Carl had taken 50 percent, which was illegal in Nevada. The WBC sanction fee was deducted from Tim’s purse and so was a $10,000 payment to the IRS.
A few months later Witherspoon learned that Scott Frank had been paid $350,000 when he was knocked out by Holmes. Frank was a stiff, a club fighter, but he had a manager who negotiated the best deal for him.
The nationally televised fight with Holmes made Witherspoon a popular figure. Strangers called him the real champ and told him he got swindled. In losing, he gained in stature and reputation.
But to get robbed twice—and to have no recourse—wounded his psyche and injected a bitter thread into his friendly comic nature.
About six weeks after the loss to Holmes, King told Witherspoon he would be fighting Quick Tillis in Richfield, Ohio. He also told him that he had to train at King’s training camp in Orwell, Ohio.
“I want to train at Ali’s camp in Deer Lake,” Tim told King. “I love it there. Ali said I can use it.”
King said absolutely not, that Ali was about to sell it, and the training location was not negotiable.
Witherspoon had a deep emotional attachment to Ali’s camp, because of its association with Ali, because of all the good times he’d had there, because it was close to his home, and because it was free. King billed all of his fighters for the use of his facility in Ohio, including its use among the mysterious deductions from their purses.
By the time Witherspoon arrived for the Tillis fight, he was in open rebellion against King. He told reporters he had trained only five days for the fight “because I don’t care anymore…. If I don’t get paid the way I should, why should I care? I’m supposed to get $50,000 for this fight, but I know I’ll only see about half that.”
Witherspoon also told reporters that he was upset that Mark Stewart had sold his contract to Carl King the year before.
“It’s like we’re racehorses,” the New York Times quoted Tim as saying. “They race us till we drop and then they shoot us. And if we win, they tie a blue ribbon around our neck.”
Witherspoon knocked Tillis out at 2:16 of the first round, dropping him with a devastating right after a minute, and then with a short left hook a minute later.
He was paid only $22,500, just as he had predicted. Carl King took 50 percent—$25,000—for his share.
Despite Tim’s outspoken complaints, Greg Page was even more of a malcontent than Tim. Page was complaining about King underpaying him to anyone who would listen, was threatening to sue King, and wasn’t training, blowing up to about 260 pounds. So King matched his two frustrated fighters to meet for the vacant WBC title on March 9, 1984, in Las Vegas. The title had been vacated by Larry Holmes before King could have him stripped of the title. The fact that Carl King was the manager of both Witherspoon and Page did not trouble the Nevada commission, which sanctioned the fight, or HBO, which purchased the TV rights.
The match was a typical incestuous venture, with King getting paid three different ways and guaranteed to control the WBC title no matter who won. It was immaterial to King that both fighters despised him; his objective was profit and continuity of control.
“I would say that Don hated Greg even more than he hated me before that fight,’ Witherspoon says. “I know that because before the fight Don told me that if I didn’t get knocked out, he would make sure I won the decision. He said if I’m standing at the end, I’ll win.”
Like so many of King’s alienated fighters, Page let his anger turn inward and become self-loathing. He sulked and barely trained, virtually going on strike at the gym. He overate, partied, and lost his motivation. It was a syndrome that would damage a whole generation of King’s heavyweights, including Witherspoon, Dokes, Tubbs, and Tucker. The day of the fight Page looked blubbery and weighed in at 240 pounds, about 15 over his best weight.
Witherspoon trained only a little more strenuously; he came in about eight pounds over his best condition, looking merely puffy rather than blubbery.
Another sign that King wanted Witherspoon to win occurred twenty minutes before the fighters were due to enter the ring. One of King’s bodyguards came into Witherspoon’s dressing room with a piece of paper for him to sign.
“It’s for the IRS, so you can get paid,” the bodyguard told Tim.
In the dressing room was Tom Moran, a close friend who would later become Witherspoon’s manager. He read the paper, and it had nothing to do with the IRS or Tim getting paid. It was a three-year extension of Tim’s managerial contract. Angry at the deception, angry at the invasion of his privacy, Tim didn’t sign the paper.
