the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 180
Promoter Lewis, who also handled the career of Spinks’s brother,
Michael, noted that Leon’s younger sibling earned $30 million by the time
his boxing career ended and retired, at age thirty, to a five-acre estate in
Wilmington, Delaware. “I know I could have made Leon upwards of $50
million if he had disciplined himself and done the right things for four or
five years,” Lewis told Coffey of the New York Daily News in 1997.
Instead, Lewis and others watched Leon Spinks plummet from the
pinnacle like a man riding a greased rocket to the chasm’s bottom. He
fought many more fights, forgettably, against mostly forgettable opponents.
Three years after the Ali rematch, he got one last shot at the title he
had once held, but he suffered a technical knockout at the hands of Larry
Holmes in the third round. In subsequent bouts, quick knockouts became
his trademark, but not in a good way. During a ten-month period in 1986
and 1987, Spinks was knocked out three times. His offi cial declaration of
bankruptcy came in 1986, to no one’s surprise. In 1987, he was banned
from boxing in Florida following a technical knockout after two minutes
and ten seconds of the first round of a fight there. The following year,
Connecticut banned him after a fight in which he remained conscious for
only thirty-three seconds of the fi rst round.
He retired for the first time in 1988, at age thirty-four, and promoter
Butch Lewis helped Spinks get work as a $1,500-a-week greeter for
a Chicago nightclub owned by football great Mike Ditka. Even that didn’t
work out; according to Coffey’s account in the New York Daily News,
Spinks couldn’t even show up the required four days a week and eventually
was fired. For a short period in the late 1980s, according to People
magazine, Spinks was tending bar at Jovans in Bingham Farms, Michigan,
where at the same time disgraced Tigers pitching ace turned racketeer
Denny McClain entertained patrons by playing “Misty,” “Yesterday,”
and other Ramada Inn–style staples on his synthesized keyboard. Jovans
was, for a brief period, a sort of Fallen Angel Lounge.
Spinks’s son Leon Calvin was shot to death in a gang-related incident
in 1990, and the tragedy briefly sobered Spinks, though his parenting