The History of the Heavyweight Championship - 1978

In 1978 the heavyweight boxing landscape changed forever. The old, the young, the obscure, the fatal dreamers and the relentless schemers all came together to make it unforgettable.

The rumours from 1977 were true: Muhammad Ali would defend his world heavyweight championship against Leon Spinks – a man who had won just six of his seven fights.
It was fairy tale, nightmare and reality.

The ancient title had seen some craziness over the years – there had been some odd challengers for the title, disgraceful decisions, dubious knockouts, strange locations for fights, but the selection of Neon Leon was one of the oddest.

Even Ali struggled to hype it: “Spinks has only had seven fights. What am I going to tell people; that I’m gonna destroy him? Talking that way makes me look bad.”

Ali arrived in the gym bloated and unmotivated. He sparred 24 rounds. Ali was getting 3.5 million dollars for fighting the kid with the boxing gloves. It would be Ali’s 58th fight and he was 36 years of age.

George Benton, one of the trainers working with Spinks, was convinced that his man had a chance, a chance at the upset – a chance at being the “real Rocky.” The film had been released. Benton had once been a Philadelphia middleweight and real contender, but his career ended when he was shot.

He was a no nonsense boxing man, but he knew what he knew and he was a believer: “I knew Ali was ready to be taken.

“He had two hard fifteen round fights the year before. I knew the old Ali was gone and I knew Leon had a chance.”

It seemed to Benton that he was on his own. Even in the Spinks team, there was not a lot of belief.

The fight was in February 1978: Ali came in two stone heavier than Spinks for the fight. It took place off the strip in Las Vegas at the Hilton and only 5,298 paid to watch.

Nobody cared, nobody believed that the novice stood a chance. Nobody believed it would be a competitive fight. Ali had been booed from the ring when he played with and joked about with Alfredo Evangelista – an experienced brawler – in May of 1977. People were wary of a one-sided repeat.

Instead, Spinks kept the pressure on and never fell for any of Ali’s tricks and moved to chase and cut down the ring. It was hard on Ali, Spinks kept letting his hands go. At the end of 15 rounds it was close.
The split decision went to Spinks. He deserved it. The kid had beaten the master, no real dispute.
He was the first man to win the world heavyweight title from the champion on points since 1935. Every single time that a champion had lost his title in the ring since James J.Braddock, also known as The Cinderella Man, outpointed Max Baer in June of 1935 – 43 years. That is as staggering a fact as the result.
Sadly and predictably, the vultures from the two sanctioning bodies were circling the Las Vegas ring long before Leon’s hand was raised. The fight was for both the WBC and WBA versions of the heavyweight championship – it was the last heavyweight title fight for both belts for nine years. Yeah, there was all sorts of history being created that night in the Hilton ring.
“I underestimated him. Now I hope I’m given the chance to regain my title. It’s not the end of world, it’s a new beginning,” Ali said after the fight.
“He was good enough to give me the chance and he deserves a return,” Spinks said after the fight.
If only it was that easy. So much was happening in the shady, sleazy and powerful corridors of boxing power and control. The Don King and Bob Arum promotional war was a tasty sideshow attraction in 1978.
“Arum is one of the most devious and evil individuals I have ever met, who builds a success road on deviousness.” King on Arum.
“Everybody knows what King is – a total charlatan.” Arum on King.
First, in March the WBC sanctioned a fight between Larry Black Cloud Holmes and Earnie The Acorn Shavers for the right to fight Kenny Norton for the WBC heavyweight title. Norton had won a WBC final eliminator in 1977 when he beat Jimmy Young … and knew at the time that if Ali refused to fight him, he would be upgraded to full WBC heavyweight champion of the world.
There was an offer from Don King of $2million to Spinks to fight Norton. It was refused. The WBC president for life, Jose Sulaiman ordered Spinks to fight Norton. He refused. On March 29, 1978 Leon Spinks was stripped of his WBC heavyweight title.
In March, the WBC sanctioned a fight between Larry Black Cloud Holmes and Earnie The Acorn Shavers for the right to fight Kenny Norton for the WBC heavyweight title. Norton had won a WBC final eliminator in 1977 when he beat Jimmy Young, and knew at the time that if Ali refused to fight him he would be upgraded to full WBC heavyweight champion of the world.
Holmes was unbeaten in 26, but was overlooked, ignored and many considered him cocky and arrogant. He had struggled for presence – in the timeless age of fighters like Ali and George Foreman that was not good news.

