After my third repetition of the question, King did something I had never seen him do before. He apologized, admitted he was wrong.
“Yes, I made the mistake of dealing,” he recanted at the same decibel level at which he had ranted. “And I’ve suffered deep contrition for it. I stand reproved. I apologize.”
Then he returned to the attack. “But you are nothing. You are an SOB. You are dirt.”
King then took a few steps away and continued to attack me to another group of reporters.
“Newfield is the worst guy who ever lived,” he said. “He’s just like Goebbels.”
But I was happy. For six years I had listened to him rationalize and sugarcoat his under-the-table payment from Sun City, and now we had his apology on videotape for our Frontline documentary.
But the good feeling didn’t last long. A few minutes later one of King’s goons, wearing a warmup suit, came up to me and whispered, “Better watch your back, Jack. This is Don’s town.”
A few seconds later, one of King’s press aides, Joe Safety, grabbed my press credential, which was hanging around my neck, and took it.
King had never denied me press credentials for any of his fights before. Despite investigative stories I had written in the past, King often kidded me and laughed them off. He had never gone out of control before. It must have been the disclosure of his betrayal of the ANC in front of so many black journalists and fighters. He certainly didn’t seem aware we were taping his tirade for public television.
I found Charles Stuart and told him what had happened, and he said, “Let’s go to the press office and get your credentials restored. They knew who we were when we applied for the credentials. All you did was ask one question.”
When we got to the press office, however, another press aide named Andy Olson confiscated Stuart’s credential, too. Olson was apologetic and explained he was “just following orders.” Olson advised us to have the executive producer of Frontline fax a letter to Don King Productions requesting restoration of our credentials to cover the fight, for which we had all flown to Las Vegas at considerable expense to PBS.
So we called the Frontline executives and lawyers back in Boston, and they did fax to us a high-minded letter about freedom of the press and the original intent of Madison and Jefferson. The next morning we took the fax to Joe Safety, but he refused to even read it. He said we were banned from coverage and ordered us to leave the press room.
John Solberg, King’s top press aide, came out from behind his desk and ordered us to leave, saying all our credentials had been revoked.
“This is worse than Central America!” exclaimed Charles Stuart, who was then editing a documentary on Noriega’s Panama.
“You’re violating the First Amendment,” I said. “I was just doing my job. I just asked one question.”
“On what grounds are you denying our application?” Stuart asked.
“I don’t have to give you a reason,” Solberg said. “It’s a privilege, not a right. Throw them out.”
Solberg then placed the palm of his hand over the lens of the camera, in the classic gesture of censorship by a fool who doesn’t realize the camera is still rolling.
“You are on private property! Take the tape out of this man’s camera!” Solberg shouted to some of King’s goons who were circling around us. But Jose Torres was standing next to Baynard, his hands clenched in a fist, and nobody made a move.
The private property we were on—the hallway—belonged to Steve Wynn and the Mirage, not King, and two Mirage security guards arrived at that moment.
“Take the tape out of the camera,” Solberg repeated.
But the security men realized we had a legal right to be taping in the hallway and made no attempt to confiscate the tape from Baynard’s camera.
As we started to leave, Carl King shouted to me, “I’m not as nice as my daddy. I’ll kick your fucking ass.”
Baynard caught that on tape, too.
“This is great,” Stuart said. “Mike Wallace lives for shit like this.”
Stuart was right. The confrontation with King made our documentary more dramatic and personal, and both Stuart and I won Emmys for the program. King’s volcanic eruption, and his apology, might have been the most self-revealing interview King has ever given.
On the night of the fight, Gene Kilroy, Muhammad Ali’s facilitator, sneaked me and Jose Torres into the ringside section, where we saw the fight and King saw us, not too happily.
A few hours after the confrontation ended, Jose Torres and I encountered Greg Page, who was still fighting, boxing an eight-round preliminary on the undercard against an opponent with a losing record.
