Larry Holmes: The Easton Assassin at 65

By Thomas Gerbasi

The men on Larry Holmes’ list of victims speak volumes: Muhammad Ali, Ken Norton, Earnie Shavers, Ray Mercer, Mike Weaver, Gerry Cooney, just to name a few. But when talking to the former heavyweight champion, he’ll be the first to admit that if he didn’t beat Roy “Tiger” Williams in April of 1976, there might not have been a Larry Holmes in the Hall of Fame, enshrined with the greats of the game.

“They’d put me back in the closet,” Holmes said. “If I don’t beat Roy Williams, they throw me away.”

Owner of a 21-0 record at the time, the 26-year-old Holmes was a top prospect, albeit one who had a scarlet letter on his back after losing to Duane Bobick in the 1972 Olympic trials.

“I was not gonna make it,” Holmes recalled, citing the talk going around during those days. “I’m a waste of time. I’m a copy of Muhammad Ali. There’s no way that Larry Holmes will become heavyweight champion of the world. No way.”

On April 5, 1976, Holmes picked up his 21st win at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, stopping Fred Askew in two rounds. After the fight, Holmes traveled back home to Easton, Pennsylvania and enjoyed the fruits of his labor. Two weeks before the end of that month, he got a phone call from his promoter.

“I was out partying and Don King called me and said you got a fight, you gotta get here to Maryland,” Holmes recalled. Then he asked King who the fight was against.

“You’re gonna fight Roy Williams.”

“Like s**t,” Holmes responded. “I’m not gonna fight Roy Williams. I ain’t ready or in shape to fight Roy Williams.”

“If you don’t fight him, they’re gonna really criticize you.”

After a bit of back and forth, Holmes agreed to the bout against the 6-foot-5 Williams, a tough style matchup for anyone and a heavyweight no one was lining up to fight. Holmes went to Maryland on April 30, broke his hand, but still won a ten-round unanimous decision. It was a turning point in his career, and he did it all for $2,500.

These days, Holmes still thinks of Williams.

“Every time I look at my hand, I can’t bend my thumb because I broke it on Roy Williams,” he laughs.

Six fights after beating Williams, Larry Holmes was the heavyweight champion of the world. That was back when that title meant something – not just to sports fans, but to everyone.  And after beating Ken Norton in a 15-round classic that is still considered by many to be the greatest heavyweight title fight of all-time, “The Easton Assassin” would go on to successfully defend his title 20 times over more than seven years, a consecutive heavyweight title defense record bested only by Joe Louis’ 25.

And though he can look at the Williams fight today and see how pivotal it was for his career, back then, he wasn’t particularly looking at the big picture.

“I was fighting and trying to win,” he said. “I didn’t think about records or anything; I just didn’t want to lose.”

He rarely did, going 48-0 before two controversial defeats to Michael Spinks in 1985-86. After the second Spinks fight, Holmes would momentarily step away from the game, returning for a 1988 bout against Mike Tyson which he lost in four rounds, the only truly emphatic defeat of a career that went on until 2002, when he defeated Eric “Butterbean” Esch at the age of 52.  In 2008, Holmes was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, a well-deserved honor for a fighter who rarely, if ever, got his due during his fighting years.

“I just started getting it last week,” Holmes laughs, but you can tell that it still stings that it took this long for him to get the respect he deserved.

“I want them to know that I was heavyweight champion of the world for over seven years,” he said. “I paid the cost. They didn’t think I’d be champ for seven seconds; they didn’t think I’d be champion at all. But in spite of everything that people said about me and still say about me – and some people still don’t want to give me the credit – listen man, I was a bad man. Look at my record. When it comes down to Ken Norton, Joe Frazier, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman and guys like that, if you don’t mention my name when you talk about those guys, something’s wrong with you.”

He’s right, yet while Holmes belongs among the best heavyweights to ever lace up the gloves, what always hurt him was timing. He rose to power after the reign of an icon in Ali and before the reign of a phenom in Tyson. He also led a division that was ridiculed at the time, but looking back, who wouldn’t pick the likes of Cooney, Shavers, Tim Witherspoon or Carl Williams over today’s lot of heavyweights? Holmes wasn’t flashy like Ali or a knockout artist like Tyson either, but what he did have was that jab, one widely seen as one of the best, if not the best, of all-time. Even as he approached 50, I talked to former contender Derek Bryant about sparring with Holmes and that legendary jab. Was it as good as advertised?

“I never saw it coming,” Bryant said. “I only saw it going back.”

Holmes doesn’t laugh when I tell him the story, as his jab is serious business.

