“Buster told me he doesn’t care who he fights next,” King claimed. “It’s not Buster, it’s Johnson who wants to fight Holyfield. John Johnson is the boss, not the fighter.”
That was too much for Johnson.
“If you want to start trying to divide us,” Johnson said, “you can just go to hell. That divisionist shit! Fuck you! Fuck you!”
Johnson went into another room to dial Steve Wynn and tell him what King was up to, and that he’d better come right over.
Left alone with McCauley, King immediately tried to play the race card, boasting how much every black fighter owed him, how if it wasn’t for him, there would be no one to give black fighters a chance, how you can never trust white promoters.
“I completely subsidized Buster,” King claimed. “He couldn’t draw flies to a dump.”
McCauley tried to speak, but King just rode over his words with his own steamroller of louder words, one of his signature tactics. What McCauley wanted to say was that he knew King had not treated Buster well during those years Buster was fighting preliminaries for King, and that he himself had tried to convince Johnson that he should take Buster away from the yoke of King’s empire.
“You stupid motherfucker,” King told the black trainer and former fighter. King launched into one of his stock monologues on race and boxing, changing history and rearranging facts as he went along. McCauley tried to speak, but King wouldn’t let him.
Finally Steve Wynn arrived in response to John Johnson’s phone call.
“I’m going to own this fucking hotel,” King declared. “Six hundred and fifty million dollars and I’m going to own it.”
Steve Wynn sat down right in front of King and told him, “You are a no-good, lying, thieving cocksucker…. You are extinct, like dinosaurs.”
That concluded the meeting. Within a few weeks Douglas sued King in Nevada to get out of his option contract, and King sued Douglas and Steve Wynn in New York to force Douglas to fight for him.
Murray Kempton would call King’s suit against Douglas the first attempt in the twentieth century to enforce the Fugitive Slave Statute.
The third week in March Don King moved into the Radisson Hotel in Columbus, Ohio, to keep his pledge to come back and kick John Johnson’s ass.
King was now an overweight fifty-eight-year-old with high blood pressure. But he was still a vagabond workaholic who could wear down any foe with his supply of words, life-force, ideas, and money.
Columbus was where Buster Douglas and John Johnson lived. King had studied and probed for weaknesses, and now he knew what they were, and he came like an old gunfighter to drive the new sheriff into hiding.
King knew that Douglas was estranged in a painful way from his father, Billy “Dynamite” Douglas, a tough main-event fighter from the 1950s, who once nearly beat the much-feared Bennie Briscoe in Briscoe’s hometown of Philadelphia. The father, a hot-tempered disciplinarian, had managed Douglas until his son just quit against Tony Tucker, and then the father walked away in disgust. King knew that Billy Douglas and John Johnson disliked each other and had differed over the son’s training habits and choice of opponents.
So the first thing Don did after he settled into Columbus was give the father a “gift” of $10,000. Then he threw an extravagant fiftieth birthday party for Dynamite Douglas that became the buzz of Columbus. And soon Dynamite Douglas was saying what Don King wanted him to say about Buster’s future, and who Buster should be fighting for. Billy Douglas needed no extra incentive to trash Johnny Johnson as the wrong man to be guiding his son’s career.
On March 24, King crashed a Buster Douglas press conference at the Parke Hotel in downtown Columbus.
“Just like it used to be,” King shouted at fire-engine decibels. “We’re gonna make it happen again.” He smiled and forced an embrace with Douglas and John Johnson, who seemed to be cringing.
While Johnson told reporters he had no interest in doing business with King, J. D. McCauley let his emotions go. With King standing a few feet away, he told Columbus Dispatch sportswriter Bob Baptist: “Don King is a dirty, sneaking, lowdown leech. I’ve been around King for five and a half years now. I watched what this man did. He talks about the black fighters he’s helped, and it’s bull. The fighters he helped, I can name them, and they’re all digging ditches right now. Tim Witherspoon, David Bey, Dwight Braxton. None of them have a quarter to their name on account of Don King.