We started to talk to him about his match with Coetzee at Sun City, when he won the heavyweight championship of the world, which should have been the best night of his career.
“Winning the title in South Africa has made my life much worse,” he said, his sad, fearful eyes darting around the room. “I’m sorry I went. I’m sorry I let Don talk me into it.”
After a pause he added, “Life ain’t fair, you know. Some things are better left unsaid. But my story is even worse than Tim Witherspoon’s.”
“Can we talk about it?” I asked.
“Don’s people are watching us,” the former champion said. “I’m in room 2104. Call me later.”
And he walked away.
When I called Page later in his room, he sounded just like Michael Dokes, another of the lost generation of Don King’s heavyweights.
“I can’t talk anymore,” Page said. “I still have a few fights left and I need Don. It’s like I told you, some things are best left unsaid.”
11. Tim Witherspoon and the Lost Generation of Heavyweights
The first time Tim Witherspoon became conscious of Don King’s presence in his life was in December 1981. Witherspoon was fighting Alfonzo Ratliff in Atlantic City when he heard that deep, commanding voice saying, “Terrible Tim, Terrible Tim, you’re going to be all right.”
Tim Witherspoon already knew about Don King, from his months as a sparring partner for Muhammad Ali, from watching television, from reading the sports pages. He knew King was the most powerful man in boxing, that he was “friends with presidents and Jesse Jackson,” and that “stars like Eddie Murphy and Diana Ross hung around him.” Tim knew it could be important if Don King was taking an interest in his career.
Once again Don King was the vulture on the ring post, starting to sing his song of seduction.
Nobody expected Tim Witherspoon to have a big pro career. Boxing was only his third favorite sport after football and basketball. Tim had been an all-city tight end in high school in Philadelphia, and was given a football scholarship to Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. But he quit college after one semester.
In 1978, he was working in a hospital, serving food to doctors, setting up rooms for parties, and preparing coffee and doughnuts for the surgeons, making $150 a week. He was also living at home with his five brothers and three sisters in a three-bedroom house.
As an all-around athlete, molded for competition, Tim started fooling around the local gym and discovered he liked boxing and had some natural ability. He tested himself in seven local amateur bouts, winning six and losing one to Marvis Frazier. He decided to turn pro and see what developed. He had no big-time connections. He certainly had won no amateur championships like Greg Page, Tony Tubbs, Michael Dokes, or Tony Tucker.
So Tim started far away from boxing’s mainstream. His first pro fight was in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. His second was in Lynchberg, Virginia. His third was in Commack, Long Island. His fourth was in McAfee, New Jersey. Tim’s manager was Mark Stewart, although they did not yet have a written contract.
During 1980 and 1981 Tim kept winning, learning, and started earning extra money as a sparring partner, first with light heavyweight champion and friend Matthew Saad Muhammad, and then with Muhammad Ali at Deer Lake. Soon he was earning enough as a sparring partner to quit his job at
the hospital.
In his ninth fight, Tim was thrown in with Marvin Stinson, a Philadelphia fighter who had been a big amateur star and was thought to have the potential for a successful pro career. Tim was considered just a stepping-stone. But Tim won a decisive ten-round decision in Atlantic City that made the insiders take notice of him for the first time.
After four more wins, Tim was matched with Alfonzo Ratliff on December 5, 1981. Ratliff was a capable fighter, who would go on to become a rated contender and fight Mike Tyson on HBO. But with Don King shouting out encouragement, Tim stopped him in seven and entered boxing’s major leagues.
In 1981 Don King did not have a promoter’s license in New Jersey because he had not yet received his pardon for the murder of Sam Garrett. So he had to operate through fronts and behind the scenes.
King went to Mark Stewart some time in mid-1981 and acquired an interest in Witherspoon that Tim didn’t even know about. King already had his hidden promotional rights to Witherspoon even before Tim heard his voice saying, “You’re going to be all right.”
