MICHAEL SPINKS : He’s in Camp to Train for His Title Fight With Mike Tyson, but He’s Still Trying Not to Think About It

The training camp is high in the mountains. Michael Spinks has been up here for five weeks. The building he lives in is off by itself.

At night, ground fog rolls in like the surf. Not a light around. Drive down the narrow road, headlight beams devoured by the mist, and you could be upon a deer, a woodchuck, a beaver, a skunk before you know it. Spinks passes each evening in the half-light of a plain room in the building on the other side of the trees at the end of the little road.

There’s no feeling sorry for Spinks. He’s guaranteed $13.5 million to fight heavyweight champion Mike Tyson June 27 in Atlantic City, N.J. But monasticism can be the bane of monastics, let alone boxers. What do you do at midnight when ESPN puts on beach volleyball? You sit there, thinking.

Truth is, Spinks is a survivor. A student of his craft, he’s 31-0. He’s learned of life through death; five years ago his common-law wife died in a car accident on Philadelphia’s Schuylkill Expressway. He called her “my first and only love.”

In the evenings he tries not to think why he’s here--preparing for the unbeaten (34-0), the seemingly unbeatable Tyson, the 6-to-1 favorite with a $17 million guarantee.

“I’ve really been trying hard not to think about it,” says Spinks, “because my heart rate goes up. I can’t rest. I can’t even think about going to sleep. It slips in every now and then, but, really, to get to sleep I have to turn it off. I try hard to turn it off, and the only way I have been able to really turn it off is to think about a woman.”

Still, he has not been sleeping well--until this night, when a merciful sleep comes on him.

“Hey, Slim, time to get up.” It’s 5:30 in the morning; it’s Julius Wilkerson--known as Moon. Nobody calls Spinks “Champ” or any such thing; he doesn’t take himself that seriously, and being 6 feet 2 1/2 inches tall and weighing only 205 pounds, he is Slim.

“Get up, Slim.” He rises, and by rote does his secret exercises with his 136-pound nutrition-conditioning guru, Mackie Shilstone, who built him up from 175 to 200 during eight weeks of 1985 and who says, “The nutrition is very high-tech stuff.” Then Spinks falls back to his good sleep. “C’mon, Slim, your food’s gonna get cold now.” From eye slits, he looks at Moon--wasn’t Moon just here? He sees Moon putting down a tray and leaving. He rolls over.

“I slip into this little vision,” says Spinks. “It was these girls. They came from outer space. Honest to goodness. Oh, this is strange. They had spacesuits on. They were in my house, in Delaware. I don’t know how they got there, but I was scared. So I run and get my little gun. The gun wouldn’t fire. They had this little device that I think prevented my gun from going off. I run up to where they are, near the washing machine. ‘If I was to have shot you, would it have hurt you?’ This one says, ‘Yes.’

“God, I didn’t want to shoot her because I was happy to see her. I hadn’t seen a girl in a long, long time. But I was afraid. I just wanted to know if they were going to hurt me. ‘No,’ they said. All of a sudden I see the credits rolling. The credits! But I was happy because it was the end of the story and they were still there. I was just so happy. She was mine to keep. And she was gorgeous, too. She was. She was beautiful. I had her in my arms. I mean, I was so happy.”

“C’mon, Slim, your food’s getting cold. C’mon, Slim.”

“Oh, Moon, I had her in my arms, and you wake me up. Oh, Moon.”

Spinks laughs. Gap-toothed or not, he loves laughing. He’ll laugh and hold his head in the long, long fingers of his right hand. His bony shoulders shake when he laughs. He laughs in the middle of his own jokes (“So if you want the camel to go really fast you say, ‘Wow. Wow. Wow.’ ”), and he laughs at his “crazy, crazy dreams.” Laughter lets him take on life’s strangeness the way he does opponents, from odd angles.

He laughs with those who line up for his autograph, when he’s showered and fresh after his 4-to-6:30 p.m. training sessions, every day except Wednesdays and Sundays. He sits at a small table next to the ring in a big room called “King Arthur’s Court” in the Concord Hotel and signs, or stands to pose for photographs with guests.

A woman takes his picture; the camera misfires. “What happened to the flash? I’ll wait. I want to see spots.” He speaks with everyone who comes up to him. “I think you’re one of the most intelligent boxers in the world.” “I’m happy you’re saying that.” He makes children happy by starting little conversations. The child he loves most is back in Philadelphia, where she lives with her grandmother: Michelle, his 7-year-old daughter. She still asks about her mother.

