Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone(175)

This was the point where my interest in Muhammad Ali moved almost subconsciously to a new and higher gear. I had seen all of Leon’s fights in the 1976 Montreal Olympics, and I recall being impressed to the point of awe at the way he attacked and destroyed whatever they put in front of him. I had never seen a young fighter who could get away with planting both feet and leaning forward when he hooked with either hand.

Archie Moore was probably the last big fighter with that rare combination of power, reflexes, and high tactical instinct that a boxer must have to get away with risking moments of total commitment even occasionally . . . But Leon did it constantly, and in most of his fights that was all he did.

It was a pure kamikaze style: the Roving Tripod, as it were—with Leon’s legs forming two poles of the tripod, and the body of his opponent forming the third. Which is interesting for at least two reasons: (1) There is no tripod until a punch off that stance connects with the opponent’s head or body, so the effect of a miss can range from fatal to unnerving, or at the very least it will cause raised eyebrows and even a faint smile or two among the ringside judges who are scoring the fight ... and, (2) If the punch connects solidly, then the tripod is formed and an almost preternatural blast of energy is delivered at the point of impact, especially if the hapless target is leaning as far back on the ropes as he can get with his head ducked in and forward in a coverup stance—like Ali’s rope-a-dope.

A boxer who plants both feet and then leans forward to lash out with a hook has his whole weight and also his whole balance behind it; he cannot pull back at that point, and if he fails to connect he will not only lose points for dumb awkwardness, but he’ll plunge his head out front, low and wide open for one of those close-in jackhammer combinations that usually end with a knockdown.

That was Leon’s style in the Olympics, and it was a terrifying thing to see. All he had to do was catch his opponent with no place to run, then land one or two of those brain-rattling tripod shots in the first round—and once you get stunned and intimidated like that in the first round of a three-round (Olympic) bout, there is not enough time to recover . . .

. . . or even want to, for that matter, once you begin to think that this brute they pushed you into the ring with has no reverse gear and would just as soon attack a telephone pole as a human being.

Not many fighters can handle that style of all-out assault without having to back off and devise a new game plan. But there is no time for devising new plans in a three-round fight—and perhaps not in ten, twelve, or fifteen rounds either, because Leon doesn’t give you much time to think. He keeps coming, swarming, pounding; and he can land three or four shots from both directions once he gets braced and leans out to meet that third leg of the tripod.

On the other hand, those poor geeks that Leon beat silly in the Olympics were amateurs ... and we are all a bit poorer for the fact that he was a light-heavyweight when he won that gold medal; because if he’d been a few pounds heavier he would have had to go against the elegant Cuban heavyweight champion, Teófilo Stevenson, who would have beaten him like a gong for all three rounds.

But Stevenson, the Olympic heavyweight champ in both 1972 and ’76, and the only modern heavyweight with the physical and mental equipment to compete with Muhammad Ali, has insisted for reasons of his own and Fidel Castro’s on remaining the “amateur heavyweight champion of the world,” instead of taking that one final leap for the great ring that a fight against Muhammad Ali could have been for him.

Whatever reasons might have led Castro to decide that an Ali-Stevenson match—sometime in 1973 or ’74, after Muhammad had won the hearts and minds of the whole world with his win over George Foreman in Zaire—was not in the interest of either Cuba, Castro, or perhaps even Stevenson himself, will always be clouded in the dark fog of politics and the conviction of people like me that the same low-rent political priorities that heaped a legacy of failure and shame on every other main issue of this generation was also the real reason why the two great heavyweight artists of our time were never allowed in the ring with each other.

This is one of those private opinions of my own that even my friends in the “boxing industry” still dismiss as the flakey gibberish of a halfsmart writer who was doing okay with things like drugs, violence, and presidential politics, but who couldn’t quite cut the mustard in their world.

Boxing.

These were the same people who chuckled indulgently when I said, in Las Vegas, that I’d take every bet I could get on Leon Spinks against Muhammad Ali at ten to one, and with anybody who was seriously into numbers I was ready to haggle all the way down to five to one, or maybe even four ... but even at eight to one, it was somewhere between hard and impossible to get a bet down on Spinks with anybody in Vegas who was even a fifty-fifty bet to pay off in real money.