Witherspoon signed a managerial contract with Mark Stewart on August 11, 1981. The contract gave Stewart 50 percent of Tim’s purses and Stewart guaranteed Tim an annual income of $100,000 a year. The contract was approved by the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission on August 18. This was four months before the Ratliff fight.
Stewart says he brought King into the picture and fronted for him as a promoter out of a sincere desire to further Tim’s career. But sometime later, Stewart also sold a managerial share in Tim to Carl King, for $50,000. At that point Stewart needed money for lawyers because he was under investigation by the FBI and IRS.
Stewart was eventually convicted and sentenced to four years in prison for tax fraud involving the preparation of false returns for forty-seven people—many of them sports celebrities—who had invested in a phony tax shelter controlled by Stewart. The whole thing was a sophisticated scam.
Tim liked Stewart and still thinks he was decently motivated. But because of his own problems, Stewart did steer his own fighter into a spiderweb of arrangements and relationships without even telling him.
Witherspoon was a good-natured, happy-go-lucky jock. He tended to trust people and was not prepared for the way he was cut up financially outside the ring.
Tim had never been in trouble or arrested in his life. But here at the outset of his career he already had a manager who was committing tax fraud, and a promoter who had gone to prison for manslaughter. And Tim didn’t even know any of this.
Witherspoon did not realize what was happening around him until August 1982. Don King had surfaced as Tim’s promoter a few months earlier, promoting his victory over Renaldo Snipes in Las Vegas, where King was licensed.
Right after that match King told Witherspoon he was fighting another young contender, James “Quick” Tillis, in August, in a match to be televised nationally by CBS. Tim was excited and felt confident he could beat Tillis.
But about a week before the fight Tim developed an infection in his right ear. He went to the Good Samaritan Hospital in Pottsyule, Pennsylvania, and was advised by a doctor to stop training and postpone the fight.
“The ear hurt, I felt weak, and the infection was hurting my sense of balance,” Witherspoon recalls. “So I called Don in Cleveland and told him what the doctor said. But Don told me to forget about the doctor; the fight had to go on because he was getting a lot of money from CBS television, and he would lose credibility if he had to cancel the date.
“Don played a trick on me,” Witherspoon says.
King told Tim to fly to Cleveland and “tell the reporters why you can’t fight.”
But when Tim arrived in Cleveland there was no press conference. Instead King took Witherspoon to the offices of the Cleveland boxing commission and ordered him to fight, regardless of the counsel of his physician. (There was no state athletic commission in Ohio until 1984.)
King had tipped off reporters and photographers to the meeting, and the next day pictures of Witherspoon facing the city commissioners were printed in the Cleveland papers.
Cleveland commissioners Mike Minnich and Eugene Pearson told Witherspoon they didn’t believe his story, and they suspended him indefinitely. Tim went home to Philadelphia confused, angry, and unable to earn a living without his license.
“I was pulling mothballs out of my pockets I was so broke,” Tim recalls.
After a few weeks King called Witherspoon with an ultimatum— sign long-term exclusive contracts with him and his stepson, and he would get the suspension lifted immediately. Otherwise Tim would be blacklisted and his career finished.
“I’m the commission, and the commission is me,” Witherspoon recalls King telling him. “Them guys ain’t nothing. It’s me. They do what I tell them.”
Witherspoon was quite willing to sign with King again to be his promoter, but he didn’t see any reason to pay Carl to be his manager, since Carl could not possibly be an independent negotiator for Tim against his own father.
(In 1989, in a deposition with prominent defense lawyer Tom Puccio, King admitted he pays Carl “a stipend,” which finally proved Carl couldn’t be an independent bargainer for his fighters, against his father.)
After holding out a few more days, Witherspoon finally surrendered. King had effectively used his monopoly power in Ohio to coerce the fighter into signing away his future.
