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

by Jack Newfield

  It almost seems like a curse of the gods, or maybe a message. The three greatest champions who ever lived all ended up with the most tragic medical problems. They all boxed too long. All three made ill-advised comebacks; they got hit too much at the end.

  Joe Louis suffered from paranoia and dementia, and was confined to a mental hospital for a time. His declining years were spent hearing voices and covering up the air vents in hotels.

  Sugar Ray Robinson suffered from Alzheimer’s disease the last fifteen years of his life. Fans cherished the memory of his knockouts of LaMotta, Graziano, Turpin, and Fullmer, but he had no memory of them. He could not recognize his sister or his grandchildren and stared at the wall with a faint smile on his lips.

  The causal relationship between thousands of blows to the brain and diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s is accepted by most doctors involved in sports medicine. In 1993, a detailed report was published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine that analyzed all the existing information on brain damage to boxers. The study concluded that “dementia pugilistica” (the scientific term for the layman’s “punch drunk”) afflicts 9–25 percent of all professional boxers. The symptoms include tremor, memory loss, inattention, impaired hearing, paranoid ideas, and “a decrease in general cognitive functions.” Doctors believe that repeated blows to the head are one of the triggers of Alzheimer’s.

  “Dementia pugilistica” is more likely to affect boxers with longer careers because they absorb more punches, and heavyweights because the blows arrive with greater force. It is less likely to affect amateur boxers, who wear headguards and box fewer rounds.

  We have all seen Muhammad Ali and winced. We saw his trembling hand light the Olympic torch in Atlanta. The Greatest has become our mute, iconic, bloated Buddha. The man with the fastest hands and legs in sports now moves as slowly as though he were underwater. The wittiest athlete now whispers inaudibly. His body is ravaged by Parkinson’s, a disease that is degenerative and will never get better.

  Watching Ali on a dais being lovingly fed by his wife, Lonnie, hurts my heart and makes me question my own fandom, my own complicity in his debilitation. Seeing a tape of his epic fight with Joe Frazier in Manila has become a bittersweet experience for me. While it was happening in 1975. I was drenched with sweat, hoarse from screaming and emotionally spent from the ebb-and-flow drama. But today, seeing the aftereffects on both men has made the greatest fight I ever saw no longer such a powerful argument for the sport it once exalted.

  If this is the fate of the greatest boxers, what happens to all the local club fighters around the country? What happens to the tough kid from Mexico or Philly who has thirty hard fights over six years, and never becomes famous or a champion?

  How does he take a vacation? What chance do his children have of going to college? Who pays his medical bills? Who pays for his funeral?

  A Bill of Rights for Boxers

  The preconditions for any meaningful reform of boxing are:

  (1) Create a national commission with enforcement power to regulate the sport. Every other major sport has a national commissioner, and boxing reform depends on some central authority that can administer and enforce improvements. The current system of state commissions, dominated by political appointees, cannot do the job.

  Senator John McCain and New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer have both urged the creation of a national commission as the key to any purification of the cruelest sport. They understand that only a national regulatory authority can enforce such things as standardized tests and licensing for ringside doctors, judges, and referees; national suspensions after three straight knockouts; a central repository for CT scans; MRIs and blood tests for drugs, steroids, and HIV.

  (2) End all recognition of the international sanctioning organizations—the WBA, WBC, WBO, and IBF. “They serve no useful purpose,” Attorney General Spitzer told me. “Their only function is to sell title belts and issue false rankings.”

  “All it would take to make them irrelevant is for the TV networks to announce they no longer will recognize the ratings of these groups,” Spitzer said. (Spitzer knows his boxing; he was the lawyer for champion William Guthrie in a lawsuit against King before he was elected in 1998.)

  (3) Create a poll of boxing writers and broadcasters to generate impartial ratings. This is the way it works in college football and basketball. The writers covering the games vote on the best teams. There is no reason boxing ratings can’t be compiled the same way—as long as it is a truly international poll. If a few popular champions recognized these rankings, that would be the final interment of the sanctioning bodies.

  (4) Establish a pension system for boxers that includes a health plan and death benefits. This could be accomplished if the fighters, promoters, cable TV networks and casinos agree to allocate just 2 percent of the revenue from all the mega-matches on pay per view to underwrite this endowment. Three such fights in one year would start a fund of $5 million or $6 million. A top accounting firm should audit and administer the fund. Any boxer who has been active for four years, or has had twenty bouts, should qualify for the system. But nobody who has taken a lot of beatings should be allowed to keep boxing just to qualify.

  (5) Health and safety standards must be improved. Ringside doctors should be competent and well trained, and should not be assigned or hired through politics. They should be qualified neurological experts.

  Any boxer who has lost more than ten fights over two years, or has been knocked out three times in a row, should have his license revoked. This would retire punching bags like Samson Cohen, who has been knocked out fourteen times—even by Richie Melito in 1998.

