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

by Jack Newfield

  Not only would Holmes have to live down the “quitter” label, but many boxing experts would also write off his future because of his physiology. “Spindly ankles and thin calves” became a mantra with an echo, as experts decided that Holmes’s upper body was too heavy for his coltish legs, and that he would never be “a real heavyweight.”

  But Ernie Butler never lost faith in Larry Holmes. They kept working together in the gym in Easton, even after the loss in the trials, while Holmes drove a truck to earn money, contributing to the support of his eleven brothers and sisters.

  On March 21, 1973, Holmes had his first professional fight. He overcame fear and nerves to win a four-round decision from Rodell Dupree in Scranton. He earned $63, and Butler took $10 of it and opened a bank account in Holmes’s name. The next day Holmes reported for work.

  In May, June, and August Holmes won three more four-round fights in Scranton. After each one, Butler remembers, they slept on a couch, or on the floor in a friend’s house, to save the expense of renting a motel room they couldn’t afford.

  In the summer of 1973 Holmes and Butler were a team. They laughed together, partied together, sweated together, dreamed together, traveled together, and practically slept together.

  “I always wanted Larry to spar with fighters better than him, so he would learn,” Butler says. “So I had him up at Deer Lake, boxing with Ali, Jeff Merritt, and Roy Williams. So one day I drove him down to New York City, to Bobby Gleason’s gym, to get him some good sparring. I was also hoping some important people might notice him, and he could get a fight in Madison Square Garden.”

  The day Butler and Holmes arrived at Gleason’s, Shavers was there, preparing for his match with Jimmy Ellis at the Garden. Shavers needed someone to spar with him who could move, jab, and smother punches like Ellis. Young Holmes volunteered for the assignment as an Ellis impersonator.

  Holmes went three rounds with Shavers that day, feeling quicker than Shavers, feeling he could hit Shavers with his jab. But Shavers did connect with one big right that Holmes would never forget, despite his protective headgear. He felt Shavers’s power and filed away the memory.

  It turned out that Don King was in Gleason’s that day as Shavers’s co-manager, making a grand entrance after their sparring session had finished. King had a flunky with him who was giving out photographs. They were not pictures of Shavers, but of King himself, who was then unknown in New York.

  Butler had heard about King from Jeff Merritt during his visits with Holmes to Deer Lake. Butler remembers introducing himself to King, who was “acting like a big shot already,” and trying to tell him what a valuable prospect Holmes was, that he was going to be champion one day.

  Holmes remembers that he went up to King that first day and asked him to autograph one of the pictures of himself. It said, “Best wishes, Don King.”*

  That day in Gleason’s, Holmes also talked to Richie Giachetti, who had watched him spar with Shavers and liked what he saw. Giachetti was a trainer of King’s fighters and a compadre going back to the Cleveland rackets, which was how he acquired the scar on his face. He also had a better eye for talent than King, and he began to tell King to pay some attention to Holmes, that the kid could box.

  * Some of the details in this chapter come from a never-published manuscript by professor and author Sam Toperoff, who was generous enough to let me read it. The text was a collaboration between him and Holmes for a book to be published under Holmes’s name in the first person. But the book, finished in 1988, never came out for several reasons. One was that Holmes had wavered on including several details about King after he received some threats. “The book contained what Holmes told me was true,” Toperoff says.

  King never really became a believer in Holmes, but he trusted Giachetti’s judgment enough to get interested. Over the next year King basically stole Larry Holmes from Ernie Butler, even though Butler had a five-year managerial contract with Holmes, dated March 21, the day of Holmes’s first pro fight.

  In June or July 1973, Giachetti called Holmes at home and asked him to come to New York—without Butler—and meet privately with him and King. Holmes drove the ninety minutes to Manhattan and King told him he wanted to become his manager. Holmes reminded King that Butler was already his manager, and King assured him that he would work out everything directly with Butler and not to worry about it.

  “I’d like to keep Ernie in my corner in some way,” Holmes told King.

  “We’ll work that out, don’t worry,” King soothed Holmes.

  Then Holmes, King, and Giachetti went down to the New York State Athletic Commission—in King’s limo—and signed papers making King Holmes’s legal manager in New York State.

