It’s not Frank Sinatra. But it is Al Bernstein.
Michael Buffer has lost count of how many feature films he has been in. His best guess is around twenty. That includes three appearances in Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky franchise.
Most of the time, Buffer plays himself. On occasion, he steps out of character, as was the case in Adam Sandler’s Don’t Mess with the Zohan, when Michael was featured as the villainous corporate magnate Grant Walbridge.
Now Buffer has what, for him, is the role of a lifetime. He has been cast as the Ringmaster in director Tim Burton’s remake of the 1941 Walt Disney animated classic, Dumbo.
The remake stars Colin Farrell, Eva Green, Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, and Alan Arkin. Buffer was on set in London for four days this past September. To take full advantage of his bona fides, the script was fashioned so that Dumbo is introduced to the circus audience with the cry of “Let’s get ready for Dumbo!!!”
Principal photography is now complete. The time-consuming addition of elaborate special effects means that the film won’t be released until early 2019.
“I’ve had some great moments in TV and movies,” Buffer said recently as he reflected on his thespian career. “Playing myself on The Simpsons was one of them. But being in Dumbo has enormous sentimental meaning for me. I remember seeing Dumbo in a theater when I was a kid and loving it. I took my own children to see it in the 1970s. I bought the VHS when that came out and then the DVD. To be part of the remake with so many brilliant creative people is special for me.”
Seth Abraham was reminiscing recently about an incident that occurred in the 1980s when he was president of HBO Sports and working to build the network’s boxing program.
Abraham met in his office at HBO with professional wrestling entrepreneur Vince McMahon as a courtesy to Caesars, which was hosting Worldwide Wrestling Federation events as well as big fights at that time. McMahon wanted HBO to televise pro wrestling and made his pitch. Abraham turned him down.
“I told Vince it would damage our boxing brand,” Abraham recalled. “I explained that boxing already had trouble maintaining its credibility and that pairing it on HBO with a scripted sport that had prearranged outcomes wouldn’t work. Then things got ugly. Vince became abusive. I asked him to leave. He wouldn’t. And I threatened to call security, which finally prompted him to go.”
Fast-forward to 2003. Abraham, who had left HBO to become president of Madison Square Garden, was asked by MSG officials to approve McMahon’s induction into the Madison Square Garden Walk of Fame.
McMahon’s credentials for induction were substantial. The WWF, known by then as Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment, had promoted WrestleMania at the Garden every year since 1985. McMahon’s own father had been inducted into what was previously known as the Madison Square Garden Hall of Fame.
When asked about inducting the junior McMahon, Abraham replied, “Absolutely.”
“I called Vince and invited him to my office at the Garden,” Abraham told this writer. “Vince came, not knowing what to expect. His jaw dropped when I gave him the news. Then he got teary. He mentioned my throwing him out of my office years before and said he couldn’t believe I was part of giving him this honor. And I told him, ‘Vince, it ain’t the HBO Hall of Fame.’”
How deeply ingrained is Don King in popular American culture? Promoter Richard Schaefer recounts a moment that answers that question.
Years ago, Schaefer took his two sons to Party City to buy them costumes for Halloween. There were costumes for heroes like Superman and Batman, monsters like Frankenstein. And nestled among them, Don King.
“I don’t know if Don was supposed to be a hero or a scary monster,” Schaefer acknowledges. “But it brought a smile to my face. There was a Don King wig, an American flag, and some plastic bling. My boys chose other costumes. And I bought a Don King costume for myself.”
“When I put it on,” Schaefer notes in closing, “am I a superhero or a super-villain? You can make an argument for both.”
Three Things You’ll Never Read on a Boxing Website:
1. Al Haymon signs contract for tell-all biography.
2. I’d like Al Haymon to come up to the podium and say a few words.
3. Al Haymon is hanging out in the media center.
Michael Buffer readily acknowledges that a lot of people helped him get to where he is in boxing today. One of them was a man named Jody Berry.
Berry was born in Kentucky in 1936 and was a successful amateur boxer in the pre-Cassius-Clay era. Then he embarked upon a career as a nightclub singer, the highlight of which was opening on occasion for Ella Fitzgerald.
Buffer met Berry after working a fight for Dan Goossen in the 1980s at the Reseda Country Club in California.
“We were in a cocktail lounge after the fights,” Buffer recalls. “In those days, I’d say ‘let’s get ready to rumble’ and go right into ‘ten rounds of boxing’ or whatever came next without a break. Jody was a showman. He knew timing. He said to me, ‘Michael, after you say let’s get ready to rumble, shut the fuck up.’”
“What do you mean?” Buffer asked.
“People want to react,” Berry explained. “Give them time to voice their enthusiasm.”
“So I tried it,” Buffer says. “And you know the rest. It’s interesting how you can be doing something that’s working well, and then you get a little tip on how to make it better, and there it goes. Jody died of cancer about ten years ago. I’ll always be indebted to him.”
And another Don King moment . . .
Over the years, Roy Langbord has been involved in the acquisition of fights by multiple television networks and counseled a wide range of boxing luminaries. Recently, Langbord was reminiscing about a dinner he shared with Don King at Piero’s Italian Cuisine in Las Vegas years ago.
