third floor. A cost-saving measure, it was billed as a way to encourage residents to congregate in communal spaces. But the foul, urine-stained elevators rarely worked, and the squalid common areas—especially the desolate stairways—became dangerous pockets of crime. For most residents, there was no safe way to get home, other than scaling the side of the building with a pick and a rope.

  “Pruitt-Igoe was a terrible place to live,” remembers DeSoto boxer Jesse Davison. “No guys would come to fix the elevators ’cause they were afraid. I lived on the eleventh floor, but I didn’t ride the elevators. I walked up the steps. You’d ride in the elevator, the lights would be broken. If you got stuck, you’d try to climb out the top, but you didn’t know what would be waiting. There’d be drug dealers on top of the elevator. You’d be afraid they’d shoot at you, urinate on you.”

  Fellow boxer James Caldwell still remembers the dangers of playing basketball in Pruitt-Igoe. “Some guy would walk up to a car and start shooting. We’d all scatter. As soon as the commotion was over, we’d go back out and start playing ball again.”

  John Crittenden, who grew up on the same block as the Spinks brothers, has his own memories. “There were car thefts. There were homicides. There were robberies, crimes against the mailman, the insurance man. The insurance guys had to be escorted by police when they came to collect the premiums. It was crazy. When the police were called, they would wait on the main street until the backup came, if any came. They were slow to respond to anything that happened in Pruitt-Igoe because they felt like victims themselves. They would be shot at. People would throw bottles down on their cars.”

  For many young men trying to stay alive long enough to get out, there seemed to be only two means of survival: join a gang or learn how to box.

  “Leon was a quiet kid,” says Crittenden. “He kept to himself. He was bullied a lot. I was a little guilty of [the bullying] myself. He wouldn’t stick up for himself. He was just a little snotty-nosed kid. He shied away from everybody. We took his lunch. We slapped him upside the head. We really did bully him, and Michael also. They wouldn’t fight back. They cried and ran away. That kind of stuff was going on. You were either with the gang or you weren’t. It was just part of growing up in Pruitt-Igoe.”

  When Michael Spinks was sixteen, a friend got caught in a robbery. “It was the first time I really thought that could have been me,” he told Sam Smith of the Chicago Tribune. “I figured I either do this for the rest of my life or stop now and lead a new life. That’s when I started listening to my mom regularly, going to church, learning about Jesus Christ. And I fought temptation like it was a disease. It was like I had to get in the ring every day because it was out there. Every time temptation came, I fought it off with prayer. The gangs came and turned on me. A guy punched me in the face and said, ‘Fight back.’ But I said, ‘I ain’t fighting. I’m done.’”

  By the time Leon and Michael had walked into the DeSoto in the late 1960s, word had gotten out that the boxing workouts were agonizing. The source of that agony was postal worker Kenny Loehr, a five-foot-seven, bulldog-jowled ex-Marine. Loehr was easy to spot: He had a military buzz cut, baby blue eyes, bulging neck veins, a clenched jaw, and white skin. He was an ex-boxer himself—he’d won the St. Louis regional Golden Gloves in 1948—and started training boxers after serving in Korea.

  Having never quite caught on to lackadaisical civilian life, Loehr had an old-school work ethic that he foisted onto the kids at the DeSoto. He pushed them hard, routinely calling them “chickenshits” and “freaks,” and never let up until the workouts were over. He ran the five-year-olds as hard as he did the teenagers, and when one of his kids got knocked out, he’d send him back into the ring the next day, telling him it would toughen him up.

  The day Harold Petty walked into the DeSoto to try boxing, Loehr was patrolling the place with a broken two-by-four in his hand. Petty, a ten-year-old pipsqueak who would go on to become a decorated bantamweight and, following that, Loehr’s assistant coach, had never seen the trainer before.

  Loehr strolled over to a boxer who was whacking the heavy bag.

  “Get your hands up! Extra rounds!” he shouted, as he cracked him on the small of his back with the plank. Wham. Then he turned to face the wide-eyed Petty. “Whaddaya want?”

  “I want to box,” the terrified Petty said, feeling his palms moisten.

  “Get a rope!” Loehr shouted.

  Petty scurried to the equipment locker to do as he was told. He swears to this day it took three years before he got up the nerve to speak to Loehr again.

  Every boxer who came up through the DeSoto has a similar story about Loehr. What they’ll also tell you—but what Loehr will never admit—is that the trainer doled out much of the money he earned as a postman to the boys, buying them shoes, coats, and food. In many cases Loehr was the closest thing to a father these kids had.

