One Punch from the Promised Land Read online

  Leon Sr. made cameo appearances in the lives of his children but did nothing to support them other than sending Kay a monthly check that amounted to five dollars for each child. Kay’s only income was her monthly welfare check of $135. And squeezing her budget even more were four additional children—Kenneth, Leland, Eddie, and Evan—none of whom belonged to Leon Sr. With all eight family members living on Kay’s $150 total monthly income, food became a luxury. Dinners usually consisted of corn bread and government-surplus peanut butter.

  It was clear to anybody who crunched the numbers that Kay needed every possible penny. Apparently, the government didn’t bother doing the math. The welfare rules as they applied to female residents were as clear as they were unfathomable: A woman’s aid would be cut off if she were living with an able-bodied male. It would also be reduced if she were receiving assistance elsewhere, even if it was the paltry sum of fifteen dollars a month from an unreliable ex-husband.

  So when government workers came to the door to inspect—which they were prone to do—Kay’s children knew never to speak of Leon Sr. or his monthly contribution. The task came easily to young Leon, a scrawny kid battling low blood pressure, intermittent blackouts, and memories of his old man that any child would choose to forget. One such recollection involves being hung by his shirt from a nail in the wall, then beaten and ridiculed. “You’ll never amount to anything,” Leon Sr. reportedly told his eldest son while swatting him across the face with an electrical cord.

  According to a 1978 interview with Leon Sr. in the Miami News, the incident never took place. The elder Spinks said that he gave his son “only two whippings”: once when young Leon refused to fight back after being kicked by another boy, and a second time when Leon returned from a shopping trip having spent family funds on a pocketful of candy.

  Regardless of what really happened, Leon grew up resenting his father. Even Charles Sleigh, one of his teachers at Vashon High School, could see the animosity the teenaged Leon harbored.

  “I wouldn’t mention his father’s name for anything,” Sleigh told Tom Boswell of the Washington Post. “I couldn’t watch his face.”

  Even though her funds were meager, Kay Spinks asked for no help raising her children. When Leon Sr. left, she found her strength in Jesus Christ. A devout follower of Pentecostal Christianity, Kay became an ordained evangelist, spreading the word of God through preaching, teaching, and living example. And anybody who came within a half mile of her knew it.

  Kenny Loehr has memories of driving up to the Spinkses’ building to take the boys to a boxing match, and having to wait outside until Michael and Kay finished praying. Cozy Marks, the former principal of Vashon High School, received letters from Kay asking him to pray for her and her kids.

  Luther Boyd, Leon’s childhood friend, recalls going to Kay’s apartment for Bible study classes when he was nine years old. “She read scripture—I’ll always remember ‘The Devil’s Funeral.’ She told us the devil wanted us but God wanted us more, so we had to bury the devil. She was teaching us good and evil, and we knew about evil because it was all around us.

  “There were between fifteen and twenty people [in the apartment], mostly children and teenagers. We would sit in folding chairs and praise the Lord and receive the Holy Ghost. We would dance and sing. People were foaming at the mouth. I don’t know if it was the cookies and the potato chips, but I kept going back.”

  For every story about Kay that includes religion, there is another that mentions discipline. If the Spinkses’ apartment were a city, Kay Spinks was mayor. She laid down the law and earned the respect of her children. There were rules to live by—how to behave, when to be home, where to hang out—and the Spinks kids did their best to obey. Except for Kenneth. He succumbed to the lure of the streets and at age twenty began serving fifteen years for first-degree armed robbery with intent to kill. Prison seemed to have done little to rehabilitate him. Two years after his release, he went back, this time for five years on a burglary charge.

  It was between Kenneth’s two prison stints, sometime around 1995, when Luther Boyd returned from the Army. Coming out of a grocery store, Boyd ran into a panhandler with a familiar face.

  “You got all that shopping?” the panhandler asked, motioning to the bags in Boyd’s arms. In north St. Louis, affording food was a sign of deep pockets.

  “Yeah,” Boyd said.

  The panhandler flashed a wide grin and the smile reminded Boyd of his childhood friend.