“When I got to the restaurant,” Langbord recalled, “Don was sitting at a table with two women he’d just met. They gave every appearance of being hookers. One of them was in her late thirties or early forties. The other was in her twenties. The older woman was acting as a sort of pimp. She kept talking about the charms of the younger woman and saying things like, ‘She can make you feel so good. The two of you could have so much fun together.’
“Don kept agreeing with what the older woman said,” Langbord continued. “He seemed interested. It was an expensive dinner. Don paid the bill and tipped generously, as he always does.”
And then?
“Don told his driver to take the women wherever they wanted to go and went back to his hotel alone. I asked why he’d spent so much time with them if he wasn’t interested. And Don told me, ‘Sometimes, I just like to watch a good hustler do their job.’”
Reflections on a Fiftieth Reunion
It has become a tradition, as a reminder that there’s a world outside of boxing, to include a bonus piece in each year’s collection of boxing articles published by the University of Arkansas Press. The essay below was written for the Columbia College alumni magazine to commemorate the fiftieth reunion of the Class of 1967.
My first impression on arriving at Columbia was that the campus was magnificent.
Butler Library and Low Library gave it an aura of historical elegance. Fourteen massive columns rose to the Butler facade where eight names were chiseled in stone: “Homer . Herodotus . Sophocles . Plato . Aristotle . Demosthenes . Cicero . Virgil.” Low Library was just as inspiring with a facade that told of Columbia’s founding as King’s College in 1754.
The grounds were beautifully kept with a lot of green and very pretty flowers.
Freshman orientation began in Wollman Auditorium (the centerpiece of Ferris Booth Hall) and lasted for eleven days. The orientation booklet advised, “Freshmen are reminded that coat and tie is required dress for every event listed in this program except athletic field day.”
There were no female students at the college then, so Wollman would take on added importance over the next four years as the site of social mixers.
John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, two months after the Class of 1967 arrived on campus. The first bulletin of shots being fired in Dallas came while I was listening to the radio in my dorm room. I went downstairs to the TV room in the basement and watched until Walter Cronkite told us that the president had died.
Two and a half months later, the Beatles invaded America and the TV room was jammed with students watching John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr on The Ed Sullivan Show. Sixteen days after that, Cassius Clay upset Sonny Liston to claim the heavyweight championship of the world.
Regardless of what the calendar says, those three months were when “the sixties” began.
Some of what I was taught in the classroom at Columbia seemed useless to me then and remains useless to this day. But courses in Contemporary Civilization and Humanities started me on a journey of analytical thinking that has served me well over the years.
I fell in love for the first time when I was in college, in keeping with the third of Shakespeare’s seven ages of man: “And then the lover, sighing like a furnace with a woeful ballad made to his mistress’s eyebrow.” (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7)
Given the existence of the war in Vietnam, I hoped to avoid Shakespeare’s fourth age: “A soldier, full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard.”
The war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and Lyndon Johnson’s effort to build a Great Society were hallmarks of our college years. It would have been considered ludicrous then to suggest that, fifty years later, we’d be enmeshed in a national debate over whether children should be taught evolution or creationism in school. But it was equally improbable that the United States would elect an African American president or that gay marriage would become law.
One day before we graduated from college, the Six-Day War broke out in the Middle East. None of us could have known then the extent to which religious hatred would endanger the world in our lifetime. But over the years, I’ve reflected often on something that Warner Schilling said on the final day of a course he taught in American foreign policy: “The past was far more confused, the present is far more complex, and the future is far more contingent than we care to realize.”
I did some things that I’m proud of during my college years and others that I wish I hadn’t done because I can see now that they were foolish and hurtful.
I’ve pursued separate careers as an attorney and author. The political debate at Columbia helped shape my thinking in ways that led to my writing Missing, which served as the basis for the Costa-Gavras film about United States involvement in the 1973 Chilean military coup. Later, another touchstone of my Columbia years moved full circle when I became Muhammad Ali’s official biographer.
We’re now closer to the end than the beginning of Jaques’s Shakespearean soliloquy: “The sixth age shifts into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon with spectacles on nose and pouch on side.”
And we’re uncomfortably near the seventh age: “Last scene of all that ends this strange eventful history is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
Those of us who make our way to Morningside Heights this spring for our fiftieth anniversary reunion will step into a world where memory and reality intermingle.
The V&T Pizzeria and Tom’s Restaurant (made famous in later years by Seinfeld) still exist. The West End and Gold Rail are long gone. Almost half of today’s 4,600 undergraduate students (there were 2,800 in our day) are women.
Butler Library and Low Library have retained their grandeur. Many of the reading rooms in Butler have been reconfigured. But the polished floors, interior artwork, and first-floor college library look remarkably similar to what we saw fifty years ago.
Ferris Booth Hall was torn down at the close of the last millennium and replaced by Alfred Lerner Hall. Wollman Auditorium is no more. Freshman orientation now begins in Roone Arledge Auditorium. There’s a carpeted lounge in the basement of the dormitory where the TV room used to be. But no television. The communications revolution has rendered that need obsolete.