Walking toward the ring Witherspoon was confident he would win if King wanted him to, and that King controlled all the judges in Las Vegas. The combination of Witherspoon fighting just to go the distance, and Page being out of condition, made for one of the lousiest fights in years.
Page held, and slapped, and lay against the ropes. Witherspoon took no chances and accepted every clinch. It was a waltz between two demoralized, unprepared athletes.
Afterward Larry Holmes said, “I’d have seen a lot more action watching some old lady play the slot machines at the MGM Grand. At least she might have hit something once in a while.”
Judge Chuck Minker scored the fight a draw, 114-114, perhaps implying neither one deserved to become champion. Judges Lou Tabat and Jerry Roth both scored it 117-111 for Witherspoon.
Witherspoon had boxed expertly against Holmes and lost. Now he performed slovenly against Page and became champion. That’s boxing, but not much of a lesson to the young about rewarding hard work and pure desire.
After the fight Page was understandably bitter. “Ask the judges, ask Don King,” he snarled at reporters in his dressing room. “I’ve been going through hell like this my whole career. This is my retirement. I’ve had enough of this bullshit.”
Witherspoon’s contract guaranteed him a purse of $250,000. But the net amount he was actually paid was $44,640.
Don King deducted from his purse: training expenses; tickets to the fight for his family; airplane tickets to Vegas for his friends and relatives; the cost of training equipment; the salaries of sparring partners; and “incidentals.” Witherspoon never got the $100,000 in training expenses he should have under the contract. Instead he was billed $150 a day to train at a camp he didn’t want to use.
Carl King again took 50 percent—$125,000. In its accounting report to the Nevada commission, Don King Productions claimed Carl King was paid only $83,000—33 percent. This was a false statement that should have cost King his license. But the commission never audits the financial records of promoters.
Financial records later obtained during Witherspoon’s lawsuit against the Kings revealed that King tried to deduct every dime possible from both fighters. Three weeks after the fight, a memo from Celia Tuckman to Connie Harper and Marc Powell said: “When we receive additional billing from the Rivera Hotel on late checkouts, an additional amount may be due from Witherspoon.”
A Celia Tuckman memo dated April 11, 1984, identified an additional $74.76 to be billed to Witherspoon for rooms rented by his trainer Aaron Snowell and Andrea Parks. This brought the hotel expenses deducted from Witherspoon’s purse to $4,752—including his own hotel room and meals.
The April 11 memo added: “We withheld $5,000 from Witherspoon’s purse for incidentals. Please check to see if any amount is due for airline tickets and ascertain if Tim owes us beyond the $5,000 which already has been deducted.”
These documents show that King even deducted from Witherspoon’s purse the cost of his protective cup ($98); his hand wraps ($5); his skip rope ($13); and the robe he wore into the ring ($54).
Three months later an unhappy Witherspoon was back in training at the Orwell, Ohio, facility for an August 31 title defense against Pinklon Thomas, who was also managed by Carl King.
“Oh, man, did I hate that training camp,” Witherspoon reflected years later. “Being there was like being back in the ghetto. The mentality put most of the fighte
rs back into a not caring situation. The fighters didn’t have no money. There wasn’t a hundred dollars between us. We knew Don was charging us for staying there. The morale was real low. There was drugs floating all around the camp. It was just like being back in Philly.
“I had to eat pork bacon there even though I told them I didn’t want it. When I mouthed off, Don said he would cancel the fight and I wouldn’t fight at all. I wouldn’t kiss his butt and he didn’t like my attitude. I was too independent for him.
“I even tried to organize all the fighters there. Leon Spinks and Mitch Green cursed out Carl. Pinklon and Berbick left. But the conditions stayed the same. I would complain to Carl, and Carl would just say he had to ask his father.
“When I tried to organize the revolt, Don spoke to all of us and said the white man was trying to keep us all down. The next night Don had a big party in his house and it was all white people. None of us black fighters got invited.
“That camp messed us all up. That’s where we became the lost generation of heavyweights, that’s what I call us.”
So it was in a depressed state of mind that Witherspoon arrived in Vegas for the fight. He was also not in the best condition, having participated in the pot smoking at the camp.
