After a few minutes, King, the natural actor, stopped and asked his two sedate guests to shout the word with him. Elbaum couldn’t look. Fariello thought the scene was surreal.
Finally, the elderly man said the word, “Motherfucker.”
“Louder!” King demanded.
He said it louder.
“Beautiful, right on,” exclaimed King.
Then the woman yelled, “Motherfucker!”
And Don King hugged them in racial pride and liberation.
“King could sell anything,” Elbaum says in admiration. “Even the word motherfucker to God-fearing religious people who prayed every week.”
Probably the best novel ever written about boxing is The Harder They Fall, by Budd Schulberg. In that book one astute character says, “Boxing is just show business with blood.”
Don King understood this instinctively, from his first day as a promoter. Elbaum understood this, too, and this made them a fun, harmonious team for a while.
Elbaum was the matchmaker, pairing local Ohio fighters for the undercard of professional fights. King was the salesman and show man. He made drama, hype, excitement, celebrity, and style part of the event.
Music legend Lloyd Price. He introduced King to Muhammad Ali and gave King the original idea for his distinctive electrified hairstyle. NEW YORK POST
King marketed the show on radio, in churches, in union halls, in corporate boardrooms, in newspaper offices. He sold it with wit, bombast, originality, and attitude. In those days there was a light in his eyes.
King held a press conference with Jackie Presser, the president of the Teamsters Union, who bought up several rows of tickets for his members.
And Ali was the honey pot. King kept telling the local boxing writers Ali would return to Cleveland for a major fight if they gave his show free advance publicity, which would pump up the gate, which would actually get Ali to come back to Cleveland, which would give all of them better stories and more space in the paper.
With help from Lloyd Price in lining up performers, King added an R&B concert to the evening. Price and King convinced Marvin Gaye, Johnny Nash, Wilson Pickett, and Lou Rawls to sing before the boxing part of the program began.
The day before the benefit, Marvin Gaye was scheduled to arrive at the airport. He was then at the top of the charts with his politically pioneering Motown hit, “What’s Going On?”
King asked Elbaum and Joey Fariello, who had a fighter on the card, to drive out to the airport with flash cameras and pretend to be photographers for the Cleveland dailies, to build up Gaye’s ego with the prospect of front-page publicity.
Fariello told King, “Are you nuts?”
Elbaum was too busy to lend himself to the scam. But he did pay some gofers ten dollars each to impersonate photographers when Gaye got off the plane.
The night of the benefit the decrepit arena on Euclid Avenue was jammed with eighty-five hundred people. This was a remarkable promotional achievement in a city that hadn’t had a big fight in years. However, Cleveland did have a rich boxing tradition as the birthplace of light heavyweight champ Joey Maxim and heavyweight contender Jimmy Bivins, and as the city where Ezzard Charles had many of his early bouts.
The gate was $81,000, the largest in history for a boxing exhibition, breaking the old record of $74,000 set by Jack Dempsey and King Lavinsky in Chicago in 1932.
Ali more than did his part. He never met a crowd he couldn’t charm, and he put on an extravagant performance. He downed for two rounds with Amos Johnson, a fighter who had beaten him as an amateur but was now broke and down on his luck. Ali playfully pretended that his old foe knocked him down during their two rounds of sparring.
Ali then boxed two more brisk rounds with his regular spar mate, Alonzo Johnson, bringing the crowd to its feet with the dazzling Ali shuffle and some fast-handed volleys.
Then the Greatest went four rounds with Terry Daniels, lifting the crowd with some pre-exile floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee. Ali then tickled the crowd by boxing a round each with local radio personalities Rudy Greene and Gary Dee, even letting Dee put him on the canvas with a phantom punch.
The concert portion of the evening lasted so long that the three ten-round matches Elbaum had put together had to be cut to six rounds each to avoid overtime payments to the unionized staff of the arena, and to accommodate the portion of the crowd that took the early bus to work. King had no sense of time—or of leaving anything out—when he was the center of attention.