The students look very young. They’re the same age that we were a half-century ago. In their eyes, we’re old.
Some campus landmarks look as they did decades ago. One can stand at the bottom of the steps in front of Hamilton Hall, gaze upward at the statue of Alexander Hamilton, and see what we saw during our college years. Hamilton was a son of Columbia centuries before Lin-Manuel Miranda discovered him.
The plaza in front of Low Library overlooking College Walk also looks the same. I remember throwing a frisbee there with an agile, very pretty, young woman. She died from ALS ten years ago. When the disease was in its final stages, I sent her a card quoting Shakespeare’s 104th sonnet:
To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were, when first your eye I ey’d,
Such seems your beauty still.
As Columbia graduates, we moved on with our lives long ago. But as classmates, we’re held together by a common bond. We shared the same world when we were young.
Issues and Answers
Don King and Bob Arum in Perspective
Over the years, Don King and Bob Arum have been bitter rivals. But their relationship has been marked by respect.
“There has never been a better salesman in boxing than Don King,” Arum has acknowledged. “I worked my tail off as a promoter because I had such a measuring stick, a bar to reach. Don made me a better a promoter than I would have been, and I think I made Don a better promoter than he would have been.”
Don King turned eighty-six on August 20, 2017. Bob Arum is four months younger.
Arum is still a force in boxing, although the calendar suggests that he’s nearing the end of a long, impressive run.
For King, the clock struck midnight in the first decade of the new millennium insofar as the promotion of big fights is concerned. After years of glory, his carriage has turned into a pumpkin.
King and Arum have dominated boxing for much of the past fifty years and shaped the business as we know it today. There hasn’t been a time since the mid-1960s when one or both of them wasn’t significantly influencing the sport. They’ve thrived in the jungle that is boxing and been its most important promoters since Tex Rickard died eighty-eight years ago.
Rickard was boxing’s first modern promoter and, arguably, the greatest boxing promoter who ever lived. More than anyone else, he was responsible for creating the Golden Age of Boxing. His promotions included Jack Johnson vs. James Jeffries, Joe Gans vs. Battling Nelson, Jack Dempsey vs. Jess Willard, and Dempsey’s later fights against George Carpentier, Luis Firpo, and Gene Tunney.
Rickard gave the public what it wanted and promoted in every sense of the word. He didn’t get a site fee from a casino and a license fee from a television network. His revenue came primarily from the sale of tickets. At times, he built his own arena (in Reno for Johnson–Jeffries, in Toledo for Willard–Dempsey, and in Jersey City for Dempsey–Carpentier). He set the standard by which future boxing promoters would be judged.
Two years after Rickard died, Bob Arum was born in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. The son of an Orthodox Jewish accountant, Arum graduated from New York University in 1953 and Harvard Law School in 1956. Six years later, he was working as an attorney in the tax division of the United States Attorney’s Office in Manhattan when Floyd Patterson defended his heavyweight title against Sonny Liston. Arum was given the assignment of impounding revenue from the fight’s closed-circuit television outlets. He had never seen a fight before. But he could count, and the numbers impressed him.
Arum left government service in 1965 and was introduced to Muhammad Ali by football great Jim Brown. In 1966, he formed a company called Main Bouts to promote Ali’s fights. The other equity participants in Main Bouts were Herbert Muhammad (Ali’s manager), John Ali (chief aide to Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad), Lester Malitz (an expert in the area of closed-circuit telecasts
), and Brown. Their first promotion was Ali vs. George Chuvalo in Toronto on March 29, 1966.
After Ali was stripped of his title for refusing induction into the United States Army, Arum set up a second corporation called Sports Action and promoted a world elimination tournament to crown a new heavyweight champion. Top Rank (his current promotional company) was incorporated in the early 1970s.
As of April 1, 2017, Arum had promoted more than two thousand fight cards. These cards were contested in 215 American cities located in 42 different states and in 92 foreign cities located in 26 countries. Breaking these numbers down further, Arum, as of April 1, 2017, had promoted 596 world title fights, 127 shows on HBO, 30 on Showtime, 48 pay-per-view cards, and 27 closed-circuit telecasts.
These are staggering numbers.
Don King came out of a very different environment than Arum. He was born in the underside of Cleveland, Ohio. When King was nine, his father was killed in an industrial accident. Don, his sister, and four brothers were raised by their mother.
Over time, King became one of the largest illegal-numbers racketeers in Cleveland. He fatally shot one man and beat another to death. The first killing was ruled justifiable homicide as a matter of self-defense. The second landed King in prison after a jury convicted him of murder, a finding later reduced to manslaughter.
Released from prison in 1971, King made his way into boxing and soon realized that the sweet science was an environment in which people made their own laws. He began as a manager and moved quickly to promoting. In 1974, he was brought into the George Foreman vs. Ken Norton championship bout by Video Techniques, the closed-circuit firm promoting the fight.
“I was their token nigger,” King later recalled. “A black face to deal with the blacks.”
Protect Yourself at All Times Page 27