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

by Jack Newfield

  At the same time, boxers began to reject gigantic offers for matches promoted at Sun City. Sugar Ray Leonard rejected one mega-offer. And Muhammad Ali confirmed that he had rejected an offer by Kerzner to co-promote his 1978 rematch with Leon Spinks in South Africa.

  Given this moral example by the two preeminent fighters of the era, very few black American fighters were prepared to follow Tate and Weaver into the eye of apartheid.

  Also, Nelson Mandela, a former amateur boxer and knowledgeable fan, put out the word through the African National Congress that he believed the international boycott by athletes and artists was important and effective.

  Soon an organization was formed called Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid. Its moving spirits were tennis great Arthur Ashe, singer-activist Harry Belafonte, and Randall Robinson, the executive director of Trans-Africa. Don King became a charter member of this group and a signatory to its founding principles.

  Also in 1983, Gerrie Coetzee was moving into contention for another chance at the heavyweight championship. He decisively beat up and knocked down Renaldo Snipes, but didn’t get the decision because the fight was held in Westchester, Snipes’s home turf. And he acquired a hardworking novice promoter named Cedric Kushner.

  After hooking up with Kushner, Coetzee knocked out Stan Ward in three rounds and fought an exciting draw with highly ranked Pinklon Thomas that was on national television. After this, the WBA rated Coetzee among the top contenders, making him eligible for a title fight.

  Kushner is yet another one of those Runyonesque boxing characters—rowdy, colorful, a captivating storyteller about his own novelistic life.

  Now a millionaire with offices in East Hampton, Long Island, Kushner started out as a sixth-grade dropout in South Africa. His first job was on a cargo ship to Europe, cleaning the cages of rhinoceroses.

  On his twenty-second birthday, in July 1971, Kushner arrived in America with $400 in his pocket and an immigrant’s burning desire to work. He became a laborer in Boston, a pool cleaner in Miami Beach, a Ferris wheel operator in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and a messenger in Manhattan.

  “When I was in Miami, I used to stand in front of the Fontainebleau Hotel every night and just watch all the rich people coming in and going out, all dressed up, having valets retrieve their expensive cars for them. I just looked. That was my hobby.”

  At the 1972 Munich Olympics Kushner had a job as a bilingual ticket scalper. While scalping tickets he met a Texas businessman who gave him his card because he was impressed by the way Kushner negotiated ticket prices in both German and English.

  Eighteen months later Kushner contacted the name on the business card, and the man staked him to $5,000 to get into the business of being a music-concert promoter. His maiden effort was a Steppenwolf concert on November 19, 1974.

  After that, Kushner rose in the cutthroat music competition that is a fine preparation for boxing, promoting concert tours by Fleetwood Mac, Bob Seger, Rod Stewart, and Joni Mitchell.

  By 1980 Kushner was a big-time rock and pop promoter when he was indicted for antitrust violations involving collusion with another promoter to monopolize territorial rights. Kushner was eventually given two years probation and fined $10,000. But in boxing, somebody with just one conviction is considered a reformer.

  And by the summer of 1982 boxing was the next career Kushner had in mind for himself. He was a fan, and on a humid August night he traveled up to Westchester, bought a ticket, and watched Gerrie Coetzee, his fellow South African, beat up Renaldo Snipes but get robbed of the decision by the local judges.

  Kushner, a short, bulky man with a walrus mustache, managed to shove his way into Coetzee’s dressing room after the fight. He introduced himself to the bitterly disappointed fighter and told him in Afrikaans, “If I had been your promoter, you wouldn’t have lost this fight.”

  It took Kushner three more months to finally arrange a meeting with Coetzee’s manager, Peter Venison, who was a hotel management expert and traveled much of the time. When the two men finally met, Kushner was aggressive and spelled out a whole marketing and management plan to get Coetzee another shot at the title.

  “Gerrie has to move to the United States,” Kushner argued. “He has to divorce himself from South Africa. Apartheid is becoming a burden to his career. He has to move his wife and kids to America. We have to Americanize him. He has to come across as a nice guy.”

