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

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The Life and Crimes of Don King: The Shame of Boxing in America Page 11

by Jack Newfield


  And what happened was, certain people took that as a sign that maybe they should seize the opportunity to get to Ali. Now Don King, it seems he tried to destroy the image of managers. Don wants to make any fighter feel he doesn’t need a manager…. Believe me, if you’re a fighter you don’t want to deal with Don King without a manager.

  As a result of King’s desperado move to displace Herbert and monopolize Ali, Ali cut King off after the Frazier fight in Manila.

  Arum hired Butch Lewis (who is black), and Herbert gave Lewis and Arum Ali’s title defense against Richard Dunn in Germany. King retaliated by calling Lewis an “Uncle Tom” to Ali.

  Then Herbert let Arum promote Ali’s moneymaking rematch with Ken Norton in Yankee Stadium in September 1976. And King had no role in Ali’s later title fight with Earnie Shavers in Madison Square Garden or his two matches with Leon Spinks in 1978.

  King was now on the outside. He needed to find some new supply of OPM to replace Mobutu, Marcos, and Carl Lombardo. That’s when he approached the ABC television network, a mark with a corporate logo and more financial reserves than a Third World country.

  6. “Dung King and Johnny Bought”

  It was the spring of 1976 and it was the first time anyone could remember seeing Don King even a little bit depressed. This most resilient and extroverted and goal-oriented of promoters was subdued for long stretches of time, spending hours alone, behind the closed door of the sixty-seventh-floor penthouse in the RCA Building, behind his big desk, brooding, and planning his next move.

  King was distressed over losing his hold over Muhammad Ali. He had worked four years to get Ali, and now he had lost him. His gargantuan ego could not handle rejection. King even took down the beautiful, life-size oil portrait of Ali that had dominated his suite. He replaced it with two huge blowups—himself with Jimmy Carter, and himself with George Foreman, the fighter he was now promoting.

  By now King had taken in Wepner’s rowdy team of Al Braverman and Paddy Flood as “consultants,” and they had offices in the penthouse suite that looked down on most of the Manhattan skyline. Braverman, however, had said, “Just gimme a pay phone in a candy store. All the rest is garbage.”

  During the summer of 1976, King, an instinctive reader of trends, noticed the national enthusiasm for America’s boxing team at the Montreal Olympics. King sensed the upsurge of nationalism and patriotism as five Americans won gold medals for the first time, including Sugar Ray Leonard and the Spinks brothers, Leon and Michael.

  The notion of organizing a tournament to crown “American champions” in each boxing weight classification was in the air that summer of televised gold. Hank Schwartz says he had the idea. Teddy Brenner says he had the idea. Paddy Flood said he had the idea. But Don King ran with it and sold it.

  It was a resourceful and timely concept. Other than Ali, all of the dominant boxing champions of 1976 were from South or Central America, not the United States. Light heavyweight champion Victor Galindez was from Argentina; middleweight champion Carlos Monzon was from Argentina; lightweight champion Roberto Duran was from Panama; and featherweight champion Alexis Arguello was from Nicaragua.

  Seeing the pride in America generated by the Olympics, and the dearth of Americans holding world titles, King identified an opening. He decided to approach the ABC television network with the concept of staging an elimination tournament of the best young American fighters, to crown “true-blue, loyal American champions.”

  Flood and Braverman would be his matchmakers and talent scouts, the way Elbaum had been at the beginning. They did know boxing, and King’s real knowledge about fighters was quite superficial. When King was still in prison, he bet all his cigarettes on Buster Mathis to beat Joe Frazier, but Frazier easily stopped Mathis in eleven rounds in 1968.

  King wanted Ring magazine, known as “the bible of boxing,” to give his tournament instant credibility and to use the publication’s ratings as the gateway into the tournament.

  In April 1976, before any meetings were held with ABC executives, King gave Johnny Ort, a writer for Ring and a man who controlled the ratings, $2,000 in cash. Later in the year he would give Ort $3,000 more in cash.