Witherspoon was also obsessing about being cheated out of so much money in the Page fight. Now that he was champion, he felt he was entitled to his own lawyer and hired March Risman of Las Vegas to make sure that this time Carl King took only 33 percent of his money instead of 50 percent.
Risman met with King, read the contracts, won an assurance that Carl would take only 33 percent this time. But King regarded the intervention of an attorney as treason by one of his chattel.
King got even by playing games with Witherspoon’s head. This time he told Tim the reverse of what he had told him before the Page fight. This time King told Witherspoon he would lose the decision, and his title, if Thomas was standing at the final bell.
Witherspoon believed King could do anything he said. He had seen him manipulate the Cleveland commission to take away his license without due process, despite a legitimate ear infection. He believed King had influenced the judges to favor him in the judging of the Page fight. And now he believed he was about to be deprived of his title because he had tried to exercise his rights.
On the morning of the fight Witherspoon was in a state of panic and paranoia. Tim had an unusually vivid imagination, and King, the grand master of mind games, was exploiting this vulnerability.
To ease his nerves, Witherspoon drank a whole bottle of bee pollen about six hours before the fight, as part of his faith in vitamins. But the honey-like concoction only made him drowsy and dulled his mind and reflexes. Feeling he had made a mistake in drinking the bee pollen only served to escalate Witherspoon’s anxiety.
Witherspoon’s mental state was so crazed that he admits he went into a urinal near his dressing room just before the fight and met with one of the officials for the fight. He says he offered the official $3,000 “to look out for me.”
The fight itself was dull and Thomas was awarded a majority decision. Referee Richard Steele deducted one point from Witherspoon’s total for “backhanding.” Steele would later be accused of pro-King bias for stopping the 1990 Chavez–Meldrick Taylor fight with two seconds remaining and Taylor ahead.
The official contract King filed with the Nevada commission said Witherspoon’s purse was $400,000, and claimed he had “no manager.” It also said Tim was due to be paid $50,000 for “training expenses.”
But after all the strange diversions and deductions, Witherspoon was paid only $116,000. Training expenses again were subtracted, not added. Carl took 50 percent after all. And Tim paid his trainer $30,000 out of his own shrunken share.
King subtracted from Witherspoon’s purse: an $8,000 sanction fee, tickets to the fight valued at $5,900; a payment to the IRS of $50,000; plane tickets worth $3,400; and a $50 fine.
The flavor of King’s penny-pinching is preserved in an internal prefight memo by Celia Tuckman. It read: “All fighters will be told in writing that they will receive $30 per day in the Cafe Roma only for food. It should be noted that the hotel is giving us $40 per day, and we are trying to keep the costs down. It should also be noted that both Pinklon Thomas and Tim Witherspoon are to be put in at $30 per day. Their actual arrangements, however, are for full food privileges.”
Tim Witherspoon went home to Philadelphia a very bitter ex-champ. “I was all fucked up,” remembers Witherspoon.
He tried to get some fights on his own, thinking he was marketable as the former champion, but King controlled all the other top heavyweights, and he wouldn’t let any of them fight Witherspoon. Tim found himself blacklisted, frozen out, unemployed—despite his fame.
“I crawled back to Don,” he says. “I had no choice. He told me to fire my lawyer, and I did it. He told me to sign a bunch of blank contracts, and I did it. They beat me. Carl was going to take fifty percent again. They wouldn’t give me copies of anything I had signed. I was back into slavery.”
Among the contracts Witherspoon signed in November 1984 was an exclusive three-year managerial contract with Carl King. This contract stipulated that Witherspoon would pay for: all trainer’s salaries, all training expenses, room and board, all transportation to and from matches, all telephone calls, and all publicity expenses.
Witherspoon, now twenty-eight, aching for another chance at the title, decided to submit and make the best of a bad situation. Accepting that he would not get paid what he was worth, he engaged in a series of comeback fights to rebuild his reputation and confidence.