  Every boxer should have a CT scan and MRI every year. A prefight drug test can detect steroid abuse, which Dr. Margaret Goodman says can make a boxer “more susceptible to blood clots and a brain hemorrhage.”

  (6) Organize a labor union, or guild, of all boxers. Paul Johnson and ex-champ José Torres have been agitating for a union for years. The best model is probably the Screenwriters Guild, since fighters are independent contractors. Traditional union solidarity and collective bargaining may not be practical among men who have to fight each other. But a union could provide a collective voice for individual rights. A union could audit pay-per-view revenues and the expenses promoters bill to fighters that often seem illegitimate or padded. A union could also demand a higher minimum payment for preliminary fighters.

  (7) When I talk to fighters, their most emotional complaint is about biased and unfair decisions by judges. This angers them even more than the inadequate safety precautions. It demoralizes them to know they won a fight but did not get the decision.

  Over the past thirty years I have witnessed some indefensible decisions in championship fights. David Tiberi fought his heart out, but was robbed against James Toney in 1992. Tyrone Everett was robbed against Alfredo Escalera in 1976. Pernell Whitaker beat Julio Cesar Chavez in 1993, but the draw decision allowed Chavez to keep his title. Lennox Lewis beat Evander Holyfield in 1999, but the decision was a draw, allowing Holyfield to retain a portion of the divided title.

  In all these matches—and many others—the judges were picked by the promoters and the sanctioning bodies, not by the state commissions. Two of the three judges in the Tiberi–Toney fight were not licensed in New Jersey, where the fight took place. They were from Illinois and Michigan. The three Lewis–Holyfield judges were not licensed in New York but were allowed to officiate the fight anyway by the NYSAC.

  In many cases the judges are paid by the promoter, including travel expenses. They know which fighter is under an exclusive contract to that promoter. They don’t have to be told that if they favor that promoter’s employee, they will get future assignments from that promoter. Can you imagine a baseball owner picking and paying the home-plate umpire in a World Series game?

  A special panel should monitor the performance of judges. Those who are biased or engage in favoritism should lose their licenses. Judges shoul
d be required to make full financial disclosure to this licensing panel.

  (8) Boxers should be encouraged to have their own lawyers and accountants in all dealings with promoters over contracts and compensation Any promoter who does not comply should lose his license.

  (9) Until a national commission over boxing is set up, the state commissions should hire inspectors who know what they are doing, not the usual political drones. These inspectors should be posted in the gyms, which are now unregulated. Fighters who get knocked out in a gym should be suspended for medical reasons, just like a fighter in an arena; the brain damage is the same. A lot of boxing’s injuries occur in unsupervised gyms and are never reported to any medical authority.

  (10) Make the promoters or the casinos—not the fighters—pay the exorbitant “sanction fees” to the bogus sanctioning bodies. Under the current system, champions have to pay 3 percent of their earnings to the WBC, WBA, and IBF for the privilege of risking their title against a challenger approved by these worthless outfits.

  When Evander Holyfield testified before the Senate in August 1992, he said that he had to pay $590,000 in sanction fees after his previous title defense. The sanctioning groups will strip a champion of his title and declare it vacant if he doesn’t pay. This is close to extortion. Over the course of his career, Holyfield has paid about $20 million of his earnings in sanction fees. Maybe that’s one reason he’s still fighting as he nears 40, well past his prime.

  If a doctor could shine a penlight into the swollen eyes of boxing now, he would detect evidence of internal bleeding. This Darwinian racket has descended into a crisis of credibility.

  My conscience won’t let me remain a passive spectator to scandal any longer. I think too much about Bee Scottland being strapped onto a stretcher. I dream about Ali’s tremor. I am haunted by the Alzheimer’s stare in Ray Robinson’s eyes. I think about underdog David Tiberi, and how he fought the fight of his life but was cheated out of the decision against James Toney, and how he retired in disgust after that spirit-breaking injustice.

  Boxing has to be changed, even though there is no lobby for fighters and no constituency for reform. It is the moral thing to do. I know Congress has more serious and universal priorities—the war on terrorism, the economy, the minimum wage, campaign finance reform, preventing the confirmation of right-wing judges, and preserving the environment. I know it’s difficult to legislate more regulation in an era of deregulation. But attention must be paid, the effort must be made. The fighters are powerless workers of color, waiting for the arrival of their Cesar Chavez, their A. Philip Randolph. They need representation, rights and a collective voice.

  Lou DiBella is right. The fact that almost all boxers are black and Latino makes it easier for respectable people to shrug and look away. It would not cost the taxpayers anything to regulate boxing at the same level every other professional sport is policed. Only the will is lacking. Nobody important cares enough.

  But the rest of us should, whether we are boxing fans or not. It’s easy to avert your eyes and say, “Abolish the sport.” But that won’t happen. Instead, we should help these voiceless workers obtain the justice they deserve.