On December 14 Shavers came back to Madison Square Garden to box Jerry Quarry—a white hope who could punch. Quarry took Shavers’s best shot and stormed back to knock out Shavers in the first round. He hit Shavers on the chin and Shavers froze, standing up straight along the ropes.
Shavers says his mind was “one thousand miles away from the fight.” He says he was depressed by all the infighting around him. He also says he never got paid by King after he lost the Quarry bout.
I interviewed Shavers for an hour during a bus ride with Muhammad Ali back to his training camp at Deer Lake. Shavers— now a minister, who says he was “saved” on April 24, 1986—spoke frankly of his past without rancor, self-pity, or defensiveness.
“Before the Quarry fight,” Shavers explained in his oddly high-pitched voice, “King and Gennaro were fighting and trying to make me take sides. Don put a lot of pressure on me to take his side, but they both had been good to me.
“The main problem was that Don fired Archie Moore as my trainer just before the fight, and I had a lot of confidence in Archie. Don had made him the scapegoat when Jeff Merritt broke my jaw in the gym, but he must have had other reasons to want to get rid of a famous guy like Archie, who had been such a great champion.
“After Archie got fired, Don put a guy in my corner who was a friend of his from Cleveland. I can’t even remember the man’s name. But the whole scene killed my concentration and confidence. And after I got knocked out I didn’t even get paid my money. Don had promised me seventy-five thousand, but he said there were expenses. But I blame myself. I was young and foolish and I let Don mistreat me.”*
Listening to Shavers’s story, I realized something that I would remember again in almost every interview with a former fighter who had been wronged financially: Boxing is the only jungle where the lions are afraid of the rats.
Whether it is Shavers, or Ali, or Saoul Mamby, or Tony Tucker, it has been my personal experience that gifted fighters, who know what their hands can do, tend to be unexpectedly gentle people, who try to avoid interpersonal conflicts and can be intimidated by promoters.
This was even true of Sonny Liston and champions from other eras, who had to deal with contemporary promoters and mobsters.
After Shavers lost, King lost interest in him. As always, the abandonment is swifter than the seduction.
In April 1974, Blackie Gennaro sued King for $500,000 in the Northern Ohio District Court. The suit accused King of not paying Gennaro his contracted share of the Quarry fight and included a copy of the March 1973 partnership contract that guaranteed King and Gennaro, as co-managers, would share any profits equally.
The suit also charged King with negligence in not consulting Gennaro on decisions, like the dismissal of Archie Moore, and argued this exclusion caused Shavers to lose the Quarry match. This would be the first of more than one hundred lawsuits filed against King over the next twenty years by fighters and managers he shafted.
* Former FBI agent Joe Spinelli, who investigated boxing from 1980 to 1984, told me that Shavers was contracted to receive $75,000 for the Quarry fight and was actually paid $3,000.
Heavyweight Jeff Merritt, Don King’s first fighter, scores a knockout early in his career. In 1991, Merritt was a homeless crack addict ranting about Don King in the lobby of the Mirage Hotel. He was begging for money from the fight crowd. BOXING ILLUSTRATED
In August 1974, the lawsuit was settled, with an agreement signed by King, Shavers, and Gennaro. King agreed to pay Gennaro $3,500 and Gennaro became Shavers’s manager once again.
King didn’t want to have anything to do with Shavers after the loss, which King felt had made him look bad. The agreement contained a clause saying, “Shavers agrees he shall make no further attempts to contact King.”
In the late 1970s, when Shavers’s confidence and reputation were restored, he would fight for King the promoter in several major bouts, knocking out Ken Norton in one round, and knocking down Larry Holmes in a heavyweight title fight Shavers was one punch away from winning, before his old stamina-weakness betrayed his body.
On June 19, 1973, when he was in town for the Shavers–Ellis match, Don King appeared at the offices of the New York State Boxing Commission at 270 Broadway. The purpose of his visit was to register his name as the manager of a heavyweight named Jeff Merritt, who had considerable promise and considerable baggage.
