The Shot Not Heard Round the World
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His skills developed too. Ronnie Wright, a Fort Worth fighter and trainer, remembers Elmo’s best weapons being that jab and a strong right cross: “I never knew if he grew up boxing or was just a natural fighter, but he would sit there and drop his hands, and you could throw a straight right at his jaw and he’d just move his head out of the way. He wasn’t afraid of anyone.”
In December 1963 things started to click, and Elmo ran off a string of six straight wins. He was fighting as “the Professor” now and wore a cap and gown into the ring instead of a robe. In November 1964 he won the state title by knocking out Austin’s Benny Bowser in the second round. Suddenly he was appearing simply as “Elmo” in sports-page headlines. “I was a celebrity,” he says. “People would buy me dinner. And the ladies were sure glad to be in my company.” But his reign was short, and the Corpus Christi Caller-Times was less than generous in its description of his rematch with Bowser a year later: “Only in the second round was there any sustained action to excite the small crowd of about 650. In that one, Henderson caught Bowser off-balance with a right hand and knocked him down. Bowser was up immediately . . . and proceeded to jar Henderson with right hand smashes to the body and left hooks to the head.” Elmo lost his title on a split decision.
He left Corpus Christi after that, bouncing between relatives’ couches in Reno and Oakland and, although he was old for a fighter, at 32, taking more fights. In 1967 he had six of them in ten months’ time. After a violent bout in San Diego that August, the California Athletic Commission demanded that he undergo an exam to see if his brain had been damaged. Instead he jetted off to New Zealand to fight Bobby Dunlop, a young comer with a 26-3 record, just two weeks later. Miraculously, he knocked Dunlop out in the fourth round, earning himself an eighth-place world ranking. But three and a half months later, he met Dunlop for a rematch in Sydney and looked like he was sleepwalking as Dunlop won a brutal eighth-round KO. When the news of the fights got back to California, his license was suspended indefinitely.
Elmo’s career was interrupted again, in 1968, when the Fort Worth police caught him with a couple of joints. After a second year in Huntsville, he moved back to Reno, where, carrying an additional twenty pounds and now 35 years old, he fought as a heavyweight. He beat a contender in Mexico and earned a fight in Lake Tahoe with Earnie Shavers, considered by some to be the hardest puncher ever. Elmo went down in four. He had two more fights in Lake Tahoe, in 1972, but after that Nevada wouldn’t license him anymore either. State law said that, with limited exceptions, no one fought past the age of 36. That October, all he wanted was a sparring job when he went looking for Ali.
I HAPPENED TO BE in the office when Elmo called one Sunday soon after our breakfast. “This is Henderson,” he said, and without waiting for me to say anything, he went on, “and I’m leaving the place here and I need a ride.”
Ten minutes later, I was at the halfway house, where Elmo was waiting out front, with everything he owned secured in five small, white garbage bags. It turned out that by “leaving” he meant “moving on,” and while I tried to talk to one of the counselors about what exactly was happening, Elmo directed another to put his things in the back of my Jeep. Then he looked at me and said, “Let’s hop in the buggy and get on.”
As we rolled to the end of the parking lot, a guy sitting on a metal folding chair in front of his room hollered, “So long, Champ!” But Elmo fiddled with the seat belt and didn’t look up. Before turning into the street, I asked him where we were headed. He said he didn’t know.
“What are we going to do with your stuff?” I asked.
“Well, I guess we better put it in storage.”
“Where’s storage?”
“I don’t know. Where is storage? Let’s drive around and see what we find.”
So we drove. The doors and the roof were off the Jeep, so Elmo bent one long arm to hold his fedora on his head as he directed me through much of East Austin with the other. He said he had some family in town, people named Denman, but he wasn’t sure where they lived. He had me stop in front of a house he thought he remembered, but when he knocked on the door, no one answered. He looked over the back fence and called out, “Henderson. Henderson,” but got no response. He said he’d check with the neighbors and walked across the yard, still calling, “Henderson.” I looked over my shoulder at his things in the backseat and then looked up to see him taking a pee next to the neighbor’s house, still calling, “Henderson.”
We stopped to get gas at a station on MLK Boulevard, and Elmo got out to talk to a man filling an old brown Impala at the next pump. I heard him ask if there were any boxing gyms in the area and then proceed to tell the man how he’d broken Ali’s jaw. Back in the car, we drove by a halfway house on East Twelfth, where a man said Elmo could have a bed if he was willing to stay a full six months and get right with Jesus. That didn’t strike Elmo as the answer, and we kept on. He had me stop every time we saw a black person on the sidewalk. “Do you know any Denmans?” he’d ask. They’d all look a little surprised and answer no.
Reluctantly, Elmo agreed to apply for a bed at the Salvation Army shelter about a block from my office. A lady who worked there said he could get in but that he’d get only one small locker and would have to place his things elsewhere. That turned out to be my office, which was fine. It would help him out and guarantee that he would keep in touch.
ELMO’S ROLE in the Rumble in the Jungle was simple. George Foreman took six sparring partners to Zaire in 1974 to help him train for Ali, and he’d go into the ring with three or four a day. Some of the guys were there because they hit hard, others for their foot speed. At 39, Elmo could still do some of both, but his chief job was to ape Ali. He danced, he jabbed, he took punishment at the ropes. “Elmo was unorthodox,” says Stan Ward, one of the other sparring partners. “He would throw punches up and over, around the side. And he had the gift of gab, like Ali, always something like ‘Is that all you got?’ that would elicit an emotion from George, maybe humor, maybe anger.” Foreman’s brother Roy said the fighters would rot ate, taking days off, but Elmo was in there every day: “Elmo used to talk so much noise that George liked to get him in the ring and pop him.”
Getting popped by George Foreman was no small deal. By the time the fight was booked with Ali for October, Foreman looked like he might be the greatest champion ever. He was strong, his chiseled frame the product of chopping down trees with an ax each morning and harnessing a pickup to his shoulders and pulling it around his California training compound each afternoon. And he had a vicious reputation that fight fans today, even with a young Mike Tyson as a reference point, could never imagine. He hit fighters on their way to the canvas. He beat his sparring partners unconscious. “Hell, I’m paying them” was his justification. But the odds were on Foreman chiefly because of the startling way he had won his two biggest fights: his tragicomic two-round and six-knockdown dismantling of Joe Frazier to win the title and a similarly decisive second-round KO of Ken Norton, the last furious punch coming when Norton was almost flat on his back. At that time, Frazier and Norton were the only two men to have beaten Ali.
The Rumble in the Jungle was the first masterstroke of a young Don King, who orchestrated the fight as a coming-out party of sorts for the new country of Zaire, recently liberated from longtime Belgian occupiers. It was a spectacle that held the attention of the world. But there was a morbid what-if-Knievel-crashes element to the fascination. Many observers worried that Foreman might actually kill Ali. It had been seven years since Ali had been stripped of his title for refusing to answer his draft notice, and since being reinstated in 1970, his four-year odyssey to win it back had been up and down. Sportswriters assumed he was acting out of fear when he went to work at psyching out Foreman before the fight, trying for a mental edge, the only one he might find.
