The Life and Crimes of Don King: The Shame of Boxing in America

by Jack Newfield

  For several days this movie-set mélange of international financial fixers, merchants of menace, and dropouts from respectable society negotiated in Paris in search of honor among thieves.

  Occasionally tossed into the middle of this volatile mix was the Paris branch manager of Barclay’s Bank, who was a pathological racist, deeply uncomfortable having to deal with King and Bula as equals. At one point Bula actually knocked the obnoxious bank manager down during a meeting.

  The negotiations produced an understanding that the fight would be staged in Kinshasa, Zaire, and that Risnelia (really Zaire and Mobutu) would provide two letters of credit, each for $4.8 million, one to Foreman, one to Ali.

  Schwartz and King were told they could pick up the letters of credit at the main branch of Barclay’s Bank, carry them back to the United States, and have them confirmed by a Barclay’s branch in America, so that the funds would not be paid in Paris or Zaire for tax purposes.

  This is how Schwartz recalls the final stage of the deal: “Each day Don and I would go down to Barclay’s branch in Paris and find out that the letter of credit was still not there. The letter of credit was being sent from the Barclay’s bank in Kinshasa under the guarantee of Mobutu himself and the government of Zaire. The letter of credit did not show up for two days because the manager of the Barclay’s bank in Zaire was away for an extended weekend with his girlfriend. So Mobutu ordered the troops to Zaire to find and arrest the bank manager and separate him from his girlfriend and throw him in jail.

  “So the president of the Barclay’s banking system had to fly to Zaire to both get his branch manager out of jail and issue the two letters of credit, under the threat the government of Zaire would expel the Barclay’s bank from the country.

  “While this was going on, the white supremacist bank manager in Paris told Bula, and I quote, ‘I don’t have to take this rubbish in my country.’ This is the same branch manager who had been kicked out of Zaire for mistreating his black employees.

  “Bula went off the wall, reached across the desk, in Paris, in the Barclay’s bank, and cold-cocked the manager of the bank.

  “Don King and I were absolutely astounded. The two of us had to jump onto Bula and the manager to stop them from killing each other over the fact the bank had not yet furnished the letter of credit.

  “The next day the letter of credit arrived, and Don and I jumped on a plane. We got it confirmed and sent them off to the fighters, in time, thereby perfecting our fight contracts with Foreman and Ali.”

  According to the deal worked out in Paris, the profits from the fight would be divided several ways. Risnelia, having put up $9.6 million, would get the largest share of the “gross proceeds”—42 percent. Hemdale would get 28 percent on its early investment of $1.5 million. Most of the remainder would go to Telemedia de Panama, with Video Techniques receiving a fee for its technical services—cameras, satellite dish, computers, technology.

  And what about Don King, whose labors produced the two fighters, without whom nothing would be possible? King was guaranteed

  4.33 percent, which he immediately took in the form of Video Techniques stock and membership on its board.

  Don King’s name never appeared in the complex and voluminous contracts for the Ali–Foreman match. You will see Risnelia, Telemedia, Hemdale, Barclay’s Bank, Video Techniques—even the George Foreman Development Corporation and the Central Bank of Oakland as Foreman’s escrow agent. But not Don King, although this fight would become his masterpiece, the showcase of his vast talent to sell and promote when it was still pure and inspired.

  Being only an employee did not prevent King from dominating the promotion from the moment it was formally announced, through all the prefight publicity, through the weeks in Zaire leading up to the fight.

  The fight was officially announced in Caracas, Venezuela, the day after Foreman knocked out Ken Norton in the second round.

  King, wearing a gold and white suit, walked into a conference room where a press conference was about to start. Somebody handed him a copy of the press release. As he read it, a shadow of anger cross his expressive face. He crumbled the press release into a ball, hurled it across the room, and stalked out.

  Don King felt disrespected. The press release said what was technically half true. The fight was being promoted by Hemdale and Video Techniques. Risnelia was kept out of it. The fifteenth line mentioned “in association with Don King Productions.”

