The Shot Not Heard Round the World
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In most states, Texas not among them, private organizations pick up the slack. The most successful has been the Retired Boxers Foundation, in California. It has a $25,000-a-year budget, the money coming from wealthy fight fans and an admirable deal with the Golden Palace online casino, which gives 2.5 percent of its endorsement fee whenever a boxer wears its logo on his back for a televised fight. The RBF has paid for old fighters’ chemotherapy treatments, bought them decent clothes to wear when they sign autographs at memorabilia shows, and helped with rent payments. There’s one boxer in Philadelphia who can’t remember to pay his light bill. RBF founder Alex Ramos calls him at the end of each month to remind him to cut a check.
Jacquie Richardson, the RBF’s volunteer executive director, said that in a case like Elmo’s, the RBF’s medical board would provide free tests to determine if boxing injuries are at play. If they are, his social security benefits could increase, Medicare could help pay for drug treatment, and he would likely qualify for an assisted-living allowance. “We’ve got another homeless fighter under a bridge on I-95 in Miami,” she said. “The process is to find someone in the area to go meet with him.” But for that to work for Elmo, he would have to settle down, something he’s never been willing to do. He’s been too busy looking for people who haven’t heard his story.
“YOU WANT A STORY about Elmo Henderson?” says Joe Souza, a seventy-year-old cut man from San Antonio. “I’ll give you one. And it’s a true story. In 1972 Cassius Clay came to San Antonio. You know who that is? Yeah, Muhammad Ali. He came to do an exhibition against four Texas fighters, two rounds apiece. I remember it was Elmo going on first and Ronnie Wright going on second. And before the exhibition started, Ronnie says to Elmo, ‘Don’t agitate this man. I go on next, and I do not want to get the stuffing beat out of me.’ And so Elmo goes after Ali. It was just an exhibition, but Elmo goes after him. And he pissed Ali off, and Ali took it out on Ronnie. Ronnie raised hell about it afterwards. He said, ‘Elmo, you son of a bitch! Why did you rile him up?’”
To be exact, it was October 24, 1972, a time in Ali’s career that doesn’t get as much attention as the glory years that came before and after. His exile had ended, but he’d been defeated by Frazier. Working his way back up the rankings, he also fought frequent exhibitions to raise a little money for local charities and himself. Though far from being America’s sweetheart, he was no longer the bogeyman he’d previously been. Popular opinion on Vietnam had started to resemble his own, and as his career was discussed more and more in the past tense, sports fans began to show him some unfamiliar sympathy.
At the bouts he would clown around, exaggerating his trademark shuffle, hiding behind the ref, or going into a mock rage at someone sitting ringside. But he’d also show the fans what made him the Greatest. He’d throw flurries of punches so fast that many couldn’t be seen, stopping each punch just short of his opponent’s jaw. He’d put his hands behind his back and let guys pound at his body, dodging their head shots with jukes and feints. As lightly as he took the events, his opponents were serious. They knew that one solid punch could bring a knockdown and national attention or, if nothing else, something to tell their grandkids about. “There was never any script,” says Ali’s trainer, Angelo Dundee. “We always told them to do the best they could, and they did, because anybody that fought Ali would be known forever.”
The Muhammad Ali Boxing Show, as it was billed, rolled into San Antonio a few days before Tuesday night’s charity exhibition. Details of the event are hard to pin down; the coverage in the two San Antonio dailies, the San Antonio Light and the San Antonio Express, is somewhat contradictory and mostly concerned with the entertainment aspect of the event. According to the Light, the exhibition had been scheduled to feature Ali and three fighters, Ronnie Wright, Sonny Moore, and Terry Daniels, but Elmo had been added to the card after he had shown up for Ali’s pre-bout workout and popped off in the gym. Daniels, the biggest Texas draw in boxing at the time by virtue of his brutal loss to Frazier earlier that year, remembers Elmo monkeying with Ali at the prefight press conference. “Elmo went there and started fooling with Ali while Ali was talking,” he says. “So Ali started flicking jabs at Elmo to play around, and Elmo just calmly blocked them off, talking back to Ali, talking to reporters, guarding his face from those jabs. He never quit talking.”
But memories of the event are the province of aging men who, like Elmo, once made their living by being hit in the head. Daniels does not recall Elmo boxing Ali that night. Nor does Wright, who adds that while he can’t dispute Joe Souza’s recollection, he just doesn’t remember it himself.
The newspaper accounts, however, place Elmo squarely in the ring. The Express said that “Henderson danced better than Ali and made better faces . . . and he was chased after two rounds, undoubtedly by design.” The Light’s story offered only a little more detail: “The audience booed the lack of action in the first round . . . [But] Ali displayed his famous left jab and footwork in the second round, let his knees sag after a light blow to the jaw, then stalked a surprised [referee Charles] Golden as if he intended to work him over.”
None of it quite jibes with Elmo’s depiction. But neither is it so different as to rule out the version in his mind. It’s a line he’s been preaching as far back as Zaire, the story that defines him, not just for himself but for everyone he meets, and no one will ever persuade him he’s wrong. Ali’s own legend was built on a punch no one saw, at least not until slow-motion technology caught up with his talent, revealing that his second fight against Sonny Liston did in fact end with a crushing straight right that flew too fast for ringside eyes to follow. And for what it’s worth, Elmo once had a tape of his fight with Ali. He used to pull it out instead of his picture. Bill Nutto saw it, and he says it looked like Elmo tagged Ali hard. But Elmo says he left that tape on a bus in Reno a long time ago. Or maybe it was Oakland, and maybe last week. On that he’s not clear.
Whatever Elmo’s performance in San Antonio that night, it did set into motion the rest of his life, the sparring jobs with Daniels and Foreman, the holiday in Zaire, and his one real payday, in a courtroom in Corpus Christi. And it all began, as Elmo has always contended, with Ali.
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.
I RAN INTO ELMO one evening after work in September. I had just changed clothes and was on my way out of the building for a jog when I saw him sitting by the security desk. He had a new lid on, a navy-blue skipper’s hat with a SeaWorld logo on the front, and a new pair of bright white Nike basketball shoes. He said he just wanted to check in on me.
I told him I couldn’t hang around; I had to go do my roadwork, but it was fortunate for both of us that he had come by. The next day I was expecting a videotape compilation of old footage I’d found while researching his story, and I wanted to watch it with him. There was film that Leon Gast had sent that hadn’t made it into When We Were Kings. It showed Elmo dancing and shadowboxing in the ring with Foreman. There were scenes from another documentary showing Elmo chasing Ali out of the gym in Zaire where Foreman was working out, and leading an “Oh yeah” parade around the hotel pool. And there was a tape of a 1967-era Elmo fighting in Australia, long and lithe and, unfortunately, getting his clock cleaned.
Elmo’s face lit up. “Yeah, I remember that fight in Sydney,” he said. “The ref said he saw me get hit, and he called the fight. Here I am, I’m whipping this kid’s ass for eight rounds, and the ref gives him the fight. And you got a reel on that? Damn, I couldn’t get this lucky in Vegas.
“Well, anyway, you go on, get out the door, then work some more, and find out the score. I’ll be by tomorrow at a little after four.” And that was that. Elmo never showed up.
“Man, I’m a roadrunner,” he had told me one day at Mike’s Pub. “In life, like in boxing, you got to stick ’em and move. Keep sticking and keep moving.”
And then, inevitably: “That’s how I did Ali.”