  One part of the plan was easy: Coetzee loved America. The other part was harder. He was not such a nice guy. He was moody, temperamental, suspicious, disloyal, filled with self-doubt over his earlier defeats and the fragile bones in his right hand that had already required fourteen operations.

  After a few weeks of negotiations a plan was agreed on. Kushner would co-promote Coetzee’s fights with Bob Arum, with Venison remaining the manager. Kushner would baby-sit the fighter day-today, while Arum would make the fights and negotiate the television deals. Early in 1983 Coetzee’s wife and two children moved into a rented house in Pleasantville, New Jersey, near Atlantic City.

  Coetzee’s first major fight for this new team was with Pinklon Thomas in Atlantic City. In the dressing room before the match Coetzee was in a paranoid fever. He was worried about his hand, which he had hurt again during training. He was worried about the officiating in New Jersey, feeling a white South African could not get a fair shake as a result of the bad decision in the Snipes fight.

  Kushner was also apprehensive about the judging, but the day before the fight he had praised the New Jersey officials to reporters, saying he had “total faith in the integrity of the commission.” Of course he didn’t, but he thought the extravagant, if insincere, flattery was the appropriate reverse psychology in a no-win situation.

  But a few minutes before the fight, Thomas’s handlers used some of their own Freudian jabs. They came into Coetzee’s dressing room and charged he had too much wrapping on his tender right hand to cushion it. George Benton demanded that Coetzee’s hand be rewrapped in front of a commission member.

  The uptight Coetzee stormed out of his own dressing room, saying he wouldn’t go through with the fight if he was forced to rebandage his hands. Since the fight was on national television, and contracts had been signed and monies advanced, a sudden cancellation would be a calamity for everybody involved.

  Kushner promised Jersey Joe Walcott and Bob Lee of the commission that he would “pacify and control” Coetzee and there would not be any cancellation. He gave the same assurance to Mort Sharnik and Gil Clancy of CBS. Then he found Coetzee, coaxed him back to the dressing room, and by then there was no time to examine or change the hand wrappings.

  After the fight, which was legitimately a draw, Kushner filibustered for ten minutes, paying homage to the judge and the New Jersey commission for treating his fighter fairly and respectfully. It was smart politics. The papers carried Kushner’s generous quotes, and Coetzee suddenly had some goodwill in New Jersey, where he was now describing himself to reporters as a happy resident of America.

  In boxing the double-cross is as frequent, and as swift, as the right cross. And right after this fight Kushner and Arum had a falling-out. Arum says Kushner dumped him to deal with Don King. Kushner says Arum told him he would make a title fight between Coetzee and Larry Holmes, but that Kushner could not be part of the promotion.

  Whichever version is closer to the truth, the split created the opening for Kushner to approach Don King about Coetzee getting a title fight with Michael Dokes, who was the WBA champion, controlled by King and managed by Carl King as a front.

  Kushner was smart, tough, and aggressive, but he was no match at the negotiating table for King, who had outthought heads of nations and major corporations. Kushner had been in the boxing business only a year, and King had all the leverage. He controlled the champion, and he was able to hold South Africa over Kushner’s head.

  From the outset King had no reluctance to promote a fight with Coetzee. It might have been political immorality for Arum to promote Kall
ie Knoetze, but King recognized it was good business for him to promote Gerrie Coetzee. Not only was King willing to be his promoter, despite his South African citizenship, King began the negotiations by demanding three options on Coetzee should he win the title from Dokes.

  Kushner told King: “I find this a little inconsistent. First you don’t want to do business with me, or the fighter, because he’s from a nation that practices racial apartheid. Now you tell me the only way you’ll do business is if you have options.”

  By the time Kushner said he was willing to accept giving King three options, King had changed his position and demanded the contract give him options for the “lifetime of Coetzee’s championship, should he win.”

  “What you’re telling me,” Kushner summarized, “is that if Gerrie is successful in the Dokes fight, and then he has five defenses, you have to be the exclusive promoter for all five defenses.”

