Butch Lewis, He Was a One of a Kind Human Being

By Bernard Fernandez

He was one hell of a story-teller, in a sport where the better raconteurs are held in nearly as high esteem by the public as the guys who actually take and absorb the punches. But few promoters delivered as many memorable punch lines as did Ronald “Butch” Lewis, dead of a massive heart attack Saturday morning at his Wilmington, Del., home. He was 65. The man who made the tuxedo-sans-shirt look a fashion statement joins the lengthening list of fight people gone too soon in recent weeks, a roll call that includes noted trainer Bouie Fisher, boxing writer George Kimball, former WBC super featherweight champion Genaro “Chicanito” Hernandez and longtime ShoBox broadcaster Nick Charles.

You can bet that Butch, a good and decent man despite his well-known penchant for profanity, is behind the celestial gates right now, trading knee-slapping war stories about boxing with those fellow ring lifers who understood that boxing is not so much a profession or a pastime as it is a passion, a bug that gets into your blood and remains until you draw your final breath.

“No matter what things I do in business that pays my rent, once you’ve got that jones for boxing, you’ve got it forever,” Butch told me in December 2008, for one of the final stories in which I asked him to draw on that inexhaustible well of personal anecdotes and remembrances. He was largely out of the fight game by then, his company, Butch Lewis Productions, having veered more into music and movies, but he retained an interest in a fringe heavyweight, Faruq Saleem, a then-34-year-old journeyman whose 38-0 record at the time was exclusively crafted against guys most fans had never seen and, if they had, wish they hadn’t.

“If he were a welterweight or a middleweight, I’d be real concerned right now,” Butch said of Saleem’s extremely slow development as a fighter anyone would dare to care about. “But come on now. We’re talking about the bleeping heavyweight division. Every bleeper-bleeper whose name anybody recognizes is older than 34, damn near. And nobody’s a killer. There ain’t no bleeping killer nowhere. I mean, who’s the killer?”

Well, there are the Klitschko brothers, who are boffo in Europe but non-draws in America. Now that Wladimir Klitschko has added David Haye’s WBA heavyweight title to the IBF and WBO ones he already possessed, in still another non-exhilirating affair, and if older brother Vitali retains his WBC crown in his Sept. 10 date against bulked-up former cruiserweight champ Tomasz Adamek, what bleeper-bleeper of a contender is going to get us excited about the division again? Worse still, what happens when the Klitschkos, who are a combined 75 years of age, retire?

In that same conversation I had with Butch about the longshot hopes of stardom for Saleem, he spoke about the yet-unfought matchup of fading legend Oscar De La Hoya and some intriguing guys from the Philippines named Manny Pacquiao.

“They say De La Hoya-Pacquiao is a big fight, but come on,” Butch said. “It’s a big fight because there’s no heavyweights pulling the bleeping wagon like they used to. I see people in the street and they say, `Butch, get back in the game. Boxing needs you.’ They must think I got a superstar in hiding somewhere.”

That Butch Lewis is not as legendary a figure as, say, Don King or Bob Arum is easy enough to explain. The most recognizable fighters he ever promoted were the Spinks brothers, Leon and Michael. He also had Bernard Hopkins before “The Executioner” became a household name, as well as a mixed bag of capable or semi-capable sorts ranging from Maurice Blocker, Vaughn Bean, John Duplessis to Saleem, who might be described as Butterbean on a diet. There even were hard times when Butch, a one-time vice president of Top Rank who bolted in 1978 to form his own company, had to resort to pitching a midget wrestler named Ed “Too Small” Jones.

If it is true that promoters’ reputations are based largely on the quality of the stables they oversee, Butch never quite advanced to the elite level occupied by His Hairness and the Master of Trickeration. But he was an undeniable contender during an important period in boxing, as vocal and as visible as the fighters whose careers he oversaw. That tuxedo jacket, bow tie and no-shirt look should have been a sartorial (ital)faux pas,(end ital) but it worked for Lewis, much as Don King’s electrified ’do became his trademark.

But a visual image without the words can only take you so far, and for Butch it was the R- and X-rated monologues that separated him from the pack as much as King’s malaprops did for him. When he was on a roll, which was often, Butch was the stand-up comedic equivalent of, say, the late, great Richard Pryor, another master of the well-placed expletive.

In fact, Pryor was the principal in another of those rollicking conversations I had with Butch, the sort of behind-the-scenes stuff that was as entertaining as the actual show.

In December 2009, Butch was telling me about his greatest moment – well, at least from a financial standpoint _ as a promoter, the June 27, 1988, showdown of WBC/WBA/IBF champion Mike Tyson and Michael Spinks, the lineal titlist, in Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall. It was one of the most anticipated heavyweight fights of all time, the biggest matchup ever in the Jersey seashore town. And so what if Tyson starched Spinks in 91 seconds? The 1976 Olympic gold medalist and former heavyweight and light heavyweight champ received $13.2 million for the final fight he would ever wage inside the ropes. Butch did OK in the profit department, too.

“It was the biggest event in the world at that time – not just in this country or in boxing,” Butch said. “I’m talking the entire bleeping world. If there was a Superdome in Atlantic City, we could have filled that sucker up twice over. The demand for tickets was just crazy.

“I was getting calls from everybody you could think of – superstar athletes, big-time entertainers, politicians, right up to the White House. `Butch, you gotta get me in,’ they all said. But there wasn’t anything I could do. The place was as sold out as sold out gets. Ringside seats had a face value of $1,500 – remember, this is 1988 dollars we’re talking about – and they were being scalped for more, a lot more, and that’s only if the people lucky enough to have ’em were willing to sell, which they weren’t.