  Butler says that in December 1973 he entered into a contract with King under which the two men would be co-managers of Holmes, sharing the manager’s end of purses as fifty-fifty partners.

  “I never got any money from the contract with Don King,” Butler says. “I had a little contract with Larry, but they told me it wasn’t any good. Don told me it wasn’t written on commission paper. I know it was drawn up by a qualified lawyer, but Don told me it wasn’t exactly legal.

  “I was with Larry for his first twenty fights, but Don was pushing me out, telling Larry I didn’t know anything, that I didn’t have the right connections to move him up.

  “I took Larry to Ali’s camp and let him stay there. He boxed with Ali every week through 1974. In fact, he went to Zaire with Ali as his sparring partner, and came back when the fight was postponed.

  “It was up at Deer Lake that King started talking behind my back to Larry. He started making Larry all kinds of promises. King can talk real fast. I was working as a guard at the county jail that year and it was sixty miles to Deer Lake. I couldn’t get there all the time. I had to raise my two children. Don just wormed his way in while I was working and being a family man.”

  In the August 1977 issue of Sport Magazine, Sam Toperoff published an article thoroughly exposing the King–ABC tournament. In the course of researching the article, Toperoff had interviewed Butler back in April 1977, since Holmes was in the tournament and King was saying any criticisms of the tournament were based on bias against black people. So Toperoff went to see the black person King had victimized to get Larry Holmes.

  Toperoff quoted Butler as saying: “I picked the kid [Holmes] off the streets when he was 17, 18 years old. Taught him everything. Bring him along slow, the right way. Just when he’s ready to be something, Giachetti shows up and tells him Don King is interested in promoting his career. But he’s got to sign with them. There’s no way to keep a kid then. They tell me I’m going along with them since I developed him. But when it came down to it, they didn’t take me.”

  By the middle of 1975, Butler was completely eased out of the picture, no longer even asked to carry the bucket in the corner or help in the gym. In October 1975 Butler filed a lawsuit against Holmes for breach of contract.

  As soon as he filed the lawsuit, Butler says, he began receiving threatening and harassing phone calls in the middle of the night. He later told the FBI that Holmes’s lawyer, Charles Spaziani, delivered threats to his lawyer, Frank Van Antwerpin, that the lawsuit better be dropped “or else.” Butler also got anonymous telephone threats warning him to stop complaining about not getting paid his managerial share of Holmes’s purses.

  Butler told Ed Howarth, a Philadelphia matchmaker, that King altered their December 1973 contract and forged Butler’s name to a new contract, and later Howarth gave this information to the FBI.

  Butler is resigned to what happened to him, and still bitter about it. “Me and Larry, we’re still friends,” he said. “I see Larry all the time, he lives a mile away. I can’t stay mad at Larry and I can’t blame him for what happened. If I was in Larry’s shoes, I might have done the same thing. Maybe I was holding him back. Larry had a chance to make some big money and maybe I wasn’t the best manager to get him those big fights.

  “But King didn’t d
eal with me right. He sent those threats on my life. Don promised me I would stay with Larry as a trainer, even after Don became the manager and promoter. That would have been fair, that would have been nice. But as soon as the real money started coming in, they got rid of me. They should have let me stay part of Larry’s team because I did discover him and teach him a few things.

  “After 1974, I got nothing. I would see Larry fight on TV and feel bad I wasn’t with him. I got an old scrapbook about me and Larry, but I never look at it anymore. I was depressed for a long time over how I got dumped. I was hurt worse than in any of my hundred and four fights.”

  Holmes told Toperoff, “Ernie cared for me too much and protected me too much,” meaning Butler was reluctant to match Holmes with tougher, riskier opponents, out of genuine affection. Holmes felt he didn’t have the luxury of coming along slowly, that he had to prove himself quickly against better opponents if he was going to erase the stigma of the Olympic trials disqualification. He knew that behind his back the boxing crowd was still whispering “dog,” and “yellow.”

  While Giachetti saw something in Holmes, Al Braverman and Paddy Flood did not. And their bad-mouthing seemed to reinforce King’s lack of confidence in Holmes. King was getting Holmes some fights, but they were insignificant preliminary fights.

