How Spinks Became a Giant for Holmes’ Rocky Horror Show

Well, the canary ate the cat. The Titanic sank the iceberg. Johnstown won the flood.

A good little man beat a good big man. the light-heavyweight champion of the world beat the heavyweight champion. David took Goliath again for the first time since the original.

Billy Conn, Archie Moore, Tommy Loughran, John Henry Lewis, eat your hearts out.

A principle of applied physics was established. We found out what happened when a resistible force meets a moveable object. The moveable object was ahead on all cards.

Another Spinks brother, the one with all his teeth except for a space in the middle, won the heavyweight championship of all the universe--well, of the IBF, anyway--Saturday night.

He did it by defying every physical-fitness-in-sports book. He did it by getting fat. No one ever thought of that as a route to success before.

Michael Spinks gained 26 pounds in a little over three months. Now, if you know anybody who put on that much blubber between June 6 and Sept. 21, you probably know a guy whose collar is too tight, whose pants look lousy on him and whose wife is telling him to lay off the beer.

Michael Spinks may be the best thing that ever happened to guys who hate salads and like ketchup on their eggs.

You see, a light-heavyweight champion of the world is supposed to weigh 175 pounds and be thin enough to mail and to be cat-quick and be almost invisible in a ring when he turns sideways.

Michael Spinks came into the ring Saturday night weighing more than Jack Dempsey, Rocky Marciano, Floyd Patterson or Ezzard Charles ever did.

The fight mob was shocked. The light-heavy champ in these things is supposed to make his fight like one of those Saturday afternoon cartoon characters who chomp on a carrot and say, “Uh, w-w-what’s up, Doc?” as the big bully crashes through a wall leaving his imprint outlined in it.

The fight was supposed to be a Tom-and-Jerry short subject. When Michael Spinks came up to the weigh-in looking like a blowfish, the wise guys couldn’t wait to get a bet down on the champ. Michael Spinks would be just a complicated heavy bag. He would spend most of the night belching.

They wanted the fight to be the pugilistic version of “The Perils of Pauline.” That’s the way light-heavy vs. heavyweight champ fights have always been. That was the way Georges Carpentier made his fight against Jack Dempsey--and the way Billy Conn thought he should fight Joe Louis.

Michael Spinks thought his way lay through a 4,500-calorie-a-day diet.

Now, 4,500 calories a day is all right for a guy getting ready to play Henry the Eighth, but the Pritikin Diet people would faint away.

If you’re 25 pounds overweight, you know what it’s like. Your pants are tight, your feet hurt all the time, and you feel like lying down a lot.

To beat a bigger, slower man, you don’t need a lot of excess baggage. You probably need to be in the general nourishment condition of Mahatma Gandhi. No light-heavy champ can take a heavyweight champ’s punch, even when it is the comparatively light one of Larry Holmes. It behooves you to be elsewhere when it is thrown--if possible, underground. It calls for a svelte condition. Boxing, after all, is a speed sport, not a strength sport, and if a fighter gained 25 1/2 pounds between every fight, he’d be the new Orson Welles, not the new champion.

Michael Spinks defied all the odds. Lord knows what he has done to the sale of Melba toast and iced tea, but his largely carbohydrate diet may give Pizza Hut a shot in the arm.

“I have revolutionized the art of getting ready for a fight,” he crowed in the press conference after the decision.

The fight was a curious one. In the first place, the closeness of the scorecards--one point on each of two judges’ cards and the admission by them that they had the fight dead even after 14 rounds--is, for boxing, peculiar. It isn’t as if Michael Spinks gave Larry Holmes any kind of drubbing. In fact, it’s almost traditional in matters of this kind, where a distinction is razor sharp and in doubt right up to the 15th round, to let a sitting champ keep his title. The pugilist axiom is, you’re supposed to take a champ’s title away from him, usually by several rounds, a knockout if necessary, a knockdown in any case.

Larry Holmes, by definition, has been one of the great champions. He held the title longer than almost anybody except Louis and/or Dempsey.

But he has never been loved. Part of the reason is, he beat a much-admired and loved fighter, Muhammad Ali. But an equally valid reason could be guessed from the ex-champ’s postfight press conference. Larry Holmes has a positive gift for the churlish.

His disappointment was great that he hadn’t tied Rocky Marciano’s record of 49 victories and an undefeated career. But this was hardly an excuse for spotting the late Rocky’s brother, who had publicly expressed the hope Rocky’s record would not be broken, and delivering himself of a flurry of insults, most in bad taste, concluding with the hardly necessary, “Rocky Marciano couldn’t carry my jockstrap!” Of course he couldn’t, he’s been dead for 16 years.

Nor was it necessary to accuse Brother Peter Marciano of “freeloading” off a Vegas hotel on the strength of his brother’s memory. “You should be grateful to me for bringing back your brother’s name from the grave!” scolded the new ex-champ.

He embellished his gratuitous remarks by accusing a Boston journalist of misusing his (Larry Holmes’) hospitality and labeling all Boston and environs as “a racist state.”

It was too bad that Larry Holmes couldn’t exit with a Jack Dempsey exit line, “Honey, I forgot to duck,” or a Joe Louis line, “Aw, I knocked out lots of guys myself--don’t cry.”

But that was Larry, ungracious to the last. “Maybe now, I’ll get the respect and affection due me,” he growled. Unfortunately, he probably will. And won’t like what it is.