Witherspoon couldn’t compete with King in the realms of numbers, contracts, psychology, politics, publicity, finance, or lawyers.
Tim was a fighter. And King had outnegotiated and out-thought the CEOs of corporations, networks, casinos, the dictators of nations, and all the law enforcement authorities who had tried to convict him. Witherspoon didn’t know how to liberate himself from the spider’s web. But he knew, better than any other fighter, that he was trapped.
And now that he was champion again, Don King was about to rape him more brazenly than he had ever been raped before. King had his compulsion to demonstrate control and dominance, and while he felt all fighters were interchangeable, he seemed to have a special urge to teach Tim a lesson for his sporadic revolts against his authority.
By the spring of 1986 the HBO heavyweight elimination tournament that King had sold to Seth Abraham was under way.
Witherspoon was one fight away from a multimillion-dollar showdown with Mike Tyson.
One day Carl King told Witherspoon, “My father says you got a fight with Frank Bruno in London. If we’re going over there, we’re getting paid. I’m going to make sure of that.”
“How much?” Witherspoon asked, knowing that if a champion travels to a challenger’s home country, that is an unusual enough risk to assure a real payday.
“I’m going to ask my father what we’re going to get,” Carl replied.
Years later Witherspoon tried to capture his state of mind when he was informed he was going to defend against Bruno in his hometown.
“I knew I was going to get robbed,” he says, “but I thought Don would be generous and give me maybe $600,000, $700,000.”
The indisputable fact is that HBO paid Don King $1.7 million to deliver Witherspoon to the fight. King told his junior partner in the promotion, Butch Lewis, that he gave all $1.7 million to Witherspoon, and Lewis told this to reporters after the fight.
King not only misled his partner, he also tried to cheat him. Lewis says that during the promotion a check for $200,000 came into their partnership made out to the Dynamic Duo, Inc., and that King deposited it into the account of Don King Productions, through a friend at Chemical Bank. Only when Lewis confronted his partner did King say it was “a mistake.”
Nobody represented Witherspoon in the complex prefight negotiations. For example, the challenger, Bruno, was given a percentage of the live gate and Witherspoon was not. Bruno’s promoter, Mickey Duff, negotiated an exemption from British taxes for the challenger, but Witherspoon had to pay $75,000 in British taxes.
With the leverage of being champion, an independent manager should have gotten Witherspoon $1 million for this fight. The Associated Press reported his purse would be $900,000.
But Witherspoon had no clue how much he was getting paid. He can’t even remember signing a contract for the Bruno match and assumes King just used the signature page of one of the many blank contracts he’d signed over the years. The official contract says Witherspoon would be paid $400,000 plus $100,000 for training expenses.
A few days before the fight, Witherspoon read in one of the London papers that his purse would be a certain number of pounds. He and his trainer tried to translate the pounds into dollars at the exchange rate and came up with $1 million.
“I’m gonna be a millionaire!” Tim shouted in his hotel room.
The crowd of forty-thousand at Wembley Stadium was in a Bruno frenzy. Bruno had won twenty-eight of his twenty-nine fights, twenty-seven by knockouts, and his fans believed he could become the first British citizen to win the heavyweight crown.
The fight itself was deadlocked and brutish going into the eleventh round. Witherspoon had been hurt several times and his face was swollen and his body ached. Bruno was motivated and in there to win. He was no Page, and no Tubbs, just going through the motions. But Witherspoon met the challenge.
In the eleventh round Witherspoon and Bruno landed rights at exactly the same instant. But Witherspoon’s landed right on the chin and Bruno shook and fell backward into a corner. His eyeballs rolled like prunes on a Vegas slot machine.
Witherspoon hit him with two more rights and Bruno bent over. One more punch put him down on his haunches in a squatting position. Witherspoon hit him once again.
The count reached three when Bruno’s corner tossed in the towel, ending the fight under British rules.
Witherspoon says that “was the best day of my life, the greatest moments of my life. I was the happiest man in the world.”