  King screamed in his boom-box voice at Schwartz. Schwartz felt contrite, and placated King by telling a group of reporters, “Don King is mainly responsible for this fight. With the diverse personalities of Foreman and Ali, he was the only one in the world capable of bringing them together. He’s a welcome addition to our company.”

  Schwartz then added, with prophetic accuracy, “King will probably have me riding in the back of the bus in a couple of months.”

  4. Survival and Betrayal in Africa

  The Muhammad Ali–George Foreman fight in Zaire would be the turning point in Don King’s life, his purest accomplishment and finest hour. He made the fight and he saved the fight.

  This event would also firmly establish Survival and Betrayal as the recurring themes of King’s career.

  Over the seven months of prefight hype, King slowly emerged as the dominant public figure among the consortium of promoters, even though his signature was not on the contracts, and he was the most junior partner.

  The magnetic force of his personality, his endless energy, and the unpredictable flow of events would propel King to the head of the table. The fight would also enable him to fashion the personal and business relationship with Ali necessary to displace all other rival promoters, including his patron, Hank Schwartz. When the fight was delayed for five weeks, King remained in Africa with the fighters while Schwartz spent most of that period in New York.

  But at the birth of the promotion, in March and April, Schwartz, and his late partner Barry Burnstein, were running the show. They had the electronics expertise and international experience.

  Schwartz flew into Kinshasa, Zaire, in March and walked into the first of many crises that would explode before the fight could take place. Zaire was mired in Third World poverty and had none of the facilities and infrastructure needed to accommodate the fight, the satellite technology, or the influx of two thousand media personnel.

  “The country looked like a shithole,” Schwartz recalls.

  The first inadequacy Schwartz noticed was that the route to the May 20th Stadium was a dirt road. There was thick underbrush growing outside the 70,000-seat outdoor soccer stadium. There was no parking lot. The stadium seats were cracking and crumbling. There was human feces on the floor where the local athletes changed their clothes.

  “The first time I walked into the stadium,” Schwartz says, “I felt like I had made a terrible mistake. I went into a panic. It wasn’t usable. There wasn’t even a roof over the ring.”

  Schwartz, the MIT graduate and electronics whiz, also realized “there was no microwave interconnection to the satellite earth station.

  “I got physically sick when I saw the conditions,” Schwartz recalls. “I actually told the government people in Zaire that the fight could not possibly be staged in this stadium, that we couldn’t go ahead with the contract.

  “But their reaction was I couldn’t even think such a thing. The government people just said to tell them whatever I wanted built or fixed, and they would do it in time for the fight, with money from the national treasury.”

  Zaire’s monstrous dictator, Joseph Mobutu, promised Schwartz that the stadium would be the equal of the best in the world, whatever it took, whatever it cost. With Schwartz shuttling between New York and Kinshasa, Mobutu ordered his people to work around the clock to provide whatever modern necessities Schwartz specified.

  The government built a new runway at the airport so jumbo jets could land. Lights were built on top of the stadium. An asphalt parking lot was constructed in the midst of the th
ick green foliage. A bar for the press was built out of one hundred different types of wood. Experts were imported from France to install one hundred simultaneous phone lines linking the stadium to the satellite station fifty miles away. The microwave system was refitted so the television signal could travel from the stadium to the uplink dish. A four-lane highway was built from the airport to the downtown hotels that would house the world’s media. Mobutu also ordered the erection of huge billboards along the roadside to obscure the view of tin and straw shacks and squatter poverty.

  One frequent sign Mobutu put up to conceal the squalid reality of his country read: BLACK POWER IS SOUGHT EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD. BUT IT IS REALIZED HERE IN ZAIRE.

  “It was an amazing transformation,” Schwartz says. “Mobutu did everything he promised. He probably spent as much money on the modernization as he did for the fight itself. He converted a shithole into a first-class facility, a modern stadium that rivaled anything in a developed nation. And he did it in six months.”

