Spencers Are Uniquely Prepared for the Family Business

The scenario was set. Todd Spencer had seen this drama before and knew what came next. He was all ready to step into the lead role.

First, you go to USC, or Tailback U., as the star tailback, the most highly recruited high school player in the land. It’s all a breeze from there, right? Roses and Heismans. Your name in the papers, your pictures in magazines. Life is a parade.

Why not? It had happened to Mike Garrett, O.J. Simpson, Charles White, Marcus Allen. It went with the territory.

Todd Spencer could do all the things they could do: Run the 100 in 10-something, run the 40 in 4.5. He had been an All-State, in fact All-American, in high school. He was quick, shifty, durable--just the player to run behind Student Body Right into the end zone.

Rose Bowl, here I come. Heisman Trophy? Well, just maybe. All-American? For sure. Drafted by the Rams? Raiders? Why not?

Well, it didn’t work out that way. Todd Spencer showed up on campus with flags flying and the band playing. Marv Goux, Mr. Trojan himself, the assistant head coach, said he had seen a lot of Trojan ballcarriers, but Todd Spencer was something special. He went 5 feet 11 1/2, 200 pounds, and he had a clear sense of the field. He had scored 37 touchdowns in his high school career and rolled up a school record of 3,566 yards.

So, they asked if he would like to block. Actually, that was OK with Spencer, at first. Because he would be blocking for Marcus Allen, who was his idol and who had himself blocked for Charles White in his first year.

But Todd thought they would be handing him the football once Marcus was gone. Blocking for Marcus was one thing, blocking for Fred Crutcher, Michael Harper or Anthony Gibson was another. “I never saw any other tailback who made me think I should pack my bags,” he sniffs.

Nothing seemed to go right. The school was on probation three of the four years he was there. This meant no bowl games, no postseason high-level exposure.

The situation went from bad to farce. In his senior year, John Robinson left as coach and took with him the emphasis on the running game. The new coach, Ted Tollner, was a passing coach. “We went from the I-formation, which was a running back’s prayer, to a wing-T,” Spencer says. “I became redundant.”

He played 66 minutes in his senior year. “I was third-string tailback,” he says. “They asked me if I wanted to move back to fullback. I found myself not even existing.”

Instead of the Rams and Raiders fighting over him, he found himself calling them.

He got into pro ball the hard way. They threw socks full of money and sent planes for O.J. and Marcus. Todd Spencer had to pay for his own planes and his own phone calls. He had to leave messages, take his hat off and wait in the outer offices, go through the indignities of tryouts.

Chuck Noll and the Pittsburgh Steelers finally took a chance on him. They put him to work returning kickoffs and blocking on special teams.

Todd Spencer was special for another reason. He was the son of Thad Spencer, the top heavyweight boxing contender of the 1960s. Pro football coaches all knew of him, some even knew him.

That gave them an edge over the son, who never did know his father, never even saw him fight. He resented the void in his life. “I could have used the direction and parent support growing up,” he remembers. “I certainly needed some.”

But Papa Thad was on a destructive agenda of his own. A marvelously skilled athlete in the ring--hailed once as “the black Gene Tunney”--he was actually up for a shot at Muhammad Ali’s title. The contract had been signed; the fight was to take place in San Francisco, where Thad was a big favorite, when the government stepped in and effectively barred Ali from the ring.

Spencer was to go on to defeat ex-champion Ernie Terrell in an elimination bout to determine a successor to Ali as champion.

But the ring lights were never bright enough for Thad Spencer. He thought he was living the high life. He was living a hallucination, a hell on earth. He never won another fight after Terrell. It was hard to do drunk or stoned. He was arrested for drunk driving two weeks before the Jerry Quarry bout. Not surprisingly, he got knocked out in the 12th round. He only lasted nine rounds in his next fight (against Leotis Martin), and then only six in his next (against Billy Walker) and only one in his fight against Mac Foster. Thad was getting lucky he could last through the anthem.

Thad went into another line of work even more dangerous--cocaine dealing. And using. It, too, was a combat existence. One night, he shot and killed a man in Portland. But that was only after the man had pumped five bullets from a .44 Magnum into Thad’s back. Exonerated for self-defense, he was back in another shooting scrape two weeks later.

He was in a bar in Oakland one night when someone sprayed the place with a shotgun, killing one and wounding seven, one of whom was Thad. He had more holes in him than the Alamo. Another assailant ran over him with a car twice. He was in a higher-risk business than a guy who puts out oil well fires.

It was son Todd who got him off the streets. Thad was in a bar watching a Notre Dame-USC game and Todd Spencer was a star. “I carried the ball seven times for 74 yards,” he recalls. “It was the last time we beat Notre Dame at Notre Dame.”

“Isn’t that your son?” the bartender asked Thad. Spencer shook his head. “No, that’s not my son.” Just then, O.J. Simpson announced on the air that this Spencer at fullback for USC was the son of the onetime heavyweight contender.

“I walked out of that club and that was my last day of cocaine,” Thad Spencer recalls.

The reconciliation between father and son came years later. “He came on campus and told me he was clean and sober for the first time in 18 years,” Todd says. “He told me he was sorry he had never been a father.”

Todd’s own pro career was something less than Marcus Allen’s. “If you come in as a high draft choice, they have an investment in you they want to get back,” he says. “When you walk in, you’re more expendable. I felt I did a good job in Pittsburgh, but I began to hang out with the wrong people. They told me, ‘You’re going to be just like your father,’ and I said, ‘I don’t know what my father was like.’ ”

Spencer and Son are united now in the fight game. Spencer Promotions Inc. in Bakersfield, where Todd is president and Thad is matchmaker, hopes to promote championship fights, but they also plan to put together a youth agency, “Youth in Action Against Drugs,” with which they hope to counsel gang kids. “We hope to take the neediest kids, the kids of addicted parents and show them a different life,” Todd says.

It’s for sure the Spencers are qualified to spot the pitfalls--two generations who hit the pinnacle but couldn’t stay there, two guys who know that success and excess are words of a feather that not only sound the same but frequently are.