  This inferior treatment began to feed a streak of resentment and hurt feelings deep inside Larry Holmes, who was more sensitive than most fighters. He always felt like a stepchild in King’s camp. He felt like he was regarded just as an Ali sparring partner, that King always preferred the other heavyweights in his herd—Merritt, Shavers, Kevin Isaac, Roy Williams, and later Michael Dokes, Ossie Ocasio, and Greg Page.

  King would eventually promote fights matching Holmes against Isaac, Williams, Shavers, and Ocasio in an attempt, at least in Holmes’s mind, to use him as a stepping-stone for another fighter’s career. King, who had bet his prison cigarettes against Joe Frazier, never really appreciated Holmes’s talent, and Holmes would tell reporters for years that King lost a lot of money betting against him when he fought Shavers in 1978.

  On November 28, 1973, King put Holmes in the ring with Kevin Isaac, in a preliminary to the Jeff Merritt–Ron Stander main event in Cleveland. Isaac was a bright prospect and Holmes was just a sparring partner. But Holmes survived a first-round knockdown and stopped Isaac in the third, displaying both power and passion. But the knockdown only made King think Holmes had a weak chin; he didn’t notice the strong heart.

  Shortly after this fight Holmes asked King for a $50 loan. King told him he didn’t have the money, but Holmes had just seen him flash his customary cash wad of thousands.

  During 1974 Holmes fought only three times, each time for very little money in Scranton. He felt King was neglecting him while focusing on making, and then holding together, the Ali–Foreman deal.*

  In 1975 King used Holmes, as befitting a fighter stereotyped as just a sparring partner, in preliminary fights underneath Ali–Wepner in Cleveland, and Ali–Frazier in Manila. In Cleveland, Holmes knocked out the badly washed-up light heavyweight Charley “Devil” Green, and in Manila, he knocked out Rodney Bobick, Duane’s brother, in revenge once removed.

  In December, King put Holmes on the undercard of a Roberto Duran fight in San Juan. The opponent was the mediocre Billy Joiner and King promised Holmes $1,000. There was no negotiation because Holmes did not have an independent manager to represent his interests. King dictated the compensation. After a fight he would pay Holmes in cash from the large roll in his pocket with no official accounting.

  Holmes says that just before the fight started, King told him to “carry” Joiner—not try to knock him out because he needed to fill time before the Duran fight went live on television. But Joiner was not clued into the scenario for a long, easy fight. He stung Holmes with punches in the first two rounds. Holmes, worried about looking bad, worried about maintaining his unbeaten record, went out and finished joiner in the third, messing up King’s TV timetable.

  * On the way to Zaire, King asked Holmes to carry his bags at the airport. Gene Kilroy interceded, saying a sparring partner had too much dignity for such a task.

  When it came time to get paid, King peeled off three $100 bills and gave them to Holmes, not the promised $1,000. Holmes couldn’t believe the most powerful man in boxing would cheat him out of $700. He went crazy on King and the two men were screaming insults at each other in the runway outside the dressing rooms. The argument came close to violence before King backed down and paid the promised $700.

  In the unpublished Toperoff manuscript, Holmes said about King’s treatment of fighters: “I’ve had a lot of time in recent years to think about why Don does what he does to fighters. With Don it was making money off them, sure, but there was something more to it. He really uses money as a form of power and control over fighters. I believe that deep down Don King hates fighters, is jealous of them, because we can do what a fat old bullshitter like him can’t do—and that’s fight. That is why he wanted to have such power over us, to humiliate us.”

  In April 1976 Holmes was staying at a motel in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to be near his future wife, Diane Robinson. He thought nobody knew he was there. But Don King, who has the skills of a private detective, located him and told him he was fighting Roy Williams, in a week!

  King told Holmes the fight would be a preliminary to Ali’s title defense against Jimmy Young, but Holmes did not want to take the fight. He was in love. He had just won a fight two weeks before and was resting. And he knew Roy Williams very well from the gym at Deer Lake. He was six feet six inches, 340 pounds, and so good nobody wanted to fight him. Holmes had seen him give Ali a hard time in sparring sessions. Williams had already beaten Jimmy Young, and Young was fighting Ali in the main event.