  “Look at you,” Boyd said. “You’re looking just like Michael Spinks.”

  “That’s my brother,” the panhandler said. “I’m Kenneth Spinks.”

  Stunned, Boyd reached into his pocket and plunked some coins into Kenneth’s empty hand. As Boyd walked home, he couldn’t help but wonder how a mother’s teachings could land so squarely on some of her children and miss entirely on others.

  The name above the entrance said Vashon High School. But the huge industrial windows, austere brick walls, and heavy metal doors gave it the look of a factory. And by the time Leon and Michael arrived, the hulking mass was on life support.

  The late ’60s had been as tough on Vashon as they’d been on Pruitt-Igoe. Originally located on Laclede Avenue, about a mile and a half from the projects, Vashon had been housed in a neighborhood systematically torn apart to make room for a spreading business district. During the decades-long transition, families moved away, teachers relocated, and enrollment dropped precipitously.

  Few officials stood up for Vashon, the city’s second all-black high school, which had turned out world welterweight champion Henry Armstrong, New York Yankee All-Star catcher Elston Howard, and US Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Why was Vashon overlooked? The answer is undocumented, but the evidence points to a deeply entrenched system of racism in the St. Louis public schools. After Brown v. Board of Education, Vashon should have been desegregated along with the rest of the nation’s public educational institutions. Its neighborhood boundaries were supposed to be broadened to include white families, but those dividing lines never shifted. The school remained segregated and, like Pruitt-Igoe, was largely ignored and left to rot.

  By the time Leon and Michael were ready for high school, Vashon had moved a couple of miles away to Bell Avenue. The hallways and classrooms were still bleak, but the school’s curriculum offered its undernourished student body a range of courses that came with the promise of a living wage—auto mechanics, dry cleaning, shoe repair.

  For Leon and Michael, it was too late. The dehumanizing conditions at Pruitt-Igoe had sabotaged any chance they’d had at academic success. They had too much to unlearn, and they weren’t alone. According to the St. Louis Housing Authority, in 1972 the median number of school years completed by students who came from Pruitt-Igoe was 8.6, one of the lowest figures in the city.

  Although Michael is remembered at Vashon as having a keen intelligence, a positive attitude, and a flair for boxing, he was too anxious about his mother’s financial plight to concentrate on schoolwork.

  Leon was never an attentive student but he had learned that only the strong survive. It was certainly true at Pruitt-Igoe, and it seemed to be the case outside the projects as well. Look at Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. No diplomas there, just strong, well-timed punches.

  Looking back, John Crittenden says his classmate was “not a bright guy at all. We had seventh and eighth grade together and he was way below the level of the eighth grade. I can remember him writing his name on the blackboard and he had the e in Leon backward.”

  Principal Cozy Marks acknowledges that “Leon might have been slow, but I never noticed dyslexia or anything. [He had learned about life] in the community where he was from—had to be the tough guy, and that sort of thing.

  “He had a discipline problem with one of the teachers. The problem was disrespect. Leon spoke out of turn, or he didn’t respond the way the teacher thought he should have. One thing that was in my favor was that I was taller than Leon and I had about thirty pounds ove
r him. He was on the verge of being suspended more than once. He had a hard time following directions, maybe because of his lack of concentration. No teachers, it seemed, were able to find a way to motivate him.”

  Kay Spinks often showed up at the principal’s office on Leon’s behalf. According to Marks, she never blamed the institution for her son’s troubles. “‘I know my boy doesn’t always follow the rules,’ she would say. ‘I try to make a good world for him at home. And you do the same here. But in between we have to turn him over to that other world.’”

  Marks knew that other world was no cakewalk. It may have been a little easier on Leon and Michael, who stuck to a small clique and protected each other. Still, the simple truth was that students at Vashon had the odds stacked against them when they left the classroom for the real world.

  March 16, 1972. A crowd of Pruitt-Igoe residents gathered to watch the fireworks. The Dore Wrecking Company of Kawkawlin, Michigan, had jammed dynamite charges into the western half of the building at 2207 O’Fallon Street and would be pushing the plunger when the clock struck three. In an act of final surrender, the St. Louis Housing Authority was scraping the fifty-seven-acre melanoma from the city’s landscape.