  And it was all to impress tourists, journalists, and the two fighters; none of it benefited the nation’s desperately poor and illiterate population.

  This first stage, involving satellite technology and on-site construction, was Schwartz’s main contribution. Once this stage was completed, Don King hijacked center stage, never relinquished it, and delivered a dominating virtuoso performance.

  On September 10, the day Ali left for Africa, he held a press conference at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, presided over by Don King. King announced there would be a three-day festival of black music in Kinshasa before “the greatest sporting event in the history of the world,” and that James Brown, B. B. King, and Lloyd Price would be among the thirty performers. Then Ali took over, gave a twenty-minute stream-of-consciousness monologue, took off his jacket, and mimicked Foreman’s rigid, robotic, roundhouse style.

  “I’m going to dance all night,” Ali said, as he danced and jabbed the air.

  “I’m so fast I can turn out the light switch and jump into bed before it gets dark,” he laughed. Then he challenged the room full of boxing reporters to make a public prediction right in front of him.

  Ali, the 3-to-1 underdog in the early betting, asked, “How many fellows here picks George? Be men, tell the truth.”

  Foreman, remember, had just knocked out Joe Frazier and Ken Norton, and they had both defeated Ali, who was thirty-two. At that moment in time, Foreman looked like an unbeatable beast.

  Most of the reporters raised their hands, indicating they were picking Foreman to win. Behind Ali, out of his view, King also raised his hand for Foreman, a prophecy recorded by the camera of Leon Gast, who was making a documentary film on the fight.

  A few minutes later Ali turned to King and said, “I know you got him picked. I know George is your man. I saw you on TV predicting me to go down. I’m gonna show you how great I am.”

  At the close of the press conference, almost as an afterthought as the reporters were standing up, King said, “I want to introduce Hank Schwartz, who is doing the ancillary rights around the world, a dynamic young man.”

  Once the fighters settled into their camps in Zaire, King became the center of the promotion, and he never stopped promoting himself. He dealt with the government, the police, the army, the press, the hotels, the airlines, the musical performers, and the fighters. Especially George Foreman, who was sullen and petulant and constantly threatening to pull out of the fight if his changing demands for preference and attention were not met.

  Foreman, for example, had demanded a first-class airplane ticket for his pet dog on his flights from San Francisco to Paris to Kinshasa. The president of American Airlines had to intercede personally before Foreman’s dog was issued a first-class ticket in its own name.

  As the fight got closer—especially after a five-week delay caused by a cut to Foreman’s eyebrow—King had to spend hours cajoling, coddling, and confronting the champion, whose personality was very different from his present public image of a good-natured, self-deprecatory cheeseburger addict.

  By this time King was rushing around Kinshasa, putting out fires and soothing egos, wearing colorful dashikis; his hair already had the modified, semi-electric stand-up look. King had short hair when he got out of prison and normal hair in early 1974.

  Lloyd Price was present in Zaire, and present at the creation of King’s hairstyle, an event Price places as sometime during mid-1974, probably while the two men were at Century Plaza in Los Angeles, working on the promotion.

  “Don and I were talking one day,” Price remembers, “and I was telling him he needed a distinctive look if he was going to become a star. He needed an image, a look, like Daddy Grace or Reverend Ike, who was his hero in those days. I told him all stars have some unique gimmick that fans can recognize them by—a hat, a uniform, a way of dressing.

  “As I was saying that, Don was absentmindedly pulling on his hair, which was his habit when he was thinking. I stopped and said, ‘That’s it! That’s the look right there!’

  “So he started combing his hair straight up and it did look distinctive. I told Don he should have a crown to go with the name King, and his straight-up hair looked like his crown.”