One of these six-rounders was a split-decision victory for Johnny Griffin over Sam McGill. Griffin’s trainer was Joey Fariello, who vividly remembers what happened next in the dressing room after the fight.
“King tried to cheat my kid out of his pay, which was only twelve hundred dollars,” Fariello says. “King told me there was a lien against the kid, but I knew that wasn’t true. We eventually got the money, but we had to fight like hell for it. This was Don’s absolutely first boxing show, and he began his career by trying to stiff my black fighter out of twelve hundred dollars on a charity card for a black hospital.”
(In February 1975, I was in Scranton and witnessed a similar scene, where King cheated heavyweight Jimmy Young out of a measly $500. At the time Young was broke and King was on his way to the top. A lawyer was complaining to King that he had coerced Young to sign to different contracts within five hours with differing compensation listed for the fighter. King insisted on paying Young the lowest amount.)
The day after the benefit, the Cleveland papers declared the night a triumph and reported that the Forest City Hospital would “receive between $40,000 and $50,000 for its operating fund.”
But what exactly happened to all that money remains in dispute even today.
Elbaum says, “Ali got ten thousand for expenses. I got paid one thousand instead of five thousand. The hospital got about fifteen hundred. And King pocketed the rest.”
A month after the benefit Clarance Rogers announced he had given the hospital a check for $17,000 and that expenses ate up the rest of the gate receipts.
In 1992, I interviewed Rogers and Roger Saffold, the accountant for the benefit committee, and both of them were adamant that King didn’t derive any money from the show, and that King had no control over the benefit committee’s bank account into which the gate receipts were deposited.
Boxing Illustrated magazine reported in a 1993 article by Rick Hornung that King took $30,000 from the benefit and the hospital got $15,000.
In his 1988 Playboy interview, King boasted, “We raised enough money to save the hospital.” But in fact, the 102-bed hospital had already been out of business for ten years when King gave the interview to Playboy. Forest City Hospital actually closed its doors to the public in February 1978. A February 2, 1978 story in the Cleveland Press on the closing described “steadily dropping admissions, heavy operating losses, and few doctors who admitted patients to the hospital.”
The story, by Elizabeth Price, explained: “In 1975 the Ohio State Medical Board warned the hospital that eight unlicensed foreign doctors on its staff could not legally treat patients… patients began to go elsewhere for treatment, and the hospital revenue dropped. In late 1975, the hospital was losing about $30,000 a month.”
After the Ali show, King and Elbaum kept their suites open at the Sheraton and began to draw even closer in comradeship and trust. They talked about collaborating on a film together based on a script by one of King’s associates in the numbers business. The story line was how a group of black numbers operators band together and drive the dope-selling Mafia out of their community. It contained a lot of shooting and car chases. The script was heavily influenced by Super Fly, Shaft, and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which were all released during 1971 and started the trend in black exploitation films.
“I’ll get you fifty thousand as the assistant producer,” King told Elbaum, “but then you got to give me back twenty-five.”
The project never materialized.
Elbaum recalls one conversation between him and King “that was as tender and eye-watering as you can get. Don put his arms around me and spoke from his heart.”
King told Elbaum, “I want to become legitimate. I want to do something right in my life for my family. I don’t want to be known as a numbers man anymore. I want boxing.”
A few days later at the farm, King’s wife told Elbaum, “You gotta get him out of the numbers business. If anyone can get him out, it’s you.” (Henrietta had been quite active herself in the business for years, getting arrested and once invoking the Fifth Amendment before a grand jury.)
One Saturday night King barged into Elbaum’s room at the Sheraton and dropped off a briefcase and an overcoat.
“I got an emergency,” King told his friend. “Whatever you do, don’t leave this room. Just watch my briefcase and coat—I’ll be back soon.”
Elbaum sat up all night waiting for King. After midnight he started calling bars and after-hours clubs without success. He was worried about his friend’s safety.
Finally at dawn King returned. He opened the suitcase and there were stacks of cash money inside. He reached into his overcoat pocket and pulled out wads of bills.