One problem was that another man already had a valid contract on file with the commission as Merritt’s manager—Norman King, who had an office at 375 Park Avenue. Norman King’s contract did not expire until the following year.
A second problem was that Merritt had been arrested for burglary three months earlier by cops from the 20th Precinct on Manhattan’s West Side. Merritt, in fact, had a criminal record almost as long as King’s, with arrests for rape, robbery, and drugs. Merritt had been released from the Missouri State Prison on December 22, 1967, after serving two years for first-degree robbery.
Merritt had a great left and an addiction to heroin, and no one knew which would write his future. He was twenty-five, six-five, 225 pounds, and had a professional record of eighteen wins, one loss, with fourteen knockouts.
On his license application, King was asked to state his experience and qualifications. He wrote, “I have been connected to boxing all my life. I love the game and want to contribute something meaningful to the sport.”
He listed Cleveland Councilman Charles Carr as a reference and fully disclosed his manslaughter conviction, adding, “Also, I was in the numbers and arrested and fined for that activity.”
Two days later, Deputy Boxing Commissioner Frank Morris wrote Merritt a letter in Kansas City, explaining he now had two managers and an outstanding burglary charge that must be disposed of before he could be licensed to box in New York.
Merritt got a release signed by Norman King and the burglary arrest was plea-bargained down to time served.
King quickly matched Merritt with used-up former champion Ernie Terrell in the Garden in September, in a live bout to precede the closed-circuit showing of the second Ali–Norton fight.
In the week leading up to Merritt’s main-event debut, King the nonstop salesman was in town. He had a story line to sell, his exuberance was infectious, and his eyes danced with innocent hyperbole.
“I’m running a mission, not a gym,” King told a group of boxing writers. “I consider myself a savior for guys like Jeff. I keep him out of the city until the day before the fight. Then I sit up with him till dawn to make sure he doesn’t run off into the street. I’ve been to the joint, just like Jeff. I’ve seen the track marks on his arms. I can relate to him. And now we both want something better in life.”
King instinctively knew how to market his fighter’s story with narrative drama. King saw his own life as a modern epic, as a great drama of suffering and redemption, like Frederick Douglass’s rise from slave to statesman. And King would always know how to dramatize and market the stories of his fighters. Sometimes it was a stretch. But with Merritt the drama and mystery of which way he would go was there.
Merritt, whose nickname was Candy Slim, overwhelmed Terrell in one round. It was such a mismatch it was hard to tell just how good Merritt could be.
In the dressing room afterward, King was shouting, “Remember the name Candy Slim. Champ next year. Don’t bring us mortal men. We want to fight giants!”
But the next year, on March 4 in Oakland, Candy Slim was knocked out in the first round by an ordinary mortal named Henry Clark, and he never fought again. The loss annulled his self-esteem, and smack wrote the rest of his life. King walked away from him, and Candy Slim vanished into the night of drugs, pimps, nomadic travel, dumb crimes, and prisons.
When David Wolf interviewed King for his True magazine profile in 1974, he asked King why he had stopped calling the prospect he loved and nursed away from the needle.
“I still care, I’m just into bigger things now,” King explained.
For years the fight crowd talke
d about Candy Slim like he had been a comet from another galaxy who burned bright and then suddenly disappeared.
In March 1991, I was in Las Vegas for the first Tyson–Ruddock fight when I noticed a tall, barefoot man in dirty clothes begging for money in the lobby of the Mirage Hotel. He was ranting about Don King, who was promoting the Tyson fight in the Mirage parking lot that week.
“Are you Jeff Merritt?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m Candy Slim. Gimme a dollar.”
Merritt said he was a crack addict and homeless. He had been in and out of prison for years. Even his mother had thrown him out.
When anyone who seemed to be in town for the fight came by— identified by a T-shirt or a press credential—Candy Slim whined, “Don’t you know me, man? I’m Jeff Merritt. I was Don King’s first fighter. Gimme some money, man.”
3. King Makes His Masterpiece
There was a power vacuum in boxing in the early 1970s. No promoter had a monopoly on heavyweight champion Joe Frazier the way Tex Richard had with Jack Dempsey and Mike Jacobs had with Joe Louis.