In April 1985, he knocked out 261-pound James Broad in two. In June he easily outpointed James “Bonecrusher” Smith. In September he knocked out an unknown named Larry Bielfus in Florida and was paid only $5,000. In October he knocked out Sammy Scaff in London, getting paid $4,000
His record was now twenty-three wins and two loses, with sixteen knockouts. He had been able to mask his feelings and not criticize King to reporters, and King rewarded his “rehabilitation” with a title fight against WBA champion Tony Tubbs in Atlanta, on January 17, 1986. King billed the fight as a tribute to Martin Luther King, in King’s birthplace, in celebration of the new national holiday honoring America’s prince of nonviolence. The date was also Muhammad Ali’s forty-fourth birthday, and King produced him at ringside for a generous fee.
But the whole evening turned out to be a grotesque farce, featuring almost all the self-destructive heavyweights of the lost generation. It was a seven-hour evening of dreadful performances by athletes who didn’t train, didn’t care, and knew most of their purses were getting attached by the IRS anyway. Before the fights even began, an IRS agent came into one dressing room with legal papers for all the waiting boxers, including David Bey, Mitch Green, and Witherspoon.
King put on seven fights with out-of-shape heavyweights who weighed an aggregate of 3,212 pounds. Every fight stank. The night began with about five thousand fans, but only about three hundred remained in the vast Omni arena when the last bout ended at 1:00
A.M.
Anyone whoever wanted to make a documentary about what’s wrong with boxing should have had a few camera crews shooting this Animal House card, in a city that hadn’t had a major fight in fifteen years, in a state where regulation was a joke.
In the opening fight, Eddie Gregg decisioned Walter Santemore in a fight so bad it helped convince the winner to retire. Mitch Green won a mismatch from 248-pound Percell Davis. Trevor Berbick looked awful in beating the much smaller Mike Perkins. Buster Douglas beat a disinterested Greg Page in a fight whose only artistic merit was in demonstrating to the public how Tubbs had been able to dethrone Page. David Bey won a decision from a 249-pound butterball named Wes Smith.
In the main event, Witherspoon regained the title with a fifteen-round verdict over Tubbs. Tubbs weighed 244 pounds and acted like he was trying to honor Dr. King by winning the Nobel Peace Prize in the ring.
Another farcical element was scoring: Witherspoon won twelve of the fifteen rounds, but one judge scored the match a draw.
During the course of the evening, the steadily vanishing audience sporadically chanted, “Ali, Ali,” out of boredom and nostalgia, possibly trying to say that the sickly, retired hero could still beat all these blubbery whales.
Four days after the fight, the urine analysis came back from the laboratory with the news that Witherspoon had tested positive for marijuana in his system. He immediately admitted he had smoked “reefer,” saying it was at a party a month before the tight. King immediately began to position himself as a public crusader against drugs, while lobbying by telephone with the WBA officials not to change the result.
With typical hollow hyperbole, King declared, “I’m going to start my own drug abuse center with my fighters. I will do everything— preach—whatever, the disuse of drugs. We will take our own tests, and if we find a fighter is not drug-free, he’ll not enter the ring. We must have some self-help in boxing, and my goal is to rid our sport of drugs.”
King, of course, never set up any kind of drug abuse center or drug education for his fighters. He never even tried to ostracize the drug dealers who openly socialized with his fighters like Dokes, Tony Tucker, Tony Tubbs, Macho Camacho, and Mike Tyson.
As a result of King’s backstage politicking, Witherspoon’s victory was allowed to stand and he was ruled to he the legitimate champion. Witherspoon agreed to pay the Georgia boxing commission a $25,000 fine and to undergo drug treatment and counseling.
In the accounting for the Tubbs fight, Carl King took his 50 percent cut—$25,000—and $1,500 was deducted for training expenses. Witherspoon was paid $2,000 in cash and an $8,000 check was signed by Carl King from Monarch’s bank account.
Tim Witherspoon was heavyweight champion again, but he still had no control over his own destiny. He was not allowed to have his own lawyer or accountant. He couldn’t get copies of his own contracts or financial records. Carl was not really his manager but his father’s employee and messenger. For all his intelligence and good intentions, Witherspoon was still just a powerless pawn in Don King’s game, just as Holmes had been.
The Life and Crimes of Don King: The Shame of Boxing in America Page 24