On the eve of the Shavers fight, Pat Putnam wrote in Sports Illustrated: “Larry Holmes is 28 years old, 6 foot three and 210 pounds, one of those heavyweight who seem vaguely familiar. For six years, he has been fighting mediocre opponents, men going nowhere or coming back from there.”
Holmes beat Shavers in a controlled, smart fight – taking no risks and winning all twelve rounds. He was not the favourite and he had done a great job.
“His punches numbed your bones – he punched harder than all the guys I fought: All of them – Tyson, Cooney and Norton,” Holmes told me one day in 2000 in his beloved hometown of Easton, Pennsylvania.
Four days after his victory, a fight for the WBC version of the title was arranged for June in Las Vegas: It was the past against the future: Holmes, the challenger, and Norton, the champion. It would be a classic.
Meanwhile, Spinks had accepted an offer from Bob Arum to fight Ali in a rematch, scheduled for September. The offer was for $5 million each. It would make history. And, Leon Spinks would do his very best to set records of excess and outright lunacy. He would have a reign like no other heavyweight in history.
In June at the Sports Pavilion, that sacred old venue out behind the pools at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas something very special took place over 15 glorious rounds. Holmes had the better, faster start and then Norton came right back winning rounds six through eleven – but this was an old-fashioned fifteen round war. After 11 rounds there were still four left; the real championship rounds. And they were brilliant. At the bell to end the 14th round, all three judges had it even. They could not be separated.
Richie Giachetti, in Holmes’s corner, knew what was needed: “I told Larry to go out there and fight a round like you have never fought before.”
Holmes listened, but Norton also had the round of his life. They trade punches in the 15th round and it has to be one of the finest three minutes of boxing ever seen – at ringside Sly Stallone and Roberto Duran are standing and throwing punches. It is mayhem in the venue. With about 20 seconds to go, Norton is hurt, but stays up. Then the final bell ends the epic.
Dave Anderson in the New York Times calls it The Best Fight Since Manila. That is some praise.
They stand, bruised and exhausted and wait for the verdict:
143-142 Holmes. 143-142 Norton. And finally, 143-142 for Holmes.
It is cruel on Norton. But somebody has to lose. I thought that Norton won the last. That’s just my opinion. Sweet Kenny Norton would box until 1981, losing a couple of massive fights and never getting another world title fight. A real heavyweight fighter from the sport’s greatest decade.
Spinks and Ali had their rematch set for September 15th at the Louisiana Dome in New Orleans.
Ali got serious this time. His team wore t-shirts with Third Coming on the chest. There is a story, probably true, that the day after the loss to Spinks in February, Ali returned to his Chicago home and got up at 2am to run. He ran and ran, a friend following in a car, as the deposed champ ran and shadow-boxed under streetlights and was shouting: “Gotta get my title back, gotta get my title back.” Who cares if it didn’t happen, you just want it to have happened.
Spinks did not get serious. He had just the WBA heavyweight title, but he was still the champion of the world. He had also beaten the man, as they say.
The new heavyweight champion was somehow given a quarter of a million dollar advance for training camp. And you best believe he did his very best to spend all of it.
There follows a list of Spinks’s crazy life from the moment he met Ali in February up until the first bell in New Orleans just seven months later. This is an X-rated list, even for the boxing business:
He was arrested seven times. Handcuffed and pictured and on the pages of newspapers.
He crashed his modified Lincoln Continental in Detroit and his souped-up Corvette in Ohio. He was charged with speeding in North Carolina. Spinks was all over the place and going there fast.
He was busted for cocaine possession – a tiny amount with street value of just one dollar fifty. But, this is the man that followed Ali… the heavyweight champion of the world.
However, even more disturbing were his disappearances. He would walk in the front door of the hotel and out the back.
The man in charge of tracking down the champion Mr. T – yeah, that Mr T – before he was fighting in Rocky he had become friends and then bodyguard to Leon Spinks. Mr. T knew where to look.
“Leon never had any sense. He was just note very smart. And he was irresponsible. You could’ve had Einstein advising him and it wouldn’t have mattered.”
It was a constant hustle to keep Spinks in camp and clean. It has to be said, his guardians were losing and the crisis was real. Mr T and his unique tracking skills obviously did his best, but he knew the truth:
“The more cocaine he snorted, the less he trained, and the less he trained, the more out of shape he got.”