  The look, which would become more extreme a few years later, was born out of this marketing and public-relations lecture by the singer who sold 42 million records. King, of course, would mythologize the hair gimmick whenever he was asked about it in later years. In his 1988 Playboy interview, King explained his trademark look this way:

  “It’s really an aura from God. Until ten years ago my hair was kinky and nappy and curly, like any other black’s. But then one night, I went to bed with my wife, Henrietta, and she shook me because my head was rumbling and moving, and my hair was just popping up—ping, ping, ping. Each hair. All of them curls were straightening out and going up.”

  “Sounds strange to us,” volunteered Playboy’s interviewer, Lawrence Linderman.

  King responded, “It does sound a little unbelievable, but it happened. My hair is au naturel. I don’t use any type of chemicals or mousse on it. It just grows straight up. No matter if it’s when I go to bed, or get up in the morning, I can go straight to the mirror and my hair is in a pyramid, like there’s 360 degrees of light.”

  Journalist Dick Schaap once quipped, “Don King’s body did four years in prison, but his hair got the chair.”

  Boxing is the one sport where even the deepest expert can’t always tell what is going on, who is winning a fight in progress, or who prepared best for the match. No one can really see from outside the ring how much a punch has hurt; no one can really tell how fatigued a fighter is; no one can know how much will to win a fighter has left.

  In baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, the score is posted and always known to the crowd. In boxing, the running score is kept secret until it is announced. Boxing always has that element of surprise and drama. And that was never more true than in Zaire.

  Boxing is based on deceit. Fighters are taught to lie—to conceal fatigue, mask pain, disguise intent with a feint, deny an injury, look one way and punch to another spot.

  Most of those who watched Ali train at Deer Lake before he departed for Africa thought he had no chance to win. He was getting beaten up in the gym by a young lion named Larry Holmes and an old warhorse named Roy Williams. Ali seemed lethargic, passive, unmotivated, without offense.

  No expert could tell this was by design. Ali had a plan forming in his mind. He was holding back, letting his sparring partners hit him. Holmes was not the better fighter: Ali wanted to practice how to endure punishment. He used the gym to make friends with pain.

  Ali had self-knowledge. He knew he could not dance for fifteen rounds at his age, although he wanted Foreman to think he was going to dance. He let Holmes and Williams hit him every day to build up his body’s resistance to pain, to let punches strike his liver, spleen, kidney, neck, lungs, heart.

  Ali also believed he could hit and hurt Foreman, that Foreman
lacked stamina, flexibility, balance, and defense. When he tired, his punches became looping. He believed if he found exactly the right distance to stand from Foreman, he could knock him out. After he took the pummeling in the gym, he watched tapes of Foreman in his cabin.

  But the visitors saw only the pummeling, could not know what strategy was forming in Ali’s protean mind. All they heard was Ali promise to dance all night. Ali was a great liar.

  Ali’s loyal friend and camp facilitator, Gene Kilroy, was with Ali as he packed his gear and prepared to leave Deer Lake for the Waldorf press conference and the flight to Africa. Kilroy says the last thing Ali did before closing the door to his cabin was to call boxing’s self-exiled philosopher, Cus D’Amato, in Catskill, New York, and ask him what tactical plan he should employ to fight Foreman.

  D’Amato told Ali, “I have only one piece of advice for you. You must hurt Foreman with your first punch. Foreman has the psychology of a bully. If you hurt him early, it will destroy his mind. Whatever you do, have bad intentions behind your first punch.”

  D’Amato then repeated his fistic Freudianism to Kilroy. But like everyone else in Ali’s camp, Kilroy had a contrary opinion. They all thought Ali should jab, dance, and move for a few rounds, and not get too close to Foreman.

  But Ali viewed Cus as a wise old owl, and the owl’s a vice coincided with what Ali was thinking, based on his studies of Foreman’s tapes, and his self-knowledge of his own body, including his faith in his own punching power, which most experts derided as ordinary.

  Ali believed that despite Foreman’s unbeaten record, and his easy conquest of the two men who had beaten Ali, Foreman was not as mentally tough as he was. Some fighters have glass jaws; Ali’s hypothesis was that Foreman had a glass mind.