“All those guys made money. Who’s got the money? Where’s the money at? Tell me about Don King and what he’s done for black fighters. He ain’t done nothing. And he’s not going to do it to my nephew. I’ll die and go to hell first.”
At the end of the news conference, King screamed at John Johnson: “You’re so brainwashed, you don’t understand. You are sick. You need help.”
King also started turning up on radio station WCKX, which has a mostly black audience, and attacking Buster Douglas for choosing a white man over his own father to be his manager, for betraying Don King after all King had done for him.
King got Benjamin Hooks, the director of the NAACP, to come to Columbus and endorse what King was saying, which had a significant impact on black public opinion. Don King Productions also made a $12,500 payment to Hook’s wife, Frances, for no apparent work, and a $12,500 donation to the NAACP. Both checks were written on May 5, 1990.
King’s propaganda campaign was effective. It did shift public opinion in the black community against its native son, who had just gotten off the floor to knock out Superman.
Like many fighters, Douglas was essentially private, introverted, and hometown. He thought he would have a few quiet months to savor his accomplishment. Instead, in his own neighborhood, people he knew personally were taking King’s side, telling him he should dump Johnson and Wynn and “fight for a brother.”
“I couldn’t believe people were coming out and siding with this man,” Douglas told the National’s Ian Thomsen. “He [King] dug so deep to find the people who came out against me. It was like people were coming forward and saying: ‘I gave him a dollar, and he didn’t give me the dollar back.’”
Douglas and Johnson were not used to this kind of media blitz of personalized venom. Douglas was deeply hurt that King would use his own father against him, and that Columbus could so easily be turned against its heroic native son. Whatever innocence Buster Douglas had left, he lost in March 1990.
He began to ask himself: Why am I fighting? Who am I fighting for? Who are my fans?
Tensions got so high that John Johnson began to carry a gun in his briefcase, just as Tim Witherspoon felt he needed a gun to protect himself. Just as Richie Giachetti had feared for his life in 1981. Johnson was a tough guy, but he feared King’s associations and felt violence was not out of the question with millions of dollars at stake.
“I thought somebody might come after John,” Douglas said, “that somebody would be sent out to get him.”
Douglas admits he became a little paranoid himself. The heavyweight champion of the world, driving at 5:00 A.M. in his hometown, noticed a car behind him that seemed to be following him. He said he was so scared that he sped through an intersection to escape, fearing the driver might have a gun and be out to assassinate him.
Six weeks after achieving the heavyweight upset of the century, the joy was going out of boxing for Buster Douglas. His mind was playing tricks on him. There wasn’t much pleasure or recreation. Don King’s pressure, the lawsuits, the new demands of fame, the unkind words from old friends, the racial tensions—they were all starting to spoil the great prize of Buster’s life.
It was a little like the Hemingway short story “The Old Man and the Sea.” Buster caught his prize fish, and before he could get it to port, the hungry fish in the sea of boxing saw the blood on the water and were stripping his prize down to the bone, even before he could show it off and enjoy it.
But Don King was more single-minded, with a stronger ego, than any competitor, or Buster Douglas. King’s will to pow
er, his instinct to control, are gargantuan. That’s why he is such a survivor.
Buster Douglas had vanquished Superman inside the ring in Tokyo. But he was no match for Don King in the more ruthless pit of the boxing business, where there is no referee, and almost no rules.
Don King’s lawsuit against Buster Douglas and Steve Wynn went on trial on July 2, 1990, in the same Manhattan federal courthouse where King was acquitted in 1985. King was seeking between $24 and $27 million in damages. His claim was that Douglas was trying to break a valid contract with him by choosing to fight for another promoter, and that Wynn, as chief executive officer of the Mirage casino, was wrongfully interfering in his contract with Douglas.
The trial was the best-ever seminar on how boxing really works, what its moral assumptions are, how routine its double-crosses are, the lack of scruples among its biggest names, and the lack of dignity accorded the fighters who generate all the wealth.
At about 3:00 P.M. on July 3, Donald Trump took the stand as a witness for King, to bolster King’s claim he was only trying to generate interest in a rematch with all his screaming during and after the Douglas–Tyson fight. Trump was under oath, although Alair Townsend, a former deputy mayor of New York, once said, “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue was notarized.”
