Fear Plays a Key Role With Spinks

On the eve of his fight with Rocky Marciano, English fighter Don Cockell’s manager held out for a 20-foot instead of 16-foot ring.

“Why?” asked the humorist, Bugs Baer. “His man’s not that tall.”

On practically the eve of his fight with Mike Tyson, the manager of challenger Michael Spinks seemed to be holding out for a 15-round instead of a 12-round fight.

“Why?” Bugs Baer might ask. “His man’s not that durable.”

Some guys fight out of a crouch. Some guys fight out of a stick-and-run. Michael fights out of fear. Some guys practice feints. Michael practices faints.

Some guys practice their jab. Some practice the left hook. Michael practices getting scared. No one knows whether he imports Dracula movies or listens to ghost stories but his style of fighting is sheer terror. The only thing Michael Spinks knows for sure in the ring is, he doesn’t want to get hit.

He imagines the worst scenarios. Once he was getting ready to fight one of those head hunters with a name right out of the Arabian Nights and he told a magazine interviewer he put himself to sleep every night imagining himself getting the worst beating of his life. By the time he climbed in the ring he was so resigned to it, the fight was a walk in the park.

Fear is his ally. Will Rogers never met a man he didn’t like, Michael Spinks never met a man he didn’t fear. The minute he does, he knows he’s through.

In the movie, “Patton,” George C. Scott, playing the general, tells his troops: “Being a good soldier is not dying for your country, it’s getting some other poor son of it to die for his country.”

An old-time fight trainer, Eddie (Cannonball) Green, used to tell his fighters to go into the ring frightened out of their wits. “If a lion ain’t scared, you can pull his tail and tweak his nose and ride on him and he’ll yawn,” he used to tell them. “But if he’s scared, God help you.”

Michael Spinks will drink to that. He had a brother, Leon, who wasn’t scared of anything on this planet. That was just the trouble. Leon should have been scared of anything that came in a bottle. Leon is now getting bombed out in 2 minutes of the first round by guys who wouldn’t scare anybody.

You examine Michael Spinks and he doesn’t seem to have much else going for him besides fear. It’s hard to figure what his ring style is because he doesn’t have any. Michael is an ad lib fighter. He makes it up as he goes along. He’s awkward, unpredictable, slow. All he does is win. If he were a ballplayer, he’d be Eddie Stanky. If he were a pitch, he’d be a knuckleball.

He does everything wrong. He hits off the wrong foot, he leads with the wrong hand--the right--he moves like a guy trying to get off a cake of soap. His hand speed is average, his foot speed non-existent. (“He couldn’t catch a parked bus,” Larry Holmes once scoffed--just before losing two fights to him). He can’t punch. All he is, is undefeated. It’s like getting beat by the heavy bag.

He doesn’t have a killer instinct. He doesn’t enjoy hurting people. “I enjoy confusing ‘em,” he has told a reporter. He gets them to pick a card, then shows them another one. He didn’t want to be a pug. He didn’t want to be a janitor, though, either.

He’s so good-natured, he’s almost sweet. It’s easy to make him laugh. Most fighters scowl a lot. Spinks grins a lot.

He himself, doesn’t scare anybody. That’s his greatest strength. Thirty-one guys have climbed into the ring with him in the pros thinking, “This guy’s nuthin’. I can take this guy without training.” When they got in the ring, they felt like Babe Ruth trying to hit a ball of cotton out of the lot.

He’s like fighting China. You seem to disappear into the interior. When the fight’s over, the judges look at each other. “I think that clumsy guy won it,” they marvel. “Don’t ask me how.”

It’s like an English movie where the butler did it.

You can hit Michael Spinks--but not hard. His nose is too big. A few more punches on it and he’ll have to breathe through his ears. It’s been hit so often, he’s the only guy in the game with a cauliflowered nose.

He’s not even really a heavyweight. He used to be the light-heavyweight champion and probably still should be. If he weighs 205 for his title fight with Tyson Monday night, probably 30 pounds of it will be liquid.

And all 200 of it will be fright.

Will the weight slow him down?

“It’s not speed that makes you hard to hit,” Michael Spinks says. “It’s fear.”

If that’s so, Michael Spinks is ready. His pulse is racing, his blood pressure is high, throat dry and he keeps looking over both shoulders at once. All his systems are go for him to fight his usual guerrilla-warfare fight. Michael Spinks will make his fight like a guy in a haunted house, a cemetery at midnight. Tyson may wonder if he showed up. Until the score cards come down.

Franklin Roosevelt told us the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. That’s not Michael Spinks’ position. The only thing he has to fear is courage.

Booze has killed some fighters, babes, others. Bravery is Spinks’ bugaboo. As long as he can avoid that, as long as he can go into the ring shaking and having difficulty swallowing, he’s ready.

If his teeth are chattering and he has a slight temperature, he may be unbeatable.

Just remember, courage has killed more men than cholera.