Game Over 
The Shot Not Heard Round the World
The way Elmo Henderson tells it, his entire life can be boiled down to a single moment in 1972, when he stepped into the ring in San Antonio and knocked out the greatest fighter on the planet. But honestly, that's just where his story begins.
(Page 4 of 5)
“FOREMAN HAD A SPARRING partner named Elmo Henderson,” began the chapter on Elmo in Mailer’s piece on the fight in Zaire, “once Heavyweight Champion of Texas and not too recently released from Nevada State Hospital for the insane.” The section came at the end of the first installment of Mailer’s two-part account, taking the pre-Rumble hype to a fevered pitch with Elmo and Bundini Brown jawing in the Kinshasa hotel lobby, leaving off at a faux cliff-hanger on the eve of the fight. Publication of the story was an event in itself; Mailer was a bona fide celebrity author, and his take on the fight was bulleted in bold on the magazine’s cover. Playboy printed seven and a half million copies of the May 1975 issue and sent them to 57 countries; more than 260,000 copies sold in Texas alone. One of those made its way to Elmo, who was working as a bouncer at a Corpus Christi gay bar. The throwaway line about the mental hospital leaped out at him. Whatever his reputation and however his appearance, that line was a lie.
He contacted a Corpus Christi lawyer named Bill Nutto. Once a tank commander under General Patton, Nutto gloried in a good fight and getting dirty on behalf of an underdog. He’s 83 now and long-retired but ever the gladiator; if you get him on the phone in the afternoon you’ll hear him fire an F-bomb every third word as he screams over a radio broadcast of Bill O’Reilly. Like a lot of old attorneys, Nutto remembers every detail of his greatest victories.
“A turning point in the trial? Ha!” he says. “We didn’t need one. Mental hospital? They published it, and it wasn’t true!”
But Nutto admits to some obstacles, chief among them a client who had twice been to prison and never held a steady job. In the transcript to his July 1975 deposition, Elmo was typically charming but occasionally incoherent. He attributed much of the adversity he’d encountered in his boxing career to a fight establishment cover-up of his San Antonio knockout of Ali. And there were moments of pure Elmo, as when he tried to sell defense attorney David Krupp one of the gold-plated golf putters he was hawking for a friend.
There was also the little matter of damages. It wasn’t enough to prove that Elmo’s feelings were hurt, not if he was to collect any real money. Nutto had to show that Mailer’s statement had somehow affected Elmo’s ability to make a living. But at forty years of age, Elmo was going to have a hard time proving he was in line for the $5 million payout of an Ali or a Foreman. Despite a conveniently scheduled fight in Corpus on the night of Elmo’s deposition, in which Elmo made short work of a no-name opponent, Krupp, who sat ringside as Nutto’s guest, was not impressed. When Nutto offered to settle Elmo’s million-dollar claim for $24,000, he declined.
In front of a hometown jury, the trial went Elmo’s way from the start. At voir dire, when Nutto was questioning 36 jury candidates, he asked who among them had heard of Norman Mailer. Two people raised their hands. When Nutto followed with, “How many of you have read Mailer’s work?” both panelists put their hands down. Mailer, who chose not to be interviewed for this story, has told friends that that moment was more degrading than losing the trial. “Corpus Christi . . . what a terrible f—ing town,” Mailer’s account usually begins.
Nutto delighted in the battles with Mailer, Krupp, and even Judge Owen Cox, a conservative jurist who wore a bow tie around a neck that old Corpus lawyers recall as decidedly stiff. Nutto particularly enjoyed introducing the issue of Playboy as evidence in Cox’s court. And when Nutto picked up a copy of Cosmopolitan that his secretary was reading, he was thrilled to find an article about Mailer in which he had admitted to smoking marijuana. On cross-examination, Nutto asked Mailer about the statement. “The defense objected,” says Nutto, “and Judge Cox said, ‘I’m not going to let that sit,’ and sustained it. So I apologized. But the jury now knew my theory that Mailer had got a little potted up and hallucinated the whole thing.”