Witherspoon celebrated with a small group of people he loved—his brothers, trainer, sparring partners, and his Irish neighbor and friend Tom Moran. The party began at King’s lavish post-fight party in a London hotel. But when they tried to take bottles of beer and champagne at the party, King personally stopped them.
This is how Tom Moran describes what happened next: “King’s guy wouldn’t even give us a beer. So a couple of us snuck in the back, got beer and champagne bottles and loaded up the bus. Tim was sitting in the back of the bus and I could tell he was in pain, because he was wearing sunglasses, and his eye was swollen, and his back was messed up.
“We had one cassette with three rap songs on it, and we kept playing the same three songs over and over and singing along. We drove all over London.
“We were singing, and telling stories, and laughing, and carousing, and drinking, and Tim was just sitting in the back, cracking a few jokes. He wasn’t making a lot of noise, but he just had this big grin on his face. He had just conquered the world and he thought this was just too big an event for him not to walk away from it a rich man. He felt great that he was bringing the title home to America. We were all wearing red, white, and blue jackets and had felt very much in enemy territory. The fight made us all feel very American.
“After a while our bus started following a London newspaper truck. At each corner we would jump off and read the headline on the front page—WITHERSPOON STOPS BRUNO—and see the picture of Tim standing over Bruno. We would take some papers at each stop, and read it out loud on the bus.
“We were having so much fun I taped the bus ride, but the only thing you can really hear are the empty bottles banging around the floor. And the singing.
“I remember just before dawn we pulled up outside a park and there was a bunch of skinheads, and they were giving us the finger and screaming racist insults. They didn’t like what Tim had done. He ruined their champion and their dreams. But we just laughed at them.”
When Witherspoon returned to the hotel as the sun was coming up, he experienced an almost mystical epiphany. He ran into his idol, Muhammad Ali. Six years ago, he had been Ali’s sparring partner, and tonight he wore Ali’s old crown.
Ali did a little shuffle and hugged Witherspoon, who remembers Ali whispering into his ear, “I know you’re not gonna get all your money.”
Then Witherspoon went up and stretched out on his hotel room bed. “I was so happy that even my soreness felt good,” Witherspoon recalls. “It was good pain.”
But three weeks later, when Tim was paid for his blood, he was given a check for $90,094. Frank Bruno, the loser, was paid $900,000.
Jimmy Binns, counsel to the WBA, says, “I know for a certain fact Don King made at least a two-million-dollar profit on the Witherspoon–Bruno fight.”
Mickey Duff, Bruno’s promoter says, “King grossed about five million on the fight and had a net profit of a couple of million dollars. He got revenue from HBO, British television, sponsorship from Miller Lite, and the live gate, which was two million.”
According to the financial records of Don King Productions, Carl King took a $275,000 portion of Witherspoon’s $500,000 purse— more than 50 percent.
King also deducted: $33,000 for cash advances, a $15,000 sanction fee, $75,000 for British income taxes, $25,000 for the WBC fine for flunking the urine test in Atlanta, $12,000 for “loans,” and $1,400 for airfare.
The $12,000 in “loans” appears to at least partially be training-camp expenses, wh
ich the contract stipulated King would pay Witherspoon for, not the other way around. The financial records for the promotion show a $100,000 check made out to Carl King’s company, Monarch, that says on the stub that the money is intended to cover “Witherspoon’s training expenses.”
But it seems clear Witherspoon never got this money from Carl King’s company, which was located in the same Sixty-ninth Street office as Don King’s company and had no independent existence, or financing, or corporate structure.
The problem was that all the money from HBO, British television, and other sources flowed into King’s office in Manhattan, and then to Monarch. Nobody paid Witherspoon directly. His share of the proceeds was skimmed before it ever got to the fighter, whose talent made the whole revenue stream possible.
In his 1991 television interview with Sam Donaldson, King defended his accounting principles:
DONALDSON: Now, you promised him $550,000 for that fight.
KING: And I paid him that.
DONALDSON: You paid him $90,000.