“Now I know I can trust you,” King roared and hugged Elbaum.
Around Christmas of 1972 Elbaum introduced King to his heavyweight fighter, Earnie Shavers. Elbaum held the promotional rights to Shavers in partnership with affluent Youngstown asphalt and highway contractor Joseph “Blackie” Gennaro, and former playboy pitcher Dean Chance, the youngest player ever to win the Cy Young Award.
Shavers was a nuclear puncher and a lovely human being, but he had a problem with stamina and his chin was not the best. He had won thirty fights in a row, twenty-nine by knockouts, mostly over tomato-can opponents selected by Elbaum, in matches mounted in towns like Warren, Akron, Canton, and Youngstown, Ohio.
Elbaum trusted King so much he decided to bring him in as a partner with Gennaro and Chance, who were already fighting with each other and creating a tense climate around the fighter, who had an unusually sensitive temperament. Elbaum even escorted King to New York City and made an introduction to Hank Schwartz, then president of Video Techniques, the company that provided the satellite technology for most of the closed-circuit fights. Elbaum told Schwartz that if he had any brains he would hire King, because King was the future face of the sport. With a master’s degree in engineering from MIT, Schwartz knew electronics, but not boxing or human nature as King did.
“Boxing needs a black promoter,” Elbaum told Schwartz. “You’ve got to get away from Madison Square Garden. This is a man who could be a force. He’s going to be able to control fighters because he is black, and all the good fighters are black. This man knows how to relate to them like nobody in the world.”
With King sitting at the table, Elbaum told Schwartz, “Talk to this guy, hire this guy. Why don’t you send him down to Jamaica for the Frazier–Foreman fight?”
About ten years later, when King was at the apex of his power and Elbaum was still scuffling and ducking last month’s phone bill, the two men ran into each other at a fight.
“My man” was King’s jovial greeting. “You took me into boxing, but you should have stayed with me, brother. You would have become a millionaire by now.”
“I would also have gone to jail,” Elbaum laughed.
Elbaum did go to jail for six months, on his own, in 1991 on tax-fraud charges.
Somehow King materialized in Kingston, Jamaica, before the January 22, 1973 heavyweight championship match between Joe Frazier and challenger George Foreman. It is not clear how he got there, what he was doing there, or who paid his passage.
Elbaum thinks King was already in the employ of Video Techniques. King says he went to Kingston on the invitation of Joe Frazier, although he would leave the stadium—and the island—in the company of George Foreman, in one of King’s fastest shifts of loyalty. This was the first of many times he would step over the bloody face of yesterday’s “main man” to seduce tomorrow’s.
Hank Schwartz says, “King was at the first fight, and jumped into the ring with Foreman, but I don’t think he was on our payroll yet…. We were hired by the government of Jamaica to do worldwide closed circuit and to help make the match. The government put up the money for the fighters and acted as the real promoter. We did the electronic feed via satellite.”
Schwartz’s memory is that his company hired King right after the fight because of his sudden influence with Foreman and his company’s desire to promote Foreman’s first title defense against Ken Norton. He says that Elbaum’s introduction and advocacy were crucial, but so was King’s performance in charging into the ring as part of Frazier’s faction, and leaving the ring as part of Foreman’s faction.
Schwartz says, “Signing Norton to a contract was easy. I flew to Los Angeles on a morning flight and conducted the negotiations in a conference room at the airport. I took the red-eye back to New York the same night with Norton’s signature on a contract to fight Foreman in Caracas….
“Foreman was a much more difficult personality. So we asked King in his first assignment for our company, to arrange a meeting with Foreman through Dick Sadler, one of Foreman’s many managers and advisers.
“But George required a cash payment to be delivered to him, and King helped with that. As I recall it, the deal was completed in a stall. After he finished counting the money he signed the contract to box Norton, still in the men’s room at the airport. King seemed quite familiar with that sort of transaction.”