  “If we didn’t have something we needed, he would front it himself,” James Caldwell says about Loehr. “And it wasn’t just equipment. There were times when he made sure that guys had coats and shoes. Let’s say we were in a tournament and a guy didn’t have a nice pair of tennis shoes. He would get the guy a pair so that he could feel good about going into the tournament.”

  Steve Holley, former president of the St. Louis Amateur Boxing Association and longtime friend of Loehr, was equally generous. “It wasn’t uncommon for us to have well over a hundred amateur boxing shows a year,” Holley says. “The majority of the kids came from the projects like Leon and Michael, and when they came to the shows, we gave them ten, fifteen, twenty dollars for dinner money, and that was a lot of money back then. A lot of times they would save the money and take it home so they would have a little bit of money to either share with their families or use when they got back.”

  Loehr often drove through Pruitt-Igoe in a beat-up green ’57 Chevy station wagon inherited from his sister-in-law. He’d rally the boys for training camp or ice cream, or in one case, his parents’ anniversary party. He was one of the few white outsiders to dare enter the projects. But Loehr had an ace in the hole. Any gang member who touched him would have to deal with the wrath of seventy angry boxers.

  “Hey, Chickenshit!” he’d yell out the driver’s window as he parked near the Spinkses’ building. “Get out here, freaks.”

  He’d then repeat the process at the Davison, Caldwell, and Petty households. One day, heading to a boxing show, he piled seventeen kids into the dilapidated car, the vehicle’s engine wheezing under the pressure.

  “If you scream, I’ll kill ya,” he told the boys.

  They didn’t scream. They didn’t dare.

  “Pruitt-Igoe, that was a tough place,” Loehr says now. “That was no life. I remember this one store burned down and all my kids put on five, ten pounds ’cause they were going over there and eating all the food they could. They never had any food. You’d be riding by with your arm out the window and some kid would take the watch right off of your hand. Well, but they never had nothin’.”

  What the boys didn’t realize was that Loehr was slowly turning them into skilled boxers and transforming St. Louis into a top-ranked amateur-boxing town.

  “Back in those days we had one of the strongest amateur programs in the country,” Steve Holley says. “Budweiser sponsored us. When the boxers wore those black jackets that said ‘Budweiser Golden Gloves,’ it meant something. Around town people knew that ‘Hey, these guys, they’re doing the do.’ It wasn’t jealously as much as it was respect.”

  And if a young boxer won his local matches, the program provided a ticket to the outside world. “I saw that I could travel as long as I beat my opponent…,” Leon told BoxingTalk.com. “It was my best escape. And it was my best [way to get] respect in the neighborhood I stayed in. So the guys knew that I boxed and how good I did at it. And the guys that would jump on me wouldn’t jump on me no more.”
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  Michael suffered at first due to Leon’s reputation. “Leon would get in fights all over the projects and win. But me, I became the target,” Michael told Earl Gustkey of the Los Angeles Times. “Guys Leon had beaten up, they’d put together gangs and come looking for me, to get even. It was always: ‘Hey, you Leon’s brother?’ And then … pow!”

  But Leon’s new status in north St. Louis served as Michael’s inspiration. “I adored Leon. I wanted to be just like him,” Michael said in an interview with Robert Seltzer of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “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.”

  So the younger Spinks—quiet, diligent, and determined—took on the one contact sport that seemed to suit his gangly frame and long reach. And while he struggled to become more like his big brother, he listened to what Kenny Loehr and the other trainers told him.

  By their late teens both Spinks brothers had built fighter’s reputations for themselves. Nobody messed with them on the streets of Pruitt-Igoe. And few outboxed them in St. Louis amateur tournaments.

  2351 Biddle Street. That’s where the bubbling, gregarious Kay Francis Spinks raised her seven children in a cramped apartment on the eighth floor, smack in the middle of Pruitt-Igoe.

  She was twenty when she and Leon Sr. moved into the projects—grateful they could rescue two-year-old Leon and one-year-old Karen from the converted bathhouse they’d been living in. It was 1955. Michael came a year later.

  Leon Sr. wasn’t ready for parenthood. Waking up just a year removed from his teens with a wife, three children, and a job as a busboy in a downtown hotel overwhelmed him. He handled the situation much the way he had dealt with high school and the countless jobs that followed: He quit. He owned little more than the worn-out pants around his waist, so there was virtually nothing to fight over. The divorce became official in 1959.