Things got worse for Krupp. Mailer was not sympathetic on the stand. Elmo, on the other hand, was, politely answering condescending questions from Krupp like “Did you ever discuss poetry with George Plimpton while you were in Zaire?” (Elmo’s answer: “Nope.”) Krupp’s gamble that Elmo would appear crazy enough to justify Mailer’s charge didn’t pay off. Nor was his case helped when, on Mailer’s way out of the courtroom to catch a plane back to New York, some jurors heard him tell Elmo, “Well, I guess we owe you some money. It’s just a matter of how much.”
At closing arguments Nutto went for broke. “Ladies and gentlemen, they’ve portrayed the life of a boxer as one of glamour,” he said. “But if they’d written the truth, they’d have written about guys who get up in the middle of the night to do roadwork, then go to a swelteringly hot gym to punch a heavy bag, spar, do more roadwork, and go to bed. If the defendants had written that, it would have been absolutely true. But it would not have sold magazines.”
“When Nutto talked about the roadwork,” remembers Krupp, “he started jogging slowly up and down the length of the jury box. What was I going to do, stand up and shout, ‘Objection, Your Honor. Counsel is jogging’?”
The jury bit. On November 16, 1977, they awarded Elmo $5,000 in actual damages but $100,000 in punitives, creating headlines in papers as widely read as the New York Times. But Judge Cox deemed the amount excessive and ordered that either Elmo would accept $22,500 or the case would be tried again. Having had enough of Nutto, the defendants chose to pay an undisclosed amount somewhere between the judge’s number and the jury’s. Nutto, still a dutiful officer of the court, refuses to say how much. Elmo says he received $40,000.
“The next time I saw Elmo,” says Nutto, “he drove up in a big, used Thunderbird. He said he was on his way to New Orleans to become a sparring partner for Leon Spinks. It was just before Spinks’ second fight with Ali.”
DR. BARRY JORDAN is the medical director for the New York State Athletic Commission and the director of the Head Injury Service at the Burke Rehabilitation Hospital, in White Plains; he is generally regarded as the world’s foremost expert on the effects of ring-related head trauma. He’s no boxing apologist but a true fight fan who happens to be supremely in tune with the dangers of the ring. As an advocate for boxers’ safety, he’s widely respected and extremely well spoken. When I told him that Elmo had fought professionally from the age of 19 to 44, he had a one-word response: “Wow.”
With the caveat that an exam of a patient and a phone call with a third party are two radically different things, Jordan outlined what 25 years in the ring can do. The chance that a boxer will suffer chronic brain injury increases dramatically as his career wears on, which makes sense, given the way advancing age, diminishing skills, and severe beatings feed off one another. The damage is to the frontal lobes of the brain, and typically the injury results in diminished motor function and cognitive abilities and in behavioral changes. The first two effects show up as slow or stiff movement and memory loss. And then there’s the decrease in judgment; a person becomes disinhibited and loses common sense. He talks to people he’s never met as though he’s known them for years. When I told Jordan that Elmo had a habit of urinating where he shouldn’t, the doctor had the same one-word response: “Wow.”
If Elmo is suffering from that kind of injury, part of the shame is that it didn’t have to happen. State athletic commissions are charged with making sure fighters are physically able to fight, and fully five of them, including Texas, granted Elmo licenses after California suspended him in 1967. That wouldn’t happen today. In 1996 Arizona senator John McCain pushed the Pro Boxing Safety Act through Congress, which requires that states honor one another’s suspensions and that fighters carry a boxer’s ID card to make suspensions easier to track. McCain also has legislation pending now that goes even further, establishing a federal boxing commission that would maintain a national medical database, so that an MRI exam showing the condition of a boxer’s brain in California early in his career could readily be compared with one taken in Texas years later.
But Elmo needs protection now from something other than better fighters. Unlike most pro sports, boxing offers no pension. Support of old fighters comes from the generosity of other, more-successful boxing figures. That’s why even Don King and Mike Tyson get good press every now and then, showing up in the news helping some forgotten, broken-down pug. But too often that goodwill comes too late, like the tombstone Tyson bought this summer for former welterweight champ Kid Gavilan, who’d recently been buried in a pauper’s grave in Florida.
My Library