  King also approached James Farley, the chairman of the New York boxing commission (and the son of FDR’s postmaster general), and won his agreement to be the supervisor of the tournament in exchange for expenses and travel reimbursements. This was a curious choice, since none of the fights would be held in New York, the only place where Farley had any legitimate regulatory jurisdiction.

  Photo inscribed from Jimmy Carter to Don King: “To my great friend.” BOXING ILLUSTRATED

  The first two fight cards, in fact, would be held at “patriotic” venues—the deck of the battleship U.S.S. Lexington in Florida, and the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis—federal property, where no local boxing commission could supervise the selection of officials. The third card, in a masterstroke of gimmickry, would be held at King’s alma mater, Marion Prison.

  In June and July 1976, King held a series of negotiating meetings with executives of ABC Sports, pitching his tournament idea. He was brilliant, farsighted, funny, and charming as ever in the seduction phase of a project. King promised to provide a reliable, steady stream of low-cost fights to ABC, at a time when boxing was enjoying a resurgence of popularity. Like all great grifters, he dangled the honey pot of futures—if ABC did this deal, then it would get all the big heavyweight fights involving Foreman. King also invoked Ring and Farley as guarantors that the tournament would be above reproach.

  During this period, King met mostly with Jim Spence, the vice president for program planning for ABC Sports, who was not particularly sophisticated about boxing and seemed eager to have a character like King able to deliver fighters no one at ABC knew how to talk to. Years later, John Martin, the vice president of ABC Sports, would tell me, “King played Spence like a Stradivarius.”

  By the end of July, ABC was sold on the project, and draft copies of contracts began to be exchanged between Spence and King. The basic deal was that ABC would pay Don King $1.5 million (later increased to $2 million) to provide forty-eight fights, twenty-three hours of boxing programming, leading up to the crowning of American champions after an elimination tournament. King would get a $250,000 fee as a promoter, and another $200,000 fee would be paid to the matchmakers, presumably Flood and Braverman.

  On July 30, King sent Ring magazine a $10,000 check “to alleviate expenses incurred in preparing the ratings of the many fighters that will be participants” in the tournament.

  Almost from day one the tournament was a scam, a good idea corrupted in its cradle.

  Only fighters allied with Flood, Braverman, Ort, or their friends were allowed into the tournament, which meant good paydays and television exposure. Ort began to manipulate the Ring magazine ratings to justify the entry of some fighters, or to justify the exclusion of others. Some boxers who wanted admission were told they had to kick back a portion of their purses, or they had to get rid of their present managers and turn their careers over to King.

  Boxing is a small community with an active grapevine, and this kind of chicanery was not a secret for long. A phone call to Texas, or a conversation in a Detroit gym, can quickly become known to a few hundred managers, trainers, matchmakers, and fighters who live the sport twenty-four hours a day, eking out an existence on the margin.

  In September 1976, John Martin of ABC Sports met with Hank Schwartz, who was trying to organize a competing tournament in partnership with Don Elbaum. Martin says that Schwartz told him exactly how ABC’s venture was being tainted.

  Schwartz warned Martin that only “house fighters” owned or controlled by King, Flood, and Braverman were being allowed into the tournament. Around the same time, Teddy Brenner of Madison Square Garden wrote a letter directly to Roone Arledge, the president of ABC Sports, alerting him to King’s methods and offering to provide higher-quality fighters and more competitive matches.

  On September 22, King h
eld a press conference at the ‘21’ Club, announcing the tournament, although he had not yet provided ABC with a list of any of the fighters who would be participating. At the press conference King did not announce any of the first-round pairings but declared, “This is a monumental, historic moment.” He also promised to promote some of the fights in New York, which never happened.

  James Farley, the quality-control supervisor, declared, “I’m proud to be part of it.”

  To spice up his press conference, King had ex-champs Rocky Graziano and Jersey Joe Walcott there, talking up the tournament and schmoozing with the press. Despite the absence of hard news, the press conference got a three-column headline in the New York Times, a two-column headline in Variety, and good space all across the country.

