SPINKS’ TOUGHEST OPPONENT : Self-Doubt Still Getting the Better of Fighter Despite His 30-0 Record

Michael Spinks can become anything he wants, has become everything he wanted.

A ghetto kid who was called Messover because he was such a good victim, Spinks rose to become an Olympic gold medalist, celebrated across this land. A professional boxer called Slim because even his light-heavyweight status failed to do his frame justice, he bulked up and became a heavyweight champion, the first ever to do so.

He can become anything he wants, apparently, except confident. His ego has lagged woefully behind his achievements, his self-concept ridiculously short of his true stature in this sport. On the eve of his Monday night fight with Gerry Cooney, Spinks is still wearing that foolish “Why me?” grin.

Someone asks if he’s eager for this fight. He fixes the man with a plaintive smile. His challenger is 6 feet 7 inches, has a wrecking-ball left hook and, with the notable exception of Larry Holmes, has dispatched almost all his opponents with a uniform savagery.

“I’m in no hurry to get into the ring with that man,” Spinks says reasonably. He thinks about the prospect. “I could start crying,” he says, quite seriously.

You have to believe him because, once, at a pre-fight press conference, he did start crying. It was an amazing sight for reporters accustomed to covering boors and bullies.

But almost everything about Spinks surprises. Once, in the dressing room immediately before a fight, Spinks was bathing in tears. Eddie Futch, his trainer, a man who had seen it all, observed this with a proper consternation.

A 20 x 20 patch of canvas, roped off to prevent escape, is no place for a man of sensitivity, or even sensibility. Nevertheless, Spinks prevails there. He is undefeated in 30 fights, including 11 with one or more light-heavyweight titles at stake and two more with heavyweight Holmes, the first of those considered a major upset.

His spastic side-to-side style and his overhand right, the Spinks Jinx, have made him a formidable boxer. So far, only the sanctioning bodies have been able to take his title.

But the ring performance does not square with the person. Out of the ring, he seems reluctant at his bravest best. The normal fighter’s bravado is almost comically absent.

“Man, I’m never in no hurry to get into a ring,” he says. “Training is fun, but thinking about the actual fight is scary. Man, those three steps up to the ring . . . “ He shudders.

“You ask if I’m eager,” he says. “I wasn’t eager for Holmes either. I mean, all those weeks, all those press conferences, all those people saying how I’m going to eat Larry Holmes’ right hand. How can you have any eagerness? That’s messing up your Sunday. That’s messing up your whole week. He was going to hurt me!”

Spinks has everyman’s apprehension about performing dangerous tasks. And for the Holmes fight, well, if he had been any more apprehensive, any more certain of his doom, he would have chosen to wear a blindfold into the ring.

“I was trusting in a higher power to see me through,” he says. “Sometimes I wondered if (promoter) Butch (Lewis) had me in too tough. I believed Butch wouldn’t do anything to hurt me. I tried to believe.”

Oh, he thought he would win the title. Sort of.

“It was meant for me to get it,” he says. “But in what fashion? Would I have to get up off the canvas, stagger around, all cut up?”

His self-doubt was profound. At the weigh-in before the Holmes fight, he was telling a small group of reporters that he had dreamed of the fight the night before.

“How’d it come out?” somebody asked.

“I lost,” Spinks said.

Of course, what he really did was stand up to an undefeated champion, a true heavyweight, and beat him, punch for punch. There was nothing reluctant about him in the ring. There never is. But Spinks seems incapable of believing in himself.

Even now, enjoying a small fame and an immense prosperity, he finds it hard to believe that he has escaped the doom of life in the St. Louis projects. He knew he wanted out, but doubted he’d find a way.

“I knew there was a place for me,” he says. “But only in my head.”

Simply to have escaped Pruitt-Igoe, the Alcatraz of tenement life, should have instilled in him some confidence.

“St. Louis was the worst time in my life,” he says quietly. “And it seems like a lifetime ago. Like, it’s tough to remember where I was born and raised anymore, hard to picture that.”

But as he talked, it came into focus.

“We were one of the last families, before they finally blew it up. By then, they couldn’t control the people that lived there, so they just fenced them up. It was like one of those ant houses. You’d go by and see people living in cracks and crevices.

“Even as we lived there, people were stealing the copper out of the apartments. We had no heat. In the winter, the floor was full of ice. We had to hang in the kitchen, all four burners of the stove on. The walls were slick with heat and grease.”

Even with the opportunities boxing provided, poverty trailed Michael and and his older brother, Leon. Rollie Schwartz, a coach of that famous 1976 Olympic team on which both competed, remembers the two traveled the world with a single pair of pants, shiny with use.

Later, boxing provided better. Leon, who quickly won the heavyweight title and the fame and fortune that attend it, sprang from poverty with a maniacal glee, squandering that title in the same year he won it, 1978.

Michael was somewhat less flamboyant. Even today, at the height of his career, he behaves with a humility that should confound his colleagues. He wears no jewelry, and although his house in Delaware is worth more than a million dollars, he lives modestly there with his sister and her five children.

“Really, I live in my bedroom,” he says.

The sense of family, which he never enjoyed in a fatherless home, is important to him. Through Leon’s comically brilliant career, Michael remained at his side, his own career on hold. He fought just three times in 1978 and 1979.

But Michael has shifted from being his brother’s keeper, frustrated at Leon’s continued misadventures. He didn’t even know that Leon had been stopped in yet another fight abroad, this one in Italy. But when told, his face couldn’t have been more mournful.

“Stopped but not knocked out, right?” he asked hopefully.

At one time, Spinks achieved his fantasy, a nuclear family, with a common-law wife and a small baby. But on the eve of a fight to unify the light-heavyweight championship, Sandra Massey was killed in a car crash.

His training was conducted through a mist of tears, he broke down at press conferences and, when somebody brought in the baby immediately before his fight with Dwight Braxton, he again broke down in tears. Futch assumed the fight had been lost right there.

But Spinks went out into the arena and faced Braxton with a calm that was nearly chilling. His detachment was even laughable at one point. Leon, hooded by a huge black cowboy hat, was behaving like a madman at ringside. Michael, in the middle of the fight, advised, “Straighten your hat, Lee.”

And went back to beating Braxton for a 15-round decision. It is the remarkable aspect of Spinks, his apparent vulnerability. He seems to be one entire chink.

It would seem important, however, that his opponents look beyond the sheer humanness of Michael Spinks. Because in the ring, as elsewhere, he becomes what he wants, time and time again. A champion.