Even now, more than twenty years later, Schwartz will not say how much cash his company had to slip Foreman in the urinal to legally lock up the rights to the fight. But in boxing, cash under the table, or over the toilet, is routine
During 1973, while still an employee of Video Techniques, King gained an interest in three top-of-the-line fighters: Earnie Shavers, Jeff Merritt, and Ray Anderson. In boxing there has never been a clear distinction between promoter, manager, booking agent, and silent partner, and King just followed in the footsteps of Mike Jacobs, Al Weill, and Jim Norris.
King quickly bought out Dean Chance’s interest in Shavers in March. Elbaum says he was present when King reached into a drawer in his home, counted off $8,000 in cash from a much larger stash, and handed the money to Chance. King began to make his own moves on the fighter, just as he had done with Foreman in Kingston, and soon there were turmoil and intrigue in the Shavers camp.
At one point there was supposed to be a big sit-down among all the partners in the back room of an Italian restaurant halfway between Cleveland and Youngstown. It was another one of King’s rap operas. No one else got a word in. King started the meeting by punching the table with his fist for attention, and then gave a half-hour sermon of superlatives.
“We people in this room own something that is everybody’s dream,” King opened up. “We own the hardest-punching heavyweight in the history of boxing, the most awesome fighting machine who is going to dominate boxing for years to come.
“And what a magnificent team we have to do this! That gentleman over there, my friend Blackie Gennaro. That man has all the money to make things happen. His money can move mountains. And there is Don Elbaum. What a boxing mind he has! He’s going to maneuver us into all the right matches, till we reach the championship.
“And here I am. I’m new to this business. But I’m going to start the greatest publicity campaign in human history for Earnie Shavers. Soon he will be more famous than Muhammad Ali.”
King then turned to Gennaro and said, “I just paid Dean Chance eight thousand dollars to become part of this all-star team. I got the contract cleared up. Now I need you to reimburse me for the eight thousand I done gave him, and I need another eight thousand for expenses to get our publicity campaign started up. We gotta start making these things happen right away.”
At the end of the meeting King left with two $8,000 checks in his pocket from Blackie Gennaro, a sweet man who
had faith in Earnie Shavers.
For a while Shavers looked like the reincarnation of Joe Louis. On February 19, 1973, he knocked out Jimmy Young in the first round. On June 18 he came to Madison Square Garden and knocked out the well-respected Jimmy Ellis in the first round.
In the afterglow of the Ellis conquest, Gennaro, Elbaum, and King met to divide their share of the purse. But there was no money left for Elbaum and Gennaro because King had billed their partnership for hotel rooms and airfare to New York for all of his friends and family.
When Gennaro questioned this practice, King delivered another speech: “I need my people around me,” he said. “They give me energy and inspiration. That’s part of our expense. It will always be part of our expense. I can’t be away from my people when I’m in New York.”
Once again, by the end of a meeting Gennaro was opening his checkbook and writing some zeros. After a double-talk explanation of the ledger sheets and expense records, King somehow persuaded Gennaro that he was owed an additional $2,000 for reimbursed expenses, including entertaining boxing writers in New York.
The Shavers–Ellis main event was King’s first exposure to the New York writers, and as a novelty he made an impression. As a new personality reinventing himself, throwing off great quotes, telling fantastic tales, dramatizing people and details, King was a beat reporter’s dream. He made their job easy. And for years that aspect would help King get over with the media, long after the time his actions should have made him a public villain and a corporate pariah.
By the fall of 1973, King had managed to isolate Elbaum from Shavers and manipulate him out of the management team. King gave no pause to double-crossing the man who gave him his start in boxing, the man he trusted with his suitcase of cash, the man he’d apprenticed himself to ever since the Forest City benefit.
Elbaum says: “I was forced out. I had an agreement on paper, but I never enforced it. I just got very disgusted with the way Don was operating. I got demoralized. He turned Shavers against us, and that hurt me, and Blackie loved Earnie as a person. So I just said the hell with it and walked away. Don wants people to jump to his tune, and that’s just not me. I go to my own jump.”
The Life and Crimes of Don King: The Shame of Boxing in America Page 4