“Anyway, Richard calls and tells me he’ll do anything to get in. Richard and me were close, so I had to try, right? I checked around, called in some favors and, somehow, I got him two tickets somewhere in the first three rows, right behind Magic Johnson.

“The fight happens. Slim (Spinks) gets knocked out in the first round. Even before he went down, Magic stood up. Boom, boom, the fight ends just like that (after an elapsed time of 91 seconds). Richard calls me later and says he never saw a punch, all he saw was Magic Johnson’s back.

“Richard is yelling, `Bleeper-bleeper, I could just as well have stayed home!’” Butch, cracking himself up, said in replicating Pryor’s frantic indignity.

“But you know what?” Butch said after he finally stopped giggling. “At least Richard was in the house. That was one night when you had to be there. And if you couldn’t actually be in the arena, at least you had to be in Atlantic City, taking in the whole wild scene. All the hotels had closed-circuit telecasts and those sold out, too.

“People who couldn’t get into Boardwalk Hall were milling around outside and offering hundreds of dollars for ticket stubs to the people who were coming out after the fight ended. They were willing to pay good money for stubs! I never saw or heard about anything like that before. But, in a way, I understood. They wanted to be able to go back to wherever they came from and tell their friends and co-workers, `See, I was there.’”

It’s a toss-up as to whether the more amazing presence on such a night belonged to Spinks or to Lewis, each of whose path to the top of the boxing world was marked by detours and roadblocks that might have discouraged others.

Butch Lewis grew up poor but street-smart in North Philadelphia’s Richard Allen Homes Housing Project. He toiled at blue-collar jobs for a while, sold cars for a while after that, until he somehow wangled a piece of the promotion for the Muhammad Ali-Richard Dunn fight  on May 24, 1976.

Ever the silver-tongued devil, he accompanied his friend, Joe Frazier, to Smokin’ Joe’s third fight with Ali, the epic “Thrilla in Manila” on Oct. 1, 1975, inching his way up the ladder until he took a deep breath and went after the largely unrecruited Spinks brothers following their Olympic gold-medal successes in Montreal in 1976.

The brothers were as different as sweaty nitroglycerin (the volatile, unpredictable Leon) and the Rock of Gibraltar (the loyal, more dependable Michael), but the constant in the mix for both was the steady hand of Lewis. He somehow maneuvered Leon into a title shot in only his eighth professional bout, on Feb. 15, 1978, against Ali, in which the older Spinks somehow rose to the occasions to become the least-experienced heavyweight champion of all time.

What a lot of people didn’t know at the time is that Butch fought nearly as hard with the fun-loving Leon as Ali (who reclaimed the title in their Sept. 15, 1978 rematch) as would Ali. Leon was somewhat less than dedicated in training, to the extent that Butch found it necessary to have an associate sleep on a cot in front of the door to Leon’s room, so that he might not wander off somewhere. Didn’t work; Leon escaped, through the window, in a snowstorm. They found him shooting pool in a nearby tavern.

There were no such problems with Michael, other than the hard battle Butch had to wage just to convince him to turn pro. Satisfied that his Olympic gold medal was all he wanted out of boxing, Michael happily returned to his $50-a-week job as a janitor at a chemical plant in his native St. Louis after leaving Montreal, and may well have stayed there had not Butch bombarded him with daily telephone calls urging him to tug on the gloves again.

The disparate fates of the Spinkses is a cautionary tale of how difficult it is to plan on anything happening as you imagined it might.

“I know I could have made Leon upwards of $50 million if he had disciplined himself doing the right things for four or five years,” lamented Butch of a fighter who nonetheless earned $5 million in the ring and blew every penny of it.

Michael was less flamboyant, and presumably less saleable, but he became the undisputed 175-pound champion and successfully transitioned to the heavyweight division, winning the title by upsetting the previously undefeated Larry Holmes on Sept. 21, 1985, and ending Holmes’ bid to equal Rocky Marciano’s 49-0 record.

After his $13.2 million payday against Tyson, Spinks, whose career earnings were around $30 million, retired to his five-acre spread in Delaware, where he and Butch remained friends and partners until Butch’s death.

It should be noted that Butch did not try to milk additional millions out of Michael, instead advising him to take his leave while he still had his health and his wealth.

In retrospect, Butch’s advice generally was well worth heeding. He told Michael Spinks to not take part in the heavyweight unification tournament eventually won by Tyson in 1986, which meant Spinks rejecting a $5 million payday to fight Tyson two years earlier than he did. But by holding out, Spinks nearly tripled his eventual payday against the only opponent ever to defeat him.

It was much the same for Butch in music – his company produced the “Godfather of Soul’s” 1991 comeback event, the pay-per-view “James Brown: Living in America,” and movies, which included the well-received “Once Upon a Time … When We Were Colored.”

Boxing is one thing, but it says a lot about an individual when he has James Brown and Denzel Washington on speed-dial.

He was always available to me, too, and any question I asked him was apt to result in a tinged-in-gold quote, like the time I inquired in August 1990 about the dismal state of the cruiserweights, whose champions at the time were Jeff Lampkin (IBF), Robert Daniels (WBA), Massimiliano Duran (WBC) and Magna Havnaa (WBO).

“If all the different champions stripped down naked and ran through Times Square at noon, they wouldn’t get noticed,” Butch said in his inimitable style. “Well, they might get noticed, but nobody would say, `Man, there went the cruiserweight champion of the world.’”

Normally, I might now say something like “Rest in peace, Butch.” But a man like this is happiest when busy, so to him I offer this most fitting of sendoffs.

Have fun, brother. And give my regards to Bouie, George, Chicanito and Nick. Maybe someday (hopefully, not too soon) we’ll all get together for the sort of happy gabfest that never ends.