His furious fists touched them gently — a generation of teenage boxers in St. Louis.
A generation of teenagers in St. Louis.
Really, a generation in St. Louis.
“You gotta listen to me now,” Kevin Cunningham said Monday by phone. “This is history I’m talking about.”
St. Louis’ Leon Spinks won Olympic gold.
St. Louis’ Leon Spinks beat Muhammad Ali.
“I can remember as a 12-year-old in 1976 — I was living in north St. Louis, in the Walnut Park neighborhood,” said Cunningham, who became a boxer and prominent boxing trainer, now based in West Palm Beach, Fla. “The nights he (and his brother Michael) won the gold, everybody in the neighborhood ran out of their houses, out into to the streets, yelling and screaming. It was such a big deal. It was almost like everybody in St. Louis, especially in the hood, felt like they were almost kin to the Spinks brothers. That’s how close Leon and Mike were to the city.”
Leon is now gone. Cancer. The champ passed away over the weekend at age 67. Lost his final fight.
But in his hometown, he’s forever important. And in his era, he was ever so impactful.
“In 1976, I was 16, and the Olympics really inspired me,” said Harold Petty, who was boxing at the time. “That made it a lot more exciting, having one of the guys from my gym and two brothers from St. Louis win. That really pumped me up to take my training to another level.”
Petty ascended. The little lefty was the Golden Gloves champion — five different times. He was also a national AAU champion in 1979.
“I was rated between No. 1 and 2 at flyweight, which is 112 pounds, and then I kind of outgrew the weight,” he recalled by phone Monday. “They gave me an at-large bid to the Olympic trials in 1980. And I don’t think they thought I was going to do as well. But I ended up losing in the finals to one of their favorites,” Jackie Beard.
Spanning three centuries, St. Louis has been the training grounds of great boxers. But the era of Leon and Michael Spinks spawned a litany of sparkplugs in gloves. Petty and Claudell Atkins. Louis Howard and Carl Daniels. Nick Kakouris and Arthur Johnson, who was from East St. Louis. Lemuel Steeples was raised in the same Pruitt-Igoe projects as Petty and the Spinks brothers. Steeples was an amateur sensation. He won the national Golden Gloves title. A Pan Am title, too. He was on a plane trip to Poland with USA. Boxing in 1980 when a tragic crash killed Steeples, 13 other boxers and 77 total passengers.
“Leon and Michael, their success really inspired the St. Louis amateur program,” Cunningham said, “because right after the ’76 Olympics, in the early in the early ’80s and ’90s, kids were going to the boxing gyms in droves. And St. Louis amateur program was one of the best programs in the United States during the ’80s and the ’90s. We had several No. 1 ranked amateurs in the country. . . . Now there was there were a couple of champions from St. Louis (in previous decades). Archie Moore, Sonny Liston, Henry Armstrong. But those guys didn’t really claim St. Louis the way the Spinks brothers did.”
And in St. Louis there were fabled gyms across the city, across the years — Capri, De Soto. 12th and Park, Mathews-Dickey Boys’ Club, Pop Myles and so many more.
Petty, out of 12th and Park, had a successful professional boxing career, finishing 37-9. He won the NABF bantamweight title in 1982 and successfully defended it four times. In recent years, he returned to the gym at the 12th and Park Recreation Center. He took over for the late, great trainer Kenny Loehr.
Before the pandemic, Petty said he was training 15-20 boxers.
“I don’t really have many at all now,” he said.
For numerous reasons, boxing doesn’t have the popularity with young kids as it did in previous generations. Petty cited basketball and football and video games. But those in the boxing community will forever hold onto pride like it’s in a balled-up fist. The sport gave them so much. They gave the sport so much, too. But the sport provided chances. And their heroes provided hope.
“I had several people call me (after Leon died),” Petty said. “It’s kind of a shame, you know? Just based on what he meant to St. Louis and what kind of person he was. . . . He was the kind of guy — if he liked you, he’d give you the shirt off his back.”
Memories from the corner of the ring in the corner of their minds.
“We all know what Leon did — he meant a lot to the boxing industry, but he meant even more to St. Louis,” Cunningham said. “He beats Muhammad Ali and wins the undisputed heavyweight championship of the world. That felt like, around the city, like St. Louis had won the Super Bowl. That was the magnitude of that win.”