  Only days earlier the Health and Welfare Council of Metropolitan St. Louis issued a report stating that those who remained at Pruitt-Igoe were living in a “state of siege.” The morning of the implosion, the police drove through the project instructing residents to close their windows lest the dusty fallout invade their apartments.

  The tower on O’Fallon was going now. A second tower, on Dickson, was next.

  The onlookers wore the grim faces of family members at an execution. Like so many on death row, Pruitt-Igoe could be blamed for its own wrongdoings, but it could also be seen as the victim of abuse and neglect. Regardless, it had become a worldwide symbol of failed public housing.

  Jesse Davison was on hand. Luther Boyd stood at the window of his tenth-story apartment. James Caldwell peered out from his schoolroom, where the class watched the city euthanize its ill-conceived dream.

  When the plunger fell, one-half of 2207 O’Fallon dropped to the ground like a pair of empty trousers, collapsing into 20,000 tons of industrial rubble. The crowd cheered as the dynamite went off, but they turned somber when a mushroom cloud of dust and pulverized mortar filled the air where the tower had once stood.

  Jesse Davison felt mixed emotions at the prospect of his neighborhood vanishing one explosion at a time. “I stood and cried. We cherished that place. Don’t get me wrong, it was bad. But we made our fun and we boxed there. That was our glory.”

  With their eyes smarting from the thick yellowish plumes of smoke, those on hand slowly returned to their homes.

  The rest of Pruitt-Igoe was brought down by 1976.

  2

  THE YEAR WAS 1973 AND THE MARINES WERE LOOKING FOR A FEW good men. Desperately.

  Unlike previous generations, teenagers in the late 1960s and 1970s weren’t shielded from the images of war by the rose-colored lens of Hollywood’s propaganda machine. The Vietnam War had played out in America’s living rooms courtesy of network news cameras, and educated young men had turned their backs on the armed forces.

  The United States had abolished the draft and begun withdrawing its troops from South Vietnam early in the year. To keep its ranks full and morale high, the Marines turned to Madison Avenue and the legendary advertising agency J. Walter Thompson to craft a new recruiting message. The result was a campaign of television commercials and magazine ads designed to seduce uneducated young men into the Marines by promising they’d become “one of the few.” The message reached Leon who, at the age of 19, was drifting aimlessly.

  Not surprisingly, the boxers at the DeSoto laughed when Leon said he planned to join the Marines. They figured he lacked the smarts to get into the armed forces and that he was too incorrigible to make it out. But Leon was smart enough to see that prosperity was not coming to north St. Louis any time soon.

  One more glance at the advertisements was all it took. Leon walked into a recruitment office and found the Marines willing to accommodate him. Perhaps too willing. In those days, if an enlistee hadn’t been sentenced to the armed forces by a judge, he had to hold a high school diploma or a GED. But Leon had neither.

  Tony Santana, a bony twenty-year-old kid from the projects in Brooklyn, New York, was watching the same TV commercials. A featherweight who would go on to win the world military championship at 126 pounds, Santana had a shock of black hair and shoulder blades as angular as chicken wings. He was looking to build himself up, and the ads told him what he wanted to hear: He’d go into the Marines a boy and come out a man. Bingo. He enlisted and would soon pal around with Leon, killing time by sharing stories about their parallel lives in poverty, housing projects, and boxing rings.

  Unlike Santana, Leon’s love of the fight game landed him in trouble as soon as he arrived at Parris Island, South Carolina, for what was supposed to be twelve weeks of boot camp. His pals back at the DeSoto were right—Leon was ready to take on anybody at any time, regardless of his rank or position. Drill instructors were one of his favorite targets.

  “Those drill instructors were terrible,” says Leon’s friend and fellow Marine Roger Stafford. “They would do anything, beat you down, call you names, talk about your mother, your brother, your father. When they talked about Leon’s mother, Leon knocked two drill instructors out. They put him in the hole—he stayed there for like three months or longer. He was in Parris Island for six months until he was discharged.”