The March 1971 Ali–Frazier fight had been promoted by millionaire sportsman Jack Kent Cooke and his partner, Hollywood hooking agent Jerry Perenchio. The fighters each got $2.5 million, but no percentage of the closed-circuit TV revenue around the world, which produced a $20 million gross. The promoters made a fortune.
But Cooke and Perenchio did not remain successful boxing promoters, or even partners. And Frazier and Ali both remained free agents.
In the early 1970s, with the exception of Jerry Quarry, all the top heavyweights were black—Frazier, Ali, Ken Norton, George Foreman, Earnie Shavers, Ron Lyle, Jimmy Young. And all the boxing promoters, led by Bob Arum and Madison Square Garden, were white.
According to singer Lloyd Price, he began to tell King on the day he emerged from prison in September 1971 that, being black, he was in a position to “take over boxing.”
Black pride and consciousness were rising all over the planet. Gold-medal sprinters John Carlos and Tommy Smith had raised their fists in black power salutes on the victory stand at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. (This helped make George Foreman seem patriotic and popular for waving a tiny American flag after defeating a Russian for the Olympic heavyweight gold medal.)
Muhammad Ali was a Muslim and preaching black pride, solidarity, and self-reliance wherever he went. His manager, Herbert Muhammad, was not only a Muslim but the son of the religion’s leader, Elijah Muhammad.
Boxing was ready for, and in fact needed, a black entrepreneur. Don King would prove to be the wrong man at the right time.
In all that follows it should not be overlooked that Don King was a trailblazer—the first successful black promoter in boxing history. He did have to overcome racism in society at large, and in boxing history. We should remember that John L. Sullivan would never fight a black opponent, avoiding his Australian challenger Peter Jackson. Jack Dempsey also would never fight a black challenger, and he ducked both Harry Wills and the magnificent Sam Langford.
When Jack Johnson won the heavyweight title from Tommy Burns in 1908, it was the novelist Jack London who first popularized the campaign to find a “great white hope” to recapture the crown for the white race. After Johnson vanquished the former champion, James J. Jeffries, on July 4, 1910, there was rioting all over America, and nineteen blacks were killed and lynched.
Ever since Rocky Marciano retired undefeated in 1956 as the last white American heavyweight champion, there have been periodic revivals of the white hope campaigns. The box office success of the early Rocky films reflected this need and nostalgia for a white champion. Since Gerry Cooney couldn’t beat Larry Holmes, there was a fantasy market for Rocky Balboa to beat Apollo Creed.
And King would eventually come around to catering to this white hope mentality. He would market Chuck Wepner and Gerry Cooney as representatives of their race. He would make an under-the-table deal in violation of the worldwide anti-apartheid boycott of South Africa because he controlled the promotional rights to white South African Gerrie Coetzee.
And in the fall of 1994, King would sign Boston’s Peter McNeeley to an exclusive promotional contract. McNeeley was a white heavyweight who had built up a 32-1 record by beating a string of handpicked losers and retirees who had a combined record of 301 defeats in 424 fights.
McNeeley’s opponents had been knocked out a total of 152 times before they were judged incompetent enough to be matched with McNeeley. But King staged a press conference with McNeeley in Manhattan, promised him a championship fight, and got him rated in the top ten, even though he did not deserve it.
Don King would exploit white racism and black racism with equal enthusiasm. But at the start he was a pioneer who opened doors.
Brooklyn-born Hank Schwartz, an electronics and satellite technology wizard, was the president of Video Techniques. He knew King at that point as a client and exhibitor from Cleveland who rented his equipment. His partner was Barry Burnstein, a sweet three-hundredpounder, who was in charge of marketing. After what Schwartz saw in Kingston he would hire King as an employee, but Schwartz says, “King was in Kingston on his own. He had no official connection to the Frazier–Foreman promotion.”