Trump described how he and King sat next to each other in ringside seats and negotiated the terms of a Douglas–Tyson rematch while their first fight was still in progress. Trump told the six jurors, “I was of the opinion that Don King had the right to commit Douglas. I thought he could choose the site and the amount for Douglas.”
This was the kind of testimony that made this civil trial such an inadvertently spectacular educational experience on boxing morals and practices. This kind of negotiating would never occur in the normal corporate world. It would never occur in any other sport. It would never occur in the entertainment industry. No movie, or concert tour, or TV pilot would ever be negotiated like this, with the talent not consulted, or even notified.
Here you have Buster Douglas in the middle of a brutal fight with Mike Tyson, a fight for which Don King has deprived Douglas of even the customary twenty-five complimentary tickets for family and close friends. And while Douglas is still in the ring, King is telling Donald Trump who Douglas will fight next, and where he will fight next. And it is just accepted as routine by the two millionaire Donalds that Douglas has no say in the matter. The two Donalds are making their deal, assuming Douglas has no mind of his own and has no independent manager who will negotiate for his rights.
King and Trump were carving up Buster Douglas as if the fighter were Poland and they were Hitler and Stalin in 1939.
“At the end of the fight,” Trump told the jury, “King and I shook hands on a rematch for twelve point five million.”
This was a reference to the site fee Trump would pay King to deliver the fight to Trump’s Atlantic City hotel-casino.
King and Trump shook hands on the rematch even though such immediate rematches are prohibited by the rules of the WBC and WBA, and even though there was no rematch clause in the Tyson– Douglas contract, something King was certainly aware of.
And King had first gained control of the heavyweight title by convincing the WBC that immediate title rematches were morally wrong, and that they should strip Leon Spinks of the title because he gave Muhammad Ali an immediate rematch. King then steered Larry Holmes into the vacated title.
On cross-examination, Douglas’s lawyer, Stan Hunterton of Las Vegas, pressed Trump on whether King had rooted openly for Tyson—something several other people in adjacent seats had plainly heard.
“I don’t recall,” Trump said. “He might have done it, but I don’t remember.”
Trump, who had done business with King on many fights, including Tyson–Spinks, was trying to tailor his testimony to help his once and future partner, whose fights would increase the “drop” in his casinos.
Trump was also a rival of Steve Wynn and the Mirage, since part of boxing politics is based on the competition between Atlantic City and Las Vegas for the biggest fights. Big fights attract gamblers and high rollers to the casinos, which is why Atlantic City and Las Vegas bid competitively to host all the major matches. It is also why boxing regulation is so lax in both New Jersey and Nevada: Each state is afraid aggressive regulation will drive boxing into the arms of the rival gambling state. This is also the reason the only possible reform of boxing would be the naming of a national commissioner—as in all the other major sports.
The only light moment during Trump’s testimony came when John Sharer, the attorney for the Mirage, mistakenly called Trump “Mr. King.”
“I’d like to be Mr. King,” Trump shot back.
When WBC president Jose Sulaiman testified, Douglas’s lawyer played the jury videotapes shot in Tokyo that showed Sulaiman saying he was suspending recognition of Douglas as the new champion.
Confronted by that irrefutable evidence, the sport’s most powerful regulator said plaintively, “In the bottom of my heart I did not withdraw recognition. My embarrassment to the people of the world was in not having the courage and intelligence to say it openly.”
Sulaiman also testified that the only person he heard call for the fight to be stopped after the eighth round was Tyson’s friend John Home. But Hunterton played an audiotape on which Sulaiman said, “The protest originally came from the promoter,” meaning King.
Another who testified on King’s behalf was his arch-enemy, Bob Arum.
Arum and King hated each other. They had called each other anti-Semite and racist. They had a physical confrontation after the Leonard–Hagler fight when Arum tore King’s jacket and a gun fell out of King’s pocket. They had sued each other dozens of times.