He sees her almost every day when he’s not in camp. He lives alone in Greenville, Del., near Wilmington. He gets up late, usually, although some days he gets up early because he doesn’t want to hear the phone ring, knowing it will be the high-pitched voice of his manager, Butch Lewis. “ ‘You going to the gym today, Slim?’ Spinks says that quickly. Then, slowly: ‘Yeah, I’m going to the gym today, Butch.’ ” He laughs. “I try to beat him to the punch. Up and out of the house and at the gym. But then I’ll hear from him at the end of the day. ‘Hey, Slim, you been at the gym?’ ‘Yeah, Butch, I been at the gym.’ ”

He drives I-95 north, playing a tape in his white ’88 Mercedes 560 with the black interior, on his way to Joe Frazier’s Philadelphia gym, “the whole while just having a nice comfortable ride, a nice, nice ride. The sun is shining. The breeze is nice. I’m collecting all my thoughts and seeing how I want to spend my day.”

He gets to the gym between noon and 2. Mostly, he works the heavy bag. “Working on what I would need most in any fight. That’s the use of my limbs. That’s punching. Lot of punches. I hit the bag as if the bag is hitting back. I swing, I duck. Deliver a punch, get out of the way, just after deliverance. I take the heavy bag as an opponent. Mr. Bag. Heavy Bag.” A laugh. “I really, really try to go on the heavy bag bad.

“Then I change clothes, and right away, as soon as I get in the car, I hop on the phone and call up my little girl. ‘Hey, sweetheart.’ ‘Daddy, where are you?’ ‘I’m in my car.’ I kid with her. ‘I’m in my car.’ ‘Where are you in your car?’ ‘Okay, I’m at the gym.’ ‘You comin’ over?’ ‘Sure, I’ll be right there. Want me to bring you anything?’ She says, yes, bring me this and that, and bring me this, too, and, ‘Daddy, can I talk to you till you get here?’ ‘Sure.’ ” He says “sure” soft and drawn out.

“And we talk the whole time I’m driving through town. Then I stay as long as I can. But the hunger pains start bothering me kind of bad. I say, ‘Sugar, I got to go eat now.’ She says, ‘Well, you always leave kind of quick.’ I try to explain it to her. ‘I been working out in the gym and I’ve got to eat something before I pass out.’ She says, ‘OK,’ so I get me some good kisses and then I leave to eat. I try to eat before I go home, because when I get home I’m just walking around the house, looking at this big empty house. So I eat, and then 95.

“When I lived in Philadelphia, it was a strange thing. I used to take a lot of rides, just ride around Philadelphia--there’s a lot to see in Philadelphia. Sometimes I’d go out dancing at night. But as I’d get done dancing, I would still want to ride around. It was something I craved: a long ride home.

“And I’ll be durned if I didn’t get it. Now I go all the way to Delaware. A 45-minute drive. Sometimes 30 minutes. Because the car goes, it’s such a car. But it’s enough time to collect all your thoughts. Plan. I love it. I got what I craved most of my life, since I moved to Philadelphia. I got a long ride home.”

Spinks’ mentor is the little master, Eddie Futch, 77, a great-grandfather. Once a champion amateur lightweight in Detroit, Futch sparred with the biggest of men, Joe Louis. Much later, he trained Joe Frazier, Ken Norton and Larry Holmes in Holmes’ prime, sitting out the two Spinks-Holmes fights “because I didn’t want to be responsible for either man losing.”

Futch rules out the notion that Spinks can beat Tyson simply because Tyson recently has been distracted by major change: his marriage to actress Robin Givens, the death of his co-manager Jimmy Jacobs, and the ensuing managerial power struggle between Jacobs’ partner Bill Cayton and voluble Don King. Futch says, “When the bell rings, all that will go out the window. I’ve seen it happen before. I’ve seen it happen to Michael Spinks.

“Fifteen minutes before Michael was to go out to fight Dwight Braxton”--Dwight Muhammad Qawi, the Camden Buzzsaw--”for the light heavyweight championship, Michael’s sister brought his baby into the dressing room. The baby’s mother had been killed just weeks before. Only Michael and I were in there, waiting to go out to the ring. And when she brought the child in there, Michael went to pieces. He went to pieces. He just turned his back and started crying. I said, there goes our fight. I don’t know how I’ll ever get him in the mood to go out there and do his best. But they called us out to the ring, and the bell rang to start the first round, and Michael went right to it.”