  “Absolutely,” King replied. “If you don’t give me the options, there is no fight.”

  Recalling the negotiations now, Kushner says, “It was a total paradox. King was saying on the one hand, ‘I won’t fight him because he is a South African,’ and on the other hand he was saying, ‘If you don’t give me the lifetime options that I’m asking for, I won’t fight him either.’ And I’m embarrassed to say those are the terms I finally agreed to. I can tell you that if you’ve only been in the boxing business for one year, and you’re dealing with Don King, he’s going to chew you up and spit you out for breakfast.

  “Coetzee was the mandatory challenger and according to the rules I didn’t have to sign options with King to get the fight. But Don told me there would be no fight without lifetime options. I felt I had no choice. Coetzee was twenty-eight, and he had fragile hands. He had already lost two title chances. This was going to be his last chance. So King got everything he wanted.”

  Don King gave the white South African a chance at the title with a black fighter he called his son, who was managed by his stepson, and stipulated that should his surrogate son lose, he would become the exclusive promoter of the white fighter he should be boycotting, not monopolizing. Kushner never saw Carl King during the entire negotiations.

  King set the fight for September 23, 1983, at the Richfield, Ohio, Coliseum, and sold the television rights to HBO. By the time the fight was signed, Dokes was a cocaine addict, but Kushner and Coetzee didn’t know this.

  The night of the fight there was a ragtag band of fifteen anti-apartheid pickets outside the arena, and about seven thousand people rattling around the twenty-two thousand seats inside.

  Even though Dokes was born in nearby Akron, the fight, like many of King’s promotions, never caught on with the public. The undefeated Dokes went into the ring a 5-to-1 favorite. He had knocked out Mike Weaver to win the title, and Weaver had knocked out Coetzee. The day before the fight Coetzee’s own father had told boxing writers he gave his son “about a 2 percent chance to win.”

  But Coetzee dominated the whole fight. Dokes went into the ring with cocaine in his system and he was gasping for air by the fourth round. Coetzee knocked him down in the fifth and finished him in the tenth.

  At the close of the tenth round, Dokes’s hands were dropping and Coetzee clubbed him with two chopping rights. Dokes pitched forward on his face with his arm caught on the middle strand of rope.

  The bell rang but the count continued, and Dokes rolled over on his back and was counted out.

  Then came one of the defining, symbolic moments of Don King’s boxing life. He jumped into the ring, in his tuxedo and bow tie and gold jewelry, stepping right over the fallen black champion he called his son to embrace the new white champion from the land he had condemned. King was hugging Coetzee before Dokes could regain his senses.

  When Larry Merchant interviewed Coetzee in the ring for the HBO audience, the new champion thanked Don King first, and God second, for his victory.

  King, always five moves ahead of the competition, immediately understood he had a money machine in Coetzee. He had the first white heavyweight champion in twenty-three years, since Ingemar Johansson. He knew he had a puncher who was controversial. He had seen the box office success of the Rocky movies, and of the Cooney– Holmes fight. And he knew that Dokes could not excite fans, that the Richfield arena was two-thirds empty for this fight. He anticipated a series of black–white “grudge fights” with Coetzee that would make millions on closed-circuit TV.

  King had said it would be “an unpardonable sin” if Kallie Knoetze became heavyweight champion. But now he had just made a different white South African heavyweight champion and he was joyous over the deed. There was a holiday on King’s face, thinking about future profits, as he hovered next to Coetzee in the ring.

  A few minutes later King hugged Kushner, shouting, “Ced, my main man!” King invited Kushner into his limo and they drove back to Cleveland together.

  “The whole ride back in the limo King kept telling me how much money we’re going to make together,” Kushner says. “I had never seen Don so happy. He kept saying how much money we could make with Coetzee in South Africa. Dokes was still woozy and Don was already telling me to go to South Africa and start negotiating with Sun City for Gerrie’s first title defense. So I knew better than anyone else what a fucking fake and phony Don King is.”