Told he couldn’t bring a lawyer, Tim went alone to King’s office in Manhattan and signed four contracts of servitude. The first contract made Don King his exclusive promoter, which Tim wanted. The second made Carl King his manager and entitled Carl to 33 percent of all his earnings. The third contract was a copy of the second—except that it entitled Carl to 50 percent of Tim’s earnings. That was the one that would be enforced. The 33 percent contract was “for show,” to be filed with boxing commissions that prohibit a manager from taking half a fighter’s purse.
The fourth contract was totally blank. King could fill in any numbers, any opponent, any date he wanted.
At the end of the meeting King gave Witherspoon a $1,500 signing bonus.
In June 1991, Don King would be asked about this meeting and the blank contract in a nationally televised interview with Sam Donaldson of ABC. King’s double-talk explanation, according to the official ABC transcript, was: “Yes, it’s fair because we didn’t know what we were going to do until the fourth one. When we got to that stage, we were negotiating, then I signed him up, and with the price in the contract beforehand, it would not have been fair with him because what the price is, in today’s market may be different in the future market.”
Don King understood that every fighter who grew up poor was a sucker for a big pile of cash, that cash in fresh, green currency made more of an impression than a check for fifty times the amount. Tim Witherspoon, despite his high school diploma, was no exception.
Nine years later Tim’s face still lit up when he described the feeling of importance and exhilaration of having that $1,500 in his pocket driving back to Philly. “I loved it. It made me feel big,” Witherspoon said.
But for some chump change Don King had locked up Witherspoon body and soul. King held an exclusive contract as Tim’s promoter. His stepson was taking 50 percent of Tim’s earnings for nothing, and Don King was now Tim’s de facto manager as well as his promoter. Witherspoon had no manager to get him the best deal. By signing Witherspoon, King now controlled nine of the top ten heavyweights in the world. The vulture on the ring post had another meal.
As always in the beginning of a relationship with a fighter, King was on his best behavior—attentive, enthusiastic, honorable.
Tim’s first fight for the Kings was a shot at the heavyweight championship. King jumped Witherspoon over several more highly rated contenders and signed him to fight Larry Holmes in Las Vegas on May 20, 1983.
The fight with Holmes should have been the crowning achievement of his life, but instead it was the beginning of his disillusionment
and his obsession to secure fair treatment from Don King.
Judging fights is a subjective, almost impressionistic, enterprise. But most people thought Witherspoon defeated Holmes that night and was cheated of the crown by the officials. Holmes was thirty-three and he suddenly got old walking up the steps to the ring. He didn’t have the same mobility anymore.
Witherspoon was able to outjab the champion, and staggered him in the ninth round. Holmes sagged into the ropes and saved himself from a knockout by catching Witherspoon with a desperation punch and clinching. Even in his twilight, Holmes was most dangerous when he was hurt.
The television announcers thought Witherspoon had won. The crowd of sixteen thousand thought he’d won and booed the decision. But only one of the three officials gave Tim the decision.
Two days after the fight, Dave Anderson, with his typical grace and wit, wrote the truth in the New York Times:
If the two boxers had fought in a street somewhere and now were on display, a latecomer would surely be able to identify the winner. One was unmarked and unafraid, his face glowing as he had said, “I had fun. I know I can beat him.” The other was uncertain and unconvincing, his face glum and his right eye puffed as he said, “Maybe I’m going down a little bit, a couple of years ago he couldn’t have worn my socks.”
But the fight had been in a ring, not a street….
Larry Holmes later talked about how, “the judges gave me the fight.” One judge in particular, Chuck Hassett, imported from Anaheim, Calif., had the champion ahead, 118-111, awarding him nine rounds with one even—a scorecard that belonged in Disneyland in his hometown, not at ringside in the Dunes Hotel parking lot…. On my scorecard Tim Witherspoon deserved to be the new champion, 115-113 in points, seven rounds to five.
After the fight Witherspoon got an ever bigger shock. He had been promised a payment of $150,000. His contract had been reported in all the newspapers. But instead he got a check from Carl King for only $52,750.
The Life and Crimes of Don King: The Shame of Boxing in America Page 23