KING: No, Sam. He borrows the money in advance. What he does is, he needs fifty for his mother, twenty-five for this, fifty for another thing, and when I advance this money to him, naturally, when the fight…
DONALDSON: So, let me see if my math is right. You advanced him about $375,000?
KING: Yes, yes.
DONALDSON: Fifty dollars at a time?
KING: Whatever he got, he got his whole purse.
DONALDSON (voice over): If Don King advanced Witherspoon a day, every day of the year, it would take more than 20 years to accumulate $375,000.
Donaldson did not ask King to explain the incredible 55 percent of Witherspoon’s purse that went to his stepson Carl, who was essentially an employee of DKP.
Tim Witherspoon’s $90,094 purse for beating Frank Bruno. Bruno, the loser, was paid $900,000. But he had an independent manager, not Carl King, who took more than 50 percent of Witherspoon’s earnings for this match.
To add insult to injury, Witherspoon later found out that King had flown most of the jurors who acquitted him in 1985 to be guests of the promotion, in ringside seats at this fight with Bruno.
Juror John Becker, a word processor for a Big Eight accounting firm, says King paid for his plane tickets, hotel rooms, and meals, as well as providing the ringside tickets. The fighter had to pay for his own protective cup, but the juror traveled first-class for free.
It’s probably fair to say that Witherspoon never recovered from his morale-busting fleecing. The experience of making the fight of his life on foreign soil, and then getting robbed of his pay, just took something out of the fighter that was never restored.
“Tim’s love for boxing as a sport just died after the Bruno fight,” Tom Moran says. “Tim felt he had lost his manhood by staying with King for all those years.”
Witherspoon joined Merritt, Dokes, Page, Tubbs, and the rest of the lost generation of warriors who had lost their self-esteem because of events outside the ring. He went on an unconscious strike against the cruelest sport.
For months after receiving the check for $90,000, Witherspoon seemed to be in a depression. He overate, he didn’t train, and he fell into the “don’t-care mentality” he associated with King’s training camp.
In October 1986, Carl King told Witherspoon he was fighting a rematch with Tubbs at Madison Square Garden on December 12. Carl also had Witherspoon sign a separate contract to fight Mike Tyson for $1 million in March 1987, as part of the HBO tournament to unify the title.
But a few days before the fight, the zany, demoralized Tubbs withdrew, claiming he had a sore shoulder, although it is more likely he was just fed up with the Kings and was in no condition to fight.
At that point Don King made a deal with James “Bonecrusher” Smith. Bonecrusher agreed to drop his lawsuit against King and to retain Carl King as his new manager. In return, Don King named him the substitute title challenger against Witherspoon, without consulting Witherspoon. Carl King just signed Witherspoon’s name to an amended contract, crossed out Tubbs’s name, and wrote in Smith’s name.
Witherspoon balked and said he would not go through with the fight. He had already beaten Smith. He didn’t want to jeopardize the $1 million match with Tyson. He felt demeaned by the whole process, treated as a serving boy, like when he was setting up coffee and doughnuts for the surgeons in the Philadelphia hospital.
But once again King told him he would never fight again if he withdrew, and New York State Boxing Commission chair Jose Torres told him the same thing.
By the time he entered the ring, Witherspoon didn’t care and wasn’t even thinking about the fight. Tom Moran wasn’t even allowed into his dressing room. Ali Tim wanted to do was get away from Don King and start his career over.
Bonecrusher, a strong puncher, knocked him out in the first round. Afterward, Tim said, “I didn’t care. Losing meant Don was out of my life, and that was all I wanted.”
After the fight, Joe Spinelli, the FBI agent who had probed boxing in the early 1980s was asked to investigate the fight for New York Governor Mario Cuomo Spinelli was then the state’s inspector general.
Spinelli discovered that Carl King managed both fighters—and didn’t even have a valid New York license.
Bonecrusher—a college graduate—told Spinelli he didn’t want to employ Carl King to be his manager and had been managing himself, but Carl had told him that his father wouldn’t let him into the HBO tournament if he didn’t sign with Carl as well as Don. Bonecrusher told Spinelli he had to hire Carl but felt it was “a total injustice that a fighter had to give up one third of his purses before he could get a championship fight.”