On arrival in New Orleans at the fight hotel, where film crews and press were waiting, Leon got out of one limo and into another, and then drove off on his own. He was gone either one or two nights before Mr.T found him.
There is a great story about either Bob Arum, Muhammad Ali or Angelo Dundee – they all claim the same story – coming down to the hotel lobby at 6am and seeing Leon. He says “Hi”. They think at first he has been running and then they realise he is coming in from a night out!
Perhaps the craziest story about the build-up to the fight and one that I have been told several times – and in mostly the same way – involves Leon’s 6-foot-tall wife, Nova. She stood taller because she had a high afro hairstyle.
Anyway, Leon Spinks goes missing on the afternoon of the fight. He is found by Nova and Mr.T in a cheap hotel room – he has been drinking and he is not alone. It’s just over an hour before the first bell. He is taken to the dressing room where Benton and a growing band of men are waiting. It is chaos. It is a disgrace.
Ali had done everything right in training, had dropped a few pounds, but he was in the right place: He knew this time it was a fight: “This time it ain’t the fat man that took him too casual in Las Vegas last February. This is the real Ali.”
Ali had also gone to Russia to meet with Communist Party Leader, Leonid Brezhnev in June. He had a plan to solve racism, leprosy and famine. Brezhnev backed him and Johnny Cash and Libya’s president, Gaddafi also backed him. Now that is a contrast of summers.
In the Leon Spinks camp, Benton is unhappy before the night of the rematch: “They’re cutting my throat, stopping me from helping the kid.”
There are 63, 350 people in the Superdome. The glitter is back and Jackie Onassis and John Travolta are ringside.
The real Ali fights like a dream. Spinks often fights like he is in a dream. At the end of the fifth round, Benton is unable to even get close to Spinks in the corner because of all the hangers-on attached to him, and he leaves. He walks away from the fight and his fighter as the bell sounds for round six. He’s distraught: “What can I do? There are ten people up there in that corner. There are too many amateurs up there. It was like watching your baby drown. There was nothing you could do about it.”
Ali wins, wins easily, close to a shut-out on points. He jabs, jabs and waits for the right hand. Simple stuff. He makes history by becoming the first man to win the heavyweight championship three times. Spinks looks relieved at the end… his shameless posse at his side. Hughie McIlvanney writing in the Observer wrote:
“Leon looked like a brave and powerful novice, burdened with inexperience and the extreme limitations of a recently converted amateur.”
Ali was instantly reflective:
“I’m going to sit down for six or eight months and think a bit. Then I’ll decide whether to fight again.”
That is exactly what he did. Ali never fought again in the Seventies, the miracle in New Orleans was his last offering in the decade. He was 36 years of age.
Spinks was back in the heavyweight mix after Ali vacated the WBA title and retired in June of 1979. Spinks went missing after the fight – it was the only way he knew. He called it the “swoop.” Those are dark days.
The heavyweight championship year ended in November when Holmes made his first defence of the WBC version. Holmes stopped Alfredo Evangelista in seven rounds in Las Vegas. He did what Ali should have done in 1977. Holmes was just getting started, building his own considerable legacy.
By the end of 1978 the heavyweight world was wide open: the men that had dominated the last ten or more years were gone or thinking of retiring. So many new fighters would get a chance to fight for the the world championship in the next couple of years. Some deserving, some undeserving and that is way it had always been.
John Tate won nine, eight quick and would have a great 1979 – he was the first of the Lost Generation of heavyweights. A tragic gang. Tate died in 1998 in a crash with cocaine in his blood.
Gerry Cooney had eight wins, seven quick and he would be in some massive fights.
South Africans Gerrie Coetzee and Kallie Knoetze kept winning in 1978 and would both feature in a WBA elimination series in 1979. Ossie Ocasio beat Jimmy Young. There were others, lots of others getting in a line for a chance to become the heavyweight champion of the world. It was not such an elite club any longer.
It was a changing heavyweight world. The one that Muhammad Ali left in 1978. As he left the ring that monumental night in New Orleans, the veteran broadcaster and Ali believer, Howard Cosell, turned to the poetry of Bob Dylan to bid his hero farewell.
This is how Cosell serenaded Ali:
“May your heart always be joyful.
May your song always be sung.
May you stay forever young.”
I have no idea if there was a dry eye in the house.
The great man was gone and would never be champion again. Holmes was just starting to realise how big, damaging and often hurtful it was to follow a giant in the boxing business.
Make no mistake, Holmes was fearless and would never turn away from any fight.