  Roy Williams was one tough man who had never gotten a break in his life, so he had become a sparring partner instead of a contender.

  “No way, Don,” Holmes said. “I need a lot more than a week to get ready for a guy like Roy Williams.”

  “If you don’t want to do this thing,” King explained, “you can become like a needle in a haystack—h-a-a-a-a-a-r-d to find.”

  Holmes suddenly felt he had no choice, that this was a threat of blacklisted unemployment if he didn’t do what King wanted. When Holmes asked how much he would get paid, King said $2,500, which was a humiliation, since Holmes had gotten $5,000 to fight the much easier Rodney Bobick in Manila.

  Holmes always felt that Al Braverman was behind the decision to throw him in with Roy Williams on short notice, and later told him so. Braverman was then managing his own heavyweight, a white hope named Dino Dennis, who was undefeated although not much of a fighter. Dennis was being coddled because he was white, and an unbeaten white heavyweight is the most precious commodity in boxing. Holmes suspected that Braverman had talked King into making the fight with Roy Williams in order to knock him off and make Dennis the heavyweight star of King’s stable.

  Holmes won the fight, partly because by then Williams’s fire was gone, snuffed out by years of neglect and the mentality of being a sparring partner too long. But in the first round Holmes broke his right thumb, proving again to the doubters he could work his way through severe pain and not quit. Despite the excruciating agony, Holmes won the fight with one hand, his left jab, and his lateral movement on those spindly legs.

  After the fight King refused to pay Holmes’s medical bills for the broken thumb, another psychic injury that went into Holmes’s memory vault of grievance.

  But Holmes was smart and he used the life of Roy Williams, who ended up in prison for a murder, as a cautionary tale, and as a reverse role model of what not to let boxing do to him. He respected Williams as a fighter, and liked him as a man, and he saw what the sewer politics of boxing had done to him. He promised himself never to become an interchangeable pawn in Don King’s overstocked inventory.

  After the Williams fight, Holmes quit as Ali’s sparring partner, and his lawyer, Charles S
paziani, took care of his medical bills.

  Holmes’s thumb was cracked in two places at the base and he couldn’t go to the gym for three months. At night he developed secret terrors that it would break again in future fights, that this was a career-ending injury, that he had to develop employable skills for the real-world economy. He worried about how he would earn money during this period of inactivity.

  The first day he went back into the gym, Holmes rebroke the thumb as he was testing it on the heavy bag. This time doctors implanted four pins at the base of the finger and told the fighter to give the thumb complete rest for four months. His arm was set in a cast that stretched from his shoulder to his fingertips.

  Holmes would be idle for nine months because of the injury in a fight he wasn’t allowed to refuse. He was twenty-six years old, and this should have been his prime. Instead, he had all this time to brood, about whether his thumb would be a chronic injury, and about why he never had any choice about whom he fought or how much he got paid.

  Holmes’s first fight after the hiatus was the easy one with Tom Prater in the ABC tournament. Howard Cosell told the nation that the winner of the first-round heavyweight match was getting paid $15,000. But Holmes got paid only $7,000 by King, who took a manager’s share even though he was also the promoter, getting his $250,000 fee from ABC. Holmes had to swallow the subtraction since he was counting on two more paydays from the tournament, and this was his first income in nine months.

  So when the tournament was killed, on the eve of Holmes’s fight with Stan Ward, Holmes got dejected, and then very angry. He had just lost a potential $100,000 because King wasn’t playing it straight with ABC. Holmes was now a year older and still undefeated, but his career was drifting without momentum. And the future of his manager-promoter seemed jeopardized by possible indictment. Holmes even thought about going back to driving a truck.

  But whenever King gets into trouble, he just puts his head down and keeps on promoting bouts as if nothing is wrong. In March he put Holmes into a semifinal in San Juan against journeyman Horace Robinson. Holmes won easily but noticed that King had signed another young heavyweight to fight on the same card, Ossie Ocasio of Puerto Rico. It made Holmes feel like he would never be King’s favored son, that there would always be a new face like Ocasio, or an ex-champ like Foreman, or an old warhorse like Shavers, or a white hope like Dennis to displace him, no matter what he did to prove himself.