  King was out of his glum period. He had a deal, he had OPM, and he had a project to sell. He started taking reporters out to dinner, picking up tabs, being accessible, slapping reporters on the back and pleading, “Make me big,” and promising to stage fights “like Zale and Graziano” and to discover “the next Ali, who just needs a break.”

  Ike Fluellen was not exactly the next Ali. He was a cop in a Houston suburb and a former fighter who had not been in the ring in over a year. In late September, he got a call from manager Chris Cline, a Johnny Ort friend, who told Fluellen he could get him into Don King’s television tournament. He also told the police officer he could get him rated in the top ten by Ring magazine—if Fluellen agreed to hire Cline as his manager. He told Fluellen getting into the tournament “meant big money.”

  Fluellen was a good cop but not much of a fighter. He had no fights during all of 1976, had lost his last fight in mid-1975, and had never defeated a rated boxer in his life. He was basically retired. But he agreed to pay Cline a booking fee, and was told he was in the tournament. Fluellen started out to the gym and training again.

  About ten weeks later, Fluellen brought the January 1977 issue of Ring magazine and was pleasantly surprised to see that he was suddenly rated the Number 10 junior middleweight in all of the United States. Fluellen then called Johnny Ort at Ring and told him that he hadn’t had a fight in well over a year. Ort just told him that he had a helluva manager in Chris Cline, whom he could trust because he was honest.

  Meanwhile, some of the most talented young fighters in America— all black and Latin—were being excluded from the tournament. Among this group were Eddie Gregory, Mike Ayala, Marvin Johnson, Matthew Franklin, and Ronnie Harris.

  The best was Marvin Hagler, already the most feared middleweight in America, the uncrowned people’s champion, ducked by the top contenders, broke and in need of a break, in need of a fight on television to show the world how good this lefty from Brockton, Massachusetts, really was. Hagler’s co-manager, Goody Petronelli, desperately wanted to get his fighter into the tournament, and he wrote to King, Ring, and ABC to make his case. But he was told he would have to pay a kickback to Flood.

  “King and his people wanted to take over Marvin’s career,” Petronelli told me years later. “They insisted me and my brother surrender all our rights to Marvin, if they let him into the tournament. King would have become his new manager if he won. We don’t do business that way. Marvin won the world title in 1980, and we never did a single title defense promoted by King the rest of Marvin’s career.”

  To add insult to Hagler’s injury, King put Johnny Baldwin in the tournament, a boxer Hagler had defeated on December 20, 1975, who had not fought since that punishing one-sided beating.

  King also put middleweights Bobby Watts and Willie Monroe in the tournament, both of whom were qualified. But Hagler would later beat both of them, knocking out Monroe in February 1977, and knocking out Watts in April 1980.

  The record shows that Petronelli wrote directly to Roone Arledge on February 22, 1977, protesting Hagler’s exclusion from the tournament and saying the price of admission had been King’s future control of Hagler.

  Some of the fighters who got in were openly managed by Braver-man and Flood, and others were semi-openly managed by King himself. The top heavyweight who got an invitation was Larry Holmes, whom King had already stolen from his first manager, Ernie Butler of Easton, Pennsylvania. Holmes’s official manager in 1976 was Sportsville, Inc., a company whose president was King’s stepson Carl.

  Two parallel trains were now on the track. King, ABC, and $2 million were on an express, getting favorable publicity, laying the groundwork for a future monopoly based on King’s inventory and ABC’s corporate wealth.

  The handful of powerless critics were boarding another train, a local still in the station, collecting anecdotal evidence, warning anyone who would listen that the express would eventually go over a cliff. But no one was taking the critics seriously yet; subsidized hype always has a big head start on truth that has no institutional base.

  In mid-October, ABC’s John Martin met Schwartz and Don Elbaum for drinks in Manhattan, at the Gattopardo Restaurant. Martin was not a boxing expert and had no direct role in the tournament, but he was already becoming uneasy about King’s practices and was willing to listen to the two insiders who’d known King longer than anyone else.