To beat Tyson, Spinks will need his skills, which most agree are considerably more than those of anyone Tyson ever fought. There’s been something wrong with all of Tyson’s opponents. Tony Tubbs was aptly named. Holmes was a relic. Tyrell Biggs, says Futch, “was a disappointment. He got hit with a shot and all the fight seemed to leave him.” Pinklon Thomas was too slow. Bonecrusher Smith was fast--he ran all night. Trevor Berbick lost his bounce--he crashed four times (twice officially) in less than six minutes.

Tyson, 21, will outweigh Spinks by 15 pounds. Spinks will have 3 inches in height and 5 inches in reach. Futch sees Spinks as the matador. “Tyson is very good coming to an opponent. Very strong, and he’s quick. He is a good puncher. But his pattern is predictable. That’s one thing I like to find, a pattern that’s predictable, because you have an idea of how to go about offsetting it.

“He moves forward, but he doesn’t move forward with the persistence of a Joe Frazier or a Marciano . . . He charges a lot. But you can only charge in a straight line; you can’t charge in a circle. You sidestep the charge, or jab and then go one way or the other. Or fake and draw the charge and step back and counterpunch on him, because you know he can only come straight to you. Give him a little movement, then he’s got to hesitate to find you.

“So we’ve got a man who has the mobility. The ability to feint a little bit and give you a little false movement. And he has enough power to hurt anybody.” Spinks lists his assets as “My speed and my ability to move in and out and”--pausing to place his hand over his heart--”my big left ticker.”

To prepare Spinks, Futch provides an assortment of boxers, each possessing one Tyson characteristic. The sparring partners work him hard. Spinks is willing. “I would like to be knocking sparring partners out, hitting them to the point where they’re turning flips. That’s been a lifelong thing; I’ve always wanted to hit somebody hard enough to flip him.”

Qawi, himself, was a sparmate until he abruptly left last week. “Unpredictable,” says Futch. Middleweight Tyrone Frazier, Joe’s nephew, offers hand speed, and snaps jabs into Spinks’s face. Bernard “The Bull” Benton bulls Spinks, like Tyson might. “A lot of bulls come through here,” says a camp aide, Don Hubbard. The baddest: Dr. Love, a Philadelphia practitioner. The “Dr.” is said once to have knocked out an opponent in 10 seconds.

Large Love, directed from the ring ropes by Philadelphia trainer Rabbi Lee and encouraged by others (“Make him work, Love”), leans his 240 pounds on Spinks, and steers him across the ring. Futch wants Spinks to move away, but Spinks, bent backward by a mountain of flesh, arms pinned against this spare tire of an 18-wheeler, screams, “I can’t!”

Watching at Futch’s side is a man in his 40s, Hedgemon Lewis (no relation to Butch Lewis). Greatly respected for his boxing skills between 1966 and 1976, Lewis thinks like Futch and has the friendliness of Spinks--he’s easygoing, upbeat. He lives by a small book he found years ago, second-hand, after he had come out of a gym. The pages between the faded red covers are yellowed, some crumbling. “At home I bought a safe,” he says, “just to keep this book in.”

It’s a collection of poems. His favorite is “It Couldn’t Be Done,” by Edgar Guest. Lewis read it to Spinks before the first Holmes fight, and he will read it again to Spinks, soon. “Here it is,” says Hedgemon Lewis:

Somebody said that it couldn’t be done,

But he with a chuckle replied

That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one

Who wouldn’t say no till he’d tried.

So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin

On his face. If he worried he hid it.

He started to sing as he tackled the thing

That couldn’t be done, and he did it.

The nights up in the mountains wouldn’t seem as long if Michael’s brother, Leon, were there. Not the Leon of today, but Leon the way he was at 14, when Michael was 11, even if Leon got Michael into trouble by beating up on guys in St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe, a crime-ridden housing project that public officials eventually conceded was a terrible failure. It was demolished, in part literally blown off the earth.

“Leon got me jumped on a lot,” says Michael. “Guys he beat up. Guys who were jealous of him. Leon had a string of TKOs. Not many guys lasted in the ring with Leon. So I’d get it. I’d get slapped in the face.” He laughs. “Here’s to Leon: Pow!”

But he always forgave Leon, even after Leon won the heavyweight title from Muhammad Ali and got too busy for Michael. Seven months later, Leon lost the title back to Ali. Eventually, he lost everything else: his retinue, his money, his respect. He couldn’t beat anyone. He turned back to Michael, and Michael was there.

Leon could never be in camp--he’d be “disruptive,” says Futch. Michael knows this. But Leon will be in Atlantic City for the fight. “Leon has never missed a fight of mine,” says Michael. “We still have a relationship. We talk on the phone sometimes. But Leon’s living Leon’s life. Michael’s living Michael’s life.”