“I worked on the jab and worked on the jab, and I developed it,” he explains. “I developed it by hitting the heavy bag as hard as I could with the jab, and as quick as I could with a flick, so that was nobody would see it. Ali didn’t flick. He tried to, but he had no power behind it. I had power behind my flick. Even today, nobody knows how to jab. You go to a fight and you’re hoping they know how to jab, but they don’t. Service Electric is our local cable company and I call fights for them, and I don’t see these guys jabbing. I was even teaching them how to jab in my gym and the more I try to show them, the less they want to learn. They think they have to throw left hooks and right hands all day long and put the jab out there just for show. The Klitschko brothers, when they were here in America, they asked me how to jab and I tried to show them, but they can’t do it either. And they’re supposed to be champions. So I gave up.”

You can hear the disgust in Holmes’ voice when he talks about the neglect of boxing’s primary weapon. To him, it’s a combination of a lack of proper training in the fundamentals as well as a lack of dedication from today’s fighters. So when asked if we’ll ever see a Golden Age of heavyweight boxing again, there is no hesitation in his response.

“No. There’s no dedication, no discipline. They want to get the money as quick as they can and say the hell with it. They don’t want to discipline themselves, so you’re not gonna see that. And they don’t have teachers no more. That’s another one of the problems. They don’t have Eddie Futch, Gil Clancy, Angelo Dundee, and people like that. They just have high school kids trying to teach you how to fight, and that won’t work.”

It’s a different world in boxing these days, and not necessarily a better one. Of course it’s nice that fighters aren’t walking away with a broken hand and less than three grand for a fight against a feared contender like Roy Williams the way Holmes did, but as far as the aesthetics of the sport, you don’t see fighters coming up like they did a couple decades ago. That’s not to say there aren’t good, and sometimes even great, fighters around today, with Wladimir Klitschko being a prime example at heavyweight. But even Klitschko, who is closing in on Holmes’ consecutive title defense mark after positing his 17th against Kubrat Pulev earlier this month, isn’t a household name or front page news in the United States.

“People knew who the heavyweight champ was then,” Holmes said. “Today they don’t know. If you ask me which Klitschko brother is the champion, I can’t tell you. The other day somebody said ‘Klitschko is approaching your record.’ I said ‘what record? Did he ever fight anybody? If he comes here to America and walks the streets, would anybody recognize him?’ I met him one time, and when I met him he shook my hand and said ‘you’ve got the best jab ever, Larry Holmes.’ Yeah, but my right hand wasn’t too bad either. (Laughs) People talk about the left, but you need more than the left; you need the right.”

At 65, Holmes has not lost one ounce of his competitive nature, and that may be the reason why he was so good for so long during his career. That’s a trait you either have or you don’t and it has nothing to do with developing a left jab or right cross.

“The mental game always played a very important part because if you didn’t go out there ready to fight, you wouldn’t win,” he said. “I went out there to fight, and I went out there to show that I can fight. As much as they talked about me, I showed them that I could do whatever I thought I could do.”

That didn’t just go for the fights, but in the gym as well. Known early in his career for his work as a sparring partner for the likes of Ali and Frazier, Holmes used to put a $10,000 bounty on his head when he was champion for anyone who could knock him down in sparring. This was back in the 80s. As a comparison, renowned trainer Freddie Roach reportedly offered just $1,000 to sparring partners who can drop Manny Pacquiao. So, did anyone ever collect?

“Never,” Holmes said. “Nobody ever got it. But that made everybody work harder to get that money. They used to try to team up on me. If I boxed three guys, the first two would try to wear me out and the third guy was supposed to get me, and they would split the money. But they never could do that.”

Holmes wears that badge of honor with pride, and though his fighting days are long over, I ask him about something he said a few years back, that he would nearly cry when walking into the ring because he was so happy. Did he miss that feeling?

“Yes, I miss that because people were hollering,” he said. “They were cheering for me or they were cheering against me. I liked that. You know how many times I’ve been called a motherf**ker who ain’t s**t? (Laughs) And then they come out and say ‘I was betting on you all the time. I knew you were gonna win. You’re bad, Larry Holmes.’”

He was a bad man in the ring, one of the baddest ever. And if you’re going to put one moment in a time capsule to say “This was Larry Holmes,” the first choice would likely be the 15th round of his title-winning effort against Ken Norton. It was a grueling bout fought at a hellacious pace, and on the judges’ scorecards the last round was going to decide the fight. Given what happened over the final three minutes, I expected Holmes to say that he knew the fight was on the line and he emptied his gas tank in search of victory.

He didn’t.

“I thought I was winning the fight; all I’ve got to do is survive it. But I was thinking wrong because I escaped by the skin of my teeth. That did not make me happy.”

But you didn’t fight like a guy with a lead in the 15th round, Larry.

“I never did. I wanted to give people what they came to see.”