  Schwartz and Elbaum showed Martin a partial list of the fighters who would be in the tournament and explained how each one was tied to King, Flood, Braverman, or Ort and was not qualified in terms of merit.

  Elbaum also explained that honest managers of promising fighters were afraid to enter the tournament because they feared King would steal their fighters away, either through an optional first refusal clause King was putting into contracts, or just with a promise to get a fight on national TV.

  Elbaum also told Martin that the Ring ratings were “becoming a joke,” demonstrating how obscure preliminary fighters—with certain connections—were suddenly getting rated in the top ten, followed by tournament invitations.

  Schwartz also stressed that his competing tournament, which would be syndicated to local independent stations, had already signed up some of the best young fighters excluded by King. Among those Schwartz named were Eddie Gregory, Vito Antuofermo, and Mike Weaver, all of whom went on to become world champions in a few years.

  Martin passed along all this information to others at ABC Sports. “I told Spence, but it was like talking to a stone wall,” he says.

  On October 21, aware of the criticism, King employed his jailhouse attack bravado; he met with Spence and asked for an additional $500,000 to be added to his contract because of “budget miscalculations.” Arledge agreed.

  Around this time King felt so secure with his ABC connections that he began to hint to executives, including Martin, that ABC should give him a national late-night talk show, so he could compete against Johnny Carson.

  On October 26, Henry Grooms, the Michigan manager of Greg Coverson, was mailed an invitation to enter the tournament. As of that date, Coverson had had only six professional fights. There were probably one hundred boxers at his weight more deserving of invitations. When the Ring Record Book was published in April 1977, Johnny Ort had added two wins to Coverson’s record. These weren’t fixed fights—they were fictional fights.

  In November, ABC’s corporate lawyers approved the form of the contracts the fighters would be asked to sign with Don King Productions. The contract contained a clause that said if the fighter won the tournament, King would have the option to promote all of the fighter’s matches for the next two years.

  This language—approved by ABC—was the cornerstone of King’s shrewd grand design. With ABC’s money, he would be able to monopolize young fighters after they had enjoyed a year of television exposure at ABC’s expense. After losing Ali to Arum, King’s goal was now quantity—numbers of fighters, inventory, product—as many fighters as possible under contract to him.

  Also King contrived to have as many white fighters as possible in the tournament, knowing their commercial value, recognizing the commercial success of the film Rocky. When some at ABC questioned the ability of these white fighters, like Biff
Cline (Chris’s son), Pat Dolan, Tom Prater, John Sullivan, and Casey Gacic, King’s rebuttal was always “The public wants to see fights between white and black fighters,” which was certainly true.

  It was also in November that King gave Johnny Ort his second cash payment—$3,000. But only after King wrote a check for $5,000 to Ort, which King then ripped up for some nefarious accounting reason.

  In November 1976, Alex Wallau was twenty-seven years old, less than a year on ABC’s payroll, working in sports producing on-air promos, publicizing future events. He would go on to become a star, an excellent on-air boxing analyst and a top ABC sports executive after he survived and conquered a 1988 diagnosis of cancer.

  But in November, Wallau was a kid, on the road in San Francisco, when he first began to hear grapevine gossip about how King was manipulating the tournament. Although Wallau was not directly involved in boxing then, he loved the sport, going to as many fights as possible, visiting gyms, and he knew most of the idealistic reformers in the sport, a tight little network.

  “When I got back to New York,” Wallau recalls, “I saw the list of fighters in the tournament. I could tell many of them were stiffs, prelim fighters who didn’t belong on national television. The first person I went to was Bob Greenway of ABC Sports and told him this is a mistake, ABC will get embarrassed. He told me it couldn’t be stopped, and later told me that Jim Spence wanted my views in writing.

  “Suddenly I felt like my ass was on the line. What if I’m wrong? I’ll get fired. Evaluating talent is so subjective, how could I prove my impressionistic opinion was sound?”

  So Wallau took a few days to document his opinions by trying to reconstruct the career records of some of the fighters in the tournament who he thought did not merit entry.

 

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