  The incidents surrounding Leon’s rebelliousness could fill a training manual. One popular story, perhaps apocryphal, places him later on with a group of privates at Camp Lejeune when a gunnery sergeant walked out of a building and spit on the sidewalk. The sergeant hadn’t looked where he was aiming and his gob landed a little too close to Leon.

  “How ’bout an ‘excuse me’?” Leon reportedly said.

  The story ended as many others did—with a superior officer on the ground and Leon in hot water.

  “I was a wise guy off the street,” Leon told Sports Illustrated’s Pat Putnam. “It was difficult for me to adjust to somebody telling me what to do and what not to do. So I fought it. But I learned. I straightened myself out because I learned it was not so bad to live the life of a Marine.”

  However convincing Leon sounded, there’s little proof that he did straighten out. By all accounts his greatest success as a Marine came after he left Parris Island for Jacksonville, North Carolina, a low-lying town of military barracks, crumbling retail outlets, and empty dirt lots. It was in Jacksonville—between tobacco fields, sweet potato farms, and the Atlantic Ocean—that the military had built Camp Lejeune back in 1941. It was to Lejeune that Leon was assigned, and where he donned his first pair of military boxing gloves.

  At that time the All-Marine boxing team, long a source of pride to the Corps, was in the hands of Art Redden. A handsome black man in his early thirties, Redden presided over the gym in a fisherman’s cap even though he’d never picked up a reel in his life. The day Leon walked into the gym, Redden was conducting varsity tryouts with Gunnery Sergeant John Davis. Redden had fought on the 1968 Olympic team that included George Foreman; Davis had brought six fighters to the ’72 Games in Munich. The two men knew talent when they saw it, or, in the case of Leon, heard it.

  In the midst of tryouts, Redden and Davis stopped dead in their tracks when the sound of a speed bag reverberated across the gym. There was one problem: The camp didn’t have a speed bag. The two men made their way to the other side of the gym and discovered the source of the ruckus: nineteen-year-old Leon Spinks wailing away at the heavy bag with a fervor they’d never seen before.

  Redden and Davis tested Leon’s mettle by putting him in the ring. They didn’t tell him he was in there with the All-Marine champ; they simply put extra-padded sparring gloves on both fighters and clanged the bell. Within thirty seconds the champ was stretched out on the canvas, kno
cked out cold by the troublemaking private from north St. Louis.

  There was no doubt that Leon would fare better in a boxing ring than on a battleground. The Marines assigned him to special services—the boxing team—and in doing so, swapped the duties he’d had trouble meeting with those he’d been handling since his days at the DeSoto. Leon now had a structured routine he could follow: roadwork in the morning, boxing in the afternoon, and representing the Marines in the ring. Perfect.

  Teammate Ron DiNicola saw firsthand how boxing trainer Art Redden did what no drill sergeant could. “Redden was able to marshal all of Leon’s skill,” he says. “Leon was a tough, tough kid. The toughness of Pruitt-Igoe never left him. He was a ferocious fighter. He was born to be a fighter; he loved the ring. Redden was about the same size as Leon and he knew how a big man should fight. He was a good tactician, delivering punches from one end to the other. And Leon was extraordinarily good at cutting angles on a dime and throwing combinations. For Leon, Redden was the right guy at the right time. He was a critical part of Leon’s transition to the big time.”

  Years later Leon told BoxingTalk.com, “I’m a boxer puncher. Steady puncher. I don’t stop. Most guys fight for a little while and then stop and hug each other. But the military taught me to punch all the time and stay busy.”

  Private Spinks was funny, loud, and friendly. Members of the team—one of the toughest and most successful collections of boxers ever assembled onto a single Marine squad—agree that Leon was the dominant personality of the group. Leon used words, gyrations, and body language to express himself with no regard for what people thought of his unrefined language and sandpapery voice. Sure, he was the butt of some jokes, but he didn’t care. He was in his element—the gym—and enjoying himself. Informally, he was the team leader—a position he’d achieved with more than brute strength. He would urge on his teammates—yelling words of encouragement from ringside—and always remained positive.