Ex-Stars Start Over in Detroit : Denny McLain Sings, Leon Spinks Tends Bar at Same Club

Just last month, Denny McLain, former Detroit Tigers pitcher, faced his second prison term.

But McLain, 44, is now playing pop music on a synthesizer at a bar in this Detroit suburb after receiving 5 years’ probation.

Baseball’s last 30-game winner--sentenced in December to probation after pleading guilty to racketeering and cocaine possession charges--entertains 5 nights a week at Jovan’s, where former heavyweight boxing champion Leon Spinks tends bar.

Jovan’s owner, Al Balooly, said he thought it might be good for business “to have someone with a name playing here.”

Balooly also hired Spinks, the 35-year-old former heavyweight boxing champion, last week as a combination bartender-greeter.

Monday, the two former big names in Detroit sports met for the first time.

“I told Denny that if anybody gives him any trouble, I’ll punch them out,” Spinks joked.

McLain, who won 31 games with the Tigers in 1968, was convicted in Tampa, Fla., of loan-sharking, gambling and cocaine dealing in March 1985, and sentenced to 23 years in prison.

He was released after serving 29 months, when a federal appeals court ruled he had been treated unfairly by the judge at his trial. He then pleaded guilty to racketeering and cocaine possession charges as part of a plea-bargain agreement and began his probation Dec. 15.

“Let’s just say I’m glad it’s over,” McLain said in an interview with the Detroit Free Press. “It’s tough not knowing what your future is going to be. I didn’t even buy a 1989 calendar--that’s how unsure I was of what was going to happen to me.”

McLain and his family now live in Fort Wayne, Ind. He said it hasn’t been easy readjusting to family life.

” . . . You don’t realize how much you miss your family until you can’t be with them,” he said.