In Kingston before the fight, King demonstrated one of his basic gifts—talking to black fighters. He knew how to do it. He knew how to ingratiate, con, charm, brown-nose, befriend, impress, amuse, and seduce fighters. He knew their language, their weakness, their psychology. He knew how to give them a self-image, an idea of their role in history, how much money they could make if they only had “proper management.”
Although King was in Kingston at Frazier’s invitation, the chess master was thinking four moves ahead. He spent part of his time having fun with Frazier and his manager, Yank Durham, but he also spent considerable time flattering the challenger, who was then a remote, sullen, secretive personality, not the jolly, self-deprecating character he has become in his comeback reincarnation. Foreman had grown up trying to emulate the scowling menace of Sonny Liston, and he was deep into that intimidating persona leading up to the Frazier fight.
But King acted almost like a groupie, volunteering to pick up members of Foreman’s family and extended entourage as they kept arriving at the airport. King, understanding the secret doubts and insecurities of all fighters, kept telling Foreman he was going to win, building up his confidence, and spinning out grand plans for making money after he was champion.
King roared and chanted the same ego-building phrases to Frazier in the hours leading up to their confrontation. Frazier now says he never liked or trusted King, and that King favored Ali against him. But on the night of his battle with Foreman, Don King rode to the stadium with Frazier in the same limo, behind a police motorcycle escort and blasting sirens clearing a path.
As the fight began, King was in his front-row seat in Frazier’s corner. As Foreman knocked Frazier down again and again during the first round, Don King started edging closer and closer to Foreman’s corner.
As Frazier went down again, was lifted into the air by an awesome uppercut, and started to totter in a daze, Don King started to climb up the steps toward the ring with Foreman’s handlers.
As the referee stopped the fight and cradled the bleeding Frazier in his arms, King was in the ring, embracing the new champion as his lifelong brother.
“George, I told you, I told you so!” King shouted into Foreman’s ear.
As Howard Cosell began to interview Foreman in the ring, King pushed himself next to the new champion, shouting, “I got him, he’s my man,” as Cosell tried to ask a question.
King insinuated himself into Foreman’s exultant entourage as they left the ring and returned to his dressing room. When Foreman left the stadium to return to his hotel, King was in the limo next to him, laughing with Foreman over the sound of the police escort sirens.
Don King has told this story himself many times, seeing it as a tribute to his own political and business acumen. Each time he tells
it, he ends with the same punch line: “I came with the champion, and I left with the champion.”
Hank Schwartz remembers the audacious spectacle of King taking over in the ring with both irony and outrage.
“I was in the truck,” Schwartz recalls, “producing the fight, looking at monitors, picking out replays for between rounds. Then I suddenly saw Don King, in the ring, on my cameras, on my monitors, at my fight. It was amazing chutzpah.”
Although to this day King thinks the Kingston anecdote reflects favorably on his adroit maneuvering, it is, in fact, the symbolic act of opportunism that would sum up his whole career. Time and again over the next eighteen years, King would switch loyalties, abandon a loser he had called his son the day before, and insinuate himself into the life, dreams, and income of a new champion.
In January 1974 at Madison Square Garden, Muhammad Ali won a unanimous twelve-round decision from Joe Frazier in their second fight. This established Ali as the logical challenger to the invincible monster George Foreman then seemed to be.
Every promoter in boxing, and all the promoters who lusted to break into the sport, wanted to make the Ali–Foreman match. Teddy Brenner and Madison Square Garden wanted it. Bob Arum wanted it. Jerry Perenchio wanted it. And Don King wanted it.
Video Techniques promoted King to vice president, gave him a salary increase, and let him loose to make the Ali–Foreman match for them. Schwartz told King to line up Ali and he would sign Foreman.
This was the opportunity of a lifetime for Don King. He put everything into it—all his will, all his energy, all his showmanship, all his mastery of numbers, all his skill at preaching an evangelical paradise in the future to black brothers.
For two months Don King talked, traveled, and talked. A parolee, just two and a half years out of prison, he competed against boxing’s incumbent power brokers in a marathon negotiation, with the most bizarre cast of characters in history, to stage the richest prizefight in history.
The Life and Crimes of Don King: The Shame of Boxing in America Page 5