But in July 1990 Arum’s anger at Steve Wynn was fresh and fanatical. Arum and Steve Wynn had also looked at Buster Douglas and seen Poland. They originally had a handshake understanding to together promote all Douglas’s fights while he was champion.
Arum is a graduate of Harvard Law School and former federal prosecutor, and he had given Wynn a shrewd tactical plan on how to win the rights to Douglas from King by filing a lawsuit first, in the Nevada state courts, where Wynn and Arum had vast influence, before King could file his lawsuit in the federal court in New York. But when Wynn filed his suit, he had dropped Arum as co-plaintiff.
Before he took the stand Arum stood in the hallway outside Room 443 and told me, “Steve Wynn stabbed me in the back and now I am about to get even. He double-crossed me and made his own deal with Douglas. He froze me out. Everything I ever said to you about King is still true, but I’m going to go in there, swear to tell the truth, and kick the shit out of Wynn and help Don win this case. Wynn is a greedy, stupid fuck. He and I could have shared control of Douglas, and of the heavyweight championship, and King would have been out in the cold. But Wynn got greedy. He wanted to hog it all for himself. He filed the Vegas suit too late, and without my name on it. That’s why King’s case went first in New York. I was forum-shopping, handing Wynn the home-court advantage before a state judge in Las Vegas. He blew it because he is a dumb schmuck. And that’s why I am here today, as King’s witness.”
Arum told the jury how Wynn had eased him out of the deal after milking him for his advice and legal knowledge. Arum justified what King did in Tokyo, saying, “In the heat of combat we all say things we are not accountable for…. A protest is the correct procedure. You yell your head off, otherwise nobody pays attention.”
Wynn’s lawyer asked Arum why he shook hands with Wynn on a $2 million fee to promote a Douglas–Holyfield fight, which violated King’s contractual rights to Douglas.
Arum, in an unusually relaxed mood on the stand, smiled and said with an impish grin, “I threw caution to the wind and did a bad thing.”
The courtroom, filled with boxing writers and insiders, broke up in laughter, and even judge Robert Sweet grinned.
Wynn’s lawyer expressed sarcastic shock at Arum’s s
udden alliance with King, given their long history of rancor and acrimony.
“This is relative peace,” Arum quipped. “We only have one lawsuit pending.”
Arum added, “Don and I have done dastardly things to each other.”
Perhaps thinking of some of these past treacheries, Arum began to smile, and then laughed out loud in the witness box.
Several times during his four hours of testimony Arum drove home his main legal point to help King: Based on his own deal with Wynn, and their private conversations, Wynn knew he was violating King’s contractual rights, but was confident he could buy King out of the contract once he had Douglas under contract himself.
Arum quoted Wynn as telling him, “We’ll buy King off, give him a piece of pie, and let him take a walk.”
And Arum described how Wynn’s two lawyers—Bruce Levin and Steve Enz—had advised Wynn against signing any contract with Douglas because it might interfere with King’s contract with Douglas.
Arum testified, “Bruce Levin said, ‘Steve, I’m against this, you shouldn’t do this,’ but Wynn was kicking Levin under the table.”
On cross, Mirage lawyer John Sharer confronted Arum with perhaps his most repeated quotation—“Yesterday I was lying. Today I am telling the truth.”
Arum winced as Sharer recited it, and tried to preempt any embarrassing questions about all the occasions he’d used that line. Arum volunteered an anecdote about the first time he said it.
“One night I was drinking with some boxing writers,” Arum explained, “including Bob Waters [the wonderful, deceased boxing writer for Newsday] and I was bombed out of my mind. I told them fighter ‘A’ was better than fighter ‘B.’
“The next night I was out with them again and we were all drunk. I told them fighter ‘B’ was better than fighter ‘A.’ Bob Waters reminded me what I had said the previous night. So that’s when I first said, ‘Yesterday I was lying, but today I’m telling the truth.’”
Sharer then tried to press Arum on the moral lessons of lying, to taint Arum’s credibility with the jury.
The Life and Crimes of Don King: The Shame of Boxing in America Page 31