  The next morning King woke up Kushner with a 7:00 A.M. call. King was already at his desk in the hotel, thinking about a title defense in South Africa and he asked the groggy Kushner to meet him right away to continue the conversation from the limo the night before.

  When they met over breakfast in the hotel coffee shop, King told Kushner he would get paid a straight $250,000 fee for each title defense by Coetzee. Then he asked Kushner to secure for him permission to go to South Africa so he could negotiate directly with Sun City and Sol Kerzner over how to stage a co-promotion at the resort.

  When King and Kushner met in New York a week later, King explained he couldn’t be the “open, public promoter” of a fight in South Africa because it would look bad politically, but he was willing to sell his option rights on Coetzee to Sun City in exchange for a letter of credit.

  King proposed as a challenger either Jeff Sims or Alfredo Evangelista, two fighters not serious contenders but already under exclusive promotional contracts to King.

  Meanwhile, another promoter surfaced. Kenny Bounds wanted to match Coetzee with Larry Holmes in a unification title fight in Las Vegas. Bounds spent seven months trying to make this fight. He was an ambitious amateur with access to big money. He thought he could come right in, write checks, tie up all the players, make a $20 million killing, and become the new king of boxing. But in the end he would prove only how problematic it is to be a boxing promoter. His unrealistic math and negotiating inexperience would remind everyone how hard it is to be Don King, how hard it is to maintain longevity in boxing, how hard it is to outmaneuver all the competition year after year, how hard it is to make a big fight happen.

  Kenny Bounds was a thirty-six-year-old Dallas real estate developer and former Georgia Tech football player. He was probably the most wholesome would-be promoter in boxing history. He had owned a health food store, had been the state director of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and was a dropout from a Baptist seminary.

  Boxing is unstructured, like frontier gold prospecting, so Bounds first had to travel across the country buying up the various rights just to negotiate for a Coetzee–Holmes fight. He visited middlemen, managers, brokers, fixers, and lawyers. Soon he had made commitments of about $18 million just to get into the game.

  Bounds guaranteed Holmes $12 million and gave him a nonrefundable $3.5 million binder. He gave King $750,000 to sell his option on Coetzee for one fight, and signed an agreement to pay King an additional $6.7 million letter of credit by May of 1984. This $6.7 million was then supposed to be divided, with $3.2 million going to Coetzee, $2.2 million to Kushner, and the rest to King. This meant King would get about $2 million for doing nothing. Bounds also co
ntracted to pay Murad Muhammad $1 million as a finder’s fee for delivering Holmes to the deal.

  On top of all this, Bounds had to pay for travel, publicity, insurance, and undercard fighters. So going into the deal, he had a nut of about $20 million.

  Bounds held a press conference on March 12 to announce that Coetzee and Holmes would fight on June 8 at Caesars Palace in Vegas.

  “King can’t stop this fight,” Bounds told the press that day.

  King was playing his usual double game. He was trying to kill the fight by pretending to go along with it and overpricing the value of his option in the hope the financing would fall apart. Although King was not on good terms anymore with Holmes, his real goal seems to have been to co-promote a Holmes–Coetzee fight himself in South Africa, with his arch-rival Bob Arum playing the out-front role.

  In costing out the deal, Bounds made a series of rookie mistakes. He expected to sell the closed-circuit TV rights in South Africa for $5 million. But he forgot that June in Vegas was winter in South Africa with 35 degree temperatures and cold rains. Since the South African government didn’t permit closed-circuit fights anyway, Bounds could sell only the home TV rights for $1.5 million to the government-controlled TV station.

  Bounds also misjudged the value of the domestic TV sales. He was counting on selling the delayed-broadcast rights for $3 million. But he ended up selling the first delayed rights to HBO for $500,000, and the second delayed rights to ABC for $200,000.

  He had budgeted the live gate at $6 million, but all he could negotiate with Caesars was $3.5 million. Down the line the numbers kept coming up short. With the fight five weeks away, Bounds had guaranteed revenues of $9 million, and $2.0 million in expenditures.