Once again, Witherspoon’s purse was skimmed and shrunk by the Kings. Training expenses were subtracted instead of added. The itemized deductions for training expenses came to $75,594.
Incredibly, King deducted $28,000 for using his Ohio training camp, charging Witherspoon $1,000 a day instead of the more usual $100 a day. He even billed Witherspoon $38 for a “drug test” in Atlanta.
So instead of $400,000, Witherspoon was given a check for $129,000. Most of that was quickly taken by the IRS, and he gave $30,000 to his trainer, Slim Robinson, who should have been paid by King.
Two days after the fight it was announced that Witherspoon had again tested positive for marijuana. He was threatened with another $25,000 fine and a one-year suspension as a two-time offender.
But it was a mistake. The New York State Athletic Commission had mishandled the urine test. Witherspoon’s sample had not come back positive. But the humiliating story had been printed around the world. The correction, a week later, barely received any coverage.
Urine samples taken after a fight are given a coded number. A boxing commission staff member had misread the number on the urine sample. It had been the sample from a preliminary fighter that had come back from the laboratory with the positive result for marijuana.
Two weeks after the fight I interviewed Witherspoon at his home in Fairless Hills, outside of Philadelphia, in an apartment complex. He was totally broke. His phone had been shut off. His car had been repossessed. He was facing eviction for nonpayment of his $500 rent. It was Christmas week and he had not been able to buy presents for his family or pregnant girlfriend. He was at rock bottom.
“You know,” Witherspoon said, “I was thinking how both times I lost my title, I tried to fight Don King the week of the fight, as well as my opponent. I just couldn’t do it. It just destroyed my focus.”
After a long pause he added: “I wonder how Joe Montana would play in the Super Bowl if every season he knew in advance he was going to get robbed and be given less than half his pay for the game.”
Early in 1987 Tim Witherspoon filed a $25 million lawsuit against Don and Carl King, accusing them of fraud and conflict of interest.
Don King’s deductions from Tim Witherspoon’s purse for his 1986 match with Bonecrusher Smith. Note miscalculated deduction of $28,000 for 28 days of trainin
g at King’s camp for $100 a day. Also, the contract called for the promoter to pay for training expenses, not the fighter.
Lawsuits are part of boxing and usually they are dropped after a few months when the publicity dries up.
More than one hundred lawsuits have been filed against Don King since 1978. Two fighters won settlements. One was Randall “Tex” Cobb, who was cheated out of money when he fought Larry Holmes. That case took five years before King paid about $300,000. King also paid a Texas heavyweight named Tony Perea, and his promoter, Tom Prendergast, $1.4 million, for contract interference. King also paid promoter Butch Lewis a settlement for stealing Greg Page in 1981.
But all the other lawsuits withered and vanished without money to sustain them. Few expected Witherspoon would stick with it. But he did. He went through four different lawyers, rejected small settlement offers from King, and even handled death threats and messages from the mob to settle.
Part of what kept Witherspoon going was Tom Moran, who became his manager after the loss to Bonecrusher. Moran had his own career, working as the director of programming for a cable TV company, and was just Witherspoon’s friend and sports buddy who didn’t want anything—except to see his friend turn his life around and rescue the remnant of his career.
“I was not the most qualified person to be Tim’s manager,” Moran says, “but I was the guy who was always telling him to organize his life, get copies of his contracts, and become a free agent. For years I just went to his fights and celebrated afterward with Tim.
“Then I agreed to become his manager, even though I never dreamed I would ever be in the boxing business. I know video and music. I thought boxing was a low and dirty business. I had been in London for the Bruno fight and saw what happened. Don kept me out of Tim’s dressing room before the Bonecrusher fight. I lived in the same housing development as Tim and saw how depressed he was. So as a friend I felt I had to intervene and try and help the guy. Even if he didn’t listen to me all the time.”
The Life and Crimes of Don King: The Shame of Boxing in America Page 25