Michael Spinks - Post Boxing

Post Boxing

Spinks remains pretty much out of the public eye, although Ken Hissner reported that, “In October 2007 he was introduced into the ring at the Legendary Blue Horizon in Philadelphia. He seemed quite at home in the ring waving and talking to the fans.

Spinks is the rare top fighter who left the sport with both money and his health and never returned to the ring. Aside from a rare event honoring him and occasionally attending fights, Spinks has remained off the boxing scene and out of the public eye.

The former champion lives privately in a seven-bedroom house, not including the guest house, on a five-acre spread outside Wilmington, Delaware. However, he has been known for visiting schools—carrying his gold medal and four title belts—where he tells kids to pursue their dreams. "Most of the kids don't have a clue who I am," he says, "but they listen when they see all the gold."

For years he remained close to his former promoter, Butch Lewis, training fighters and making rare public appearances at events promoted by Lewis.

In 2011, however, after Lewis died from natural causes, it was reported that Spinks had sued Lewis’s estate in a Delaware Chancery Court, alleging that the promoter had failed to properly manage the more than $24 million dollars Spinks had earned in the ring and had violated their agreements that Lewis would continue to manage Spinks’s money and pay his living expenses for the rest of the boxer’s life.

One of the top deal-makers in the late 1970s and 1980s as well as representing both Michael and Leon, died in July 2011. He had allegedly commingled his personal funds with Spinks’s and used Spinks’s money to pay his and his children’s own personal and business expenses. Also name as a defendant was Robert L. Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television, head of the real estate firm of RLJ Development LLC, in Bethesda, Maryland, and one of the executors of Lewis’s $8.5 million estate.

According to Spinks’s lawyers, following Lewis’s death in July 2011 Johnson and attorney Leonard Williams stopped the payments without telling him, which in turn caused Spinks’ health insurance to lapse and bills totaling up to $50,000 a month to go unpaid. “Spinks had to invade his pension and retirement funds and incur significant taxes and penalties in order to meet these obligations,” the boxer’s lawyers added in the filings.

Spinks asked that the court bar Johnson and Williams from transferring any further assets from Lewis’s estate until there can be a full accounting and payments to Spinks are resumed.