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.
THERE IS A QUIET, inviting light in the gaze of Elmo Henderson, the look of a charming man who knows he’s charming. He’s clearly from another time, still tipping his hat to the ladies, peppering his speech with “ma’am’s” and “sir’s” and “oh, no, after you’s” and insisting on eating every dish with a knife and fork—french fries, hamburgers, tacos, everything. He’s 69 years old, an age when people expect nothing more from him than a story and a smile. That is, after all, the only real currency that an old homeless man like Elmo has, and it’s how he’s made his way for quite a while now. No conversation gets far before he brings up the night in 1972 when he fought Muhammad Ali in an exhibition in San Antonio and all the unlikely doors that that opened for him.
“I was in Fort Worth from Reno to see the family,” said the onetime light-heavyweight champion of Texas, “and I picked up the morning paper one day and it exposed that Ali would be in San Antonio that Tuesday putting on an exhibition against some local fighters. I said, ‘Let me go to San Antonio and congratulate Muhammad on coming back to the ring.’ Well, I didn’t know nothing about it, but one of the fighters for that night was a kid from Mexico who couldn’t get his visa to get in the country. So when I went to where Ali was staying, across from the Alamo, I ran into the promoter on the bottom floor, and he says, ‘Good morning, Elmo. How would you like to put on an exhibition with Ali tonight?’ And I okayed it. Then, when I’m signing the contract, Ali comes up and taps me on the shoulder and says, ‘Get up and let me see what you got.’ I said, ‘Get away from me, sucker. I’m too fast for you!’ And he popped his eyes and got away.”
We were sitting in an East Austin Mexican food place called Juan in a Million, and Elmo looked closer to fifty than seventy. His ash-colored hair is always hidden by a hat, what he calls his “lid,” and on this August morning he’d chosen a black straw fedora with a small feather in the band. He wore a short-sleeved button-down shirt, white with black pinstripes, that he tucked into black, pleated Bermuda shorts. The only hints at his age were sheer black dress socks and clean white tennis shoes below bony old knees. The restaurant was a block from the halfway house where Elmo had lived for the spring and summer, but in his mind we’d moved considerably farther, to a time when boxing mattered to people other than ring nuts and gamblers. The ring then was the domain of true lions, champions like Ali, Frazier, and Foreman, heroes people felt they knew, not vague figures who came out each year and a half for a pay-per-viewing. Once upon that time, some fight fans even knew the name Elmo Henderson.
“About seven-thirty that evening, I cranked up and made it to the dressing room at the coliseum. I got into my togs, and a guy came in and asked for me personally, Elmo Henderson. He said, ‘You first.’ Here I am, thirty-seven years old, and they wanted me first, for three rounds with Ali. So I put my robe on and ran out there. I didn’t walk. I ran. And I got up in the ring, looking at the fans, you know, putting the game on Ali, and the ref motioned us into the center. I’m looking down, and what’s going through my mind is, ‘I’m first, so I guess the old man gets the honors.’”
He pushed his taco plate aside and spread out a folded-up, Xeroxed copy of an old newspaper photo on the table. His hands are heavy and broad, with the joint at the bottom of his right thumb shoved back to his wrist, a trophy of a fight that is harder for him to find in his mind than the one with Ali. “That’s me and Ali,” he said, pointing at the picture.
“When they rang that bell, I came out like a speedball: Brr-rrrr-rrrr-rrrr, everything a blur, and then the first round was over. On to the second round. I didn’t run out. I took my time. Moving. Ali was throwing jabs, and I moved away from one and threw a right hand and—bam!—that put him down. So the referee runs the count to eight, and instead of going on, he went back to one. Then he brought it up to eight again and stopped. I just pushed him away and said, ‘Hey, if you want to let him up, let him up.’ I said, ‘Get your ass up, kid! You ain’t hurt!’ Then the bell rang and the referee came to my corner and said, ‘Elmo, that’s all.’ But he didn’t raise my hand or give me my rights. He just put me out the ring, and they went on with the rest of the bouts.”
Elmo paused to watch me soak it all in. Then he rolled through the ways that that night had redirected his life. In the dressing room after the fight, Ali’s headlining opponent, Terry Daniels, asked him to spar out in Reno. A couple months later, he took a similar job with George Foreman and then accompanied Foreman to Zaire for the Rumble in the Jungle with Ali. In Africa Foreman appointed Elmo cheerleader of his entourage, the designated counterbalance to the histrionics of Ali. He made enough of an impression there to merit a section in Norman Mailer’s account of the fight in Playboy, which, in turn, became the basis of a million-dollar libel claim after Elmo took issue with the way he was depicted. In 1977 a Corpus Christi jury awarded Elmo $105,000, making him, at least in his telling of the story, the first black man ever to win a libel suit against a white man.
Most of that information was just a Nexis search away. But the exhibition in San Antonio didn’t show up in the books, not even in a career like Ali’s, which has been chronicled down to the round. I studied the newspaper picture. It was the reason I’d found Elmo in the first place. A doctor friend of mine had given him my number after Elmo had been in for some malady or another. When the doc asked him for identification, Elmo told him this story and pulled out this picture. It was a twentieth-generation copy of a copy and mostly black blur. All that was discernible were two figures, one in a pair of white Everlast trunks. At some point in the past, Elmo had scrawled “Alie” on the trunks. He must have repeated the story more times than he could remember, so many times that it seemed to have become all he remembered.
“Ali was looking for a jab, so I evened up on him and shot him a right. It was a good one. Even I saw lightning.
“And that’s about it, sir.”
NOBODY SETS OUT to be a sparring partner. It’s a temporary state, a function that signals a stage in a boxer’s career, hopefully the beginning, when he is trying to pick up fights and make his name. Less frequently it comes at the end, when the fights have faded away but a boxer knows no other life. Elmo Henderson knew sparring on the way up and on the way down.
He got his first taste of the ring in 1954. He was an easygoing nineteen-year-old then, a ninth-grade dropout from Fort Worth’s Stop Six neighborhood who was cleaning sheets of metal in a steel mill when a friend with an upcoming boxing match asked him to spar. The gym felt right. He was a natural athlete who enjoyed a little dope but hardly ever drank, and even though he was a spindly six-two, 145 pounds, he was quick enough to keep from getting hurt. When he found out his friend would be paid for the fight, Elmo heard his calling.
He sparred around Dallas and Fort Worth, taking fights where he could. The Ring Record Book shows four of them in the fifties, most notably an eight-round loss on points to Curtis Cokes, who went on to hold the world welterweight title from 1966 to 1969 and is now in the International Boxing Hall of Fame. In 1961 Elmo began a year in Huntsville for stealing a television set out of a truck, but he boxed as much as he could in prison and got released early, he says, after defeating the Texas middleweight champion in a match at the Walls.
He’d heard from a murderer he’d sparred with in prison that Corpus Christi was a good fight town, and that’s where he landed upon his release, working as a longshoreman and fighting every three months or so. He’d finally filled out some, fighting as a light heavyweight at 165 pounds. His height gave him an advantage over most of his opponents, who had to work past a stiff left jab to get near him. Since he always fought preliminary matches, he didn’t get much ink in the Corpus paper, but whenever he was mentioned, he was described as a flamboyant crowd favorite. “I was always talking,” says Elmo, “always bragging about what I could do and what I had done.”
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