Thereafter, working with Video Techniques and the Hemdale Corporation, King journeyed to Zaire and persuaded president Mobutu Sese Seko to part with ten million dollars of his nation’s scarce foreign currency to cover the fighters’ purses for Muhammad Ali vs. George Foreman, “The Rumble in the Jungle.”
Ultimately, King gained control over the heavyweight division as no one else ever has. At one point during Larry Holmes’s championship reign, King had promotional ties to Holmes and eleven of the top twelve ranked World Boxing Council challengers. Later, King had promotional control over Mike Tyson, which he leveraged to extend his power.
There was a time when King could lay claim to having promoted seven of the ten largest pay-per-view fights in history (as gauged by total buys) and twelve of the top twenty highest-grossing live boxing gates in the history of Nevada. He has promoted Ali, Tyson, Foreman, Holmes, Joe Frazier, Evander Holyfield, Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, Julio Cesar Chavez, Felix Trinidad, Roy Jones, and dozens of other Hall of Fame fighters.
It’s easy to praise King and Arum, and easy to criticize them. They’re similar in some ways and radically different in others.
“King forgives but he doesn’t forget,” Jerry Izenberg (the dean of American sportswriters) says. “Arum does neither. A lot more people respect them than like them.”
Both men are too complex for simple caricature. They’re brilliant and demanding, focused and driven, indefatigable and imaginative, admired in some circles and disliked in others. They’re not ordinary people. Each man enjoys the process and is a survivor.
Ethical standards aren’t known for being high among boxing promoters or within the industry as a whole. Decades ago, Jimmy Cannon labeled boxing “the red-light district of professional sports.” The sweet science had reputation issues long before King and Arum got involved. As John Schulian noted, “Charles Darwin would have loved the fight racket.” The Marquis of Queensberry’s rules apply only to what goes on inside the ring.
Reflecting on the respective careers of King and Arum, Izenberg recently opined, “Neither one has a moral edge over the other where boxing is concerned. It’s like a discussion about the Bible. It depends on which side you’re on and which sin you’re talking about.”
Both men have had questionable relationships with sanctioning body officials and state athletic commission officials over the years.
Each can tell a lie now and then. King boldly proclaimed, “The boxing business is predicated on lies.” Arum will be followed to the grave by his utterance, “Yesterday I was lying. Today I’m telling the truth.”
Arum made an accommodation with the apartheid government in South Africa and sent fighters to Sun City (a resort located within the unrecognized state of Bophuthatswana) in circumvention of the international sporting boycott that saw South Africa banned from the Olympics from 1964 until the 1992 games. King responded by calling Arum “the Master of Apartheid” (as well as the “Prince of Eviality” and “Wizard of Trickeration”).
Then King sent one of his own fighters, Greg Page, to fight in South Africa. That led Arthur Ashe and Harry Belafonte to begin the process of removing King from the executive committee of Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid. King resigned from the organization before the removal could be implemented.
Ferdie Pacheco once advised, “Think of Don King as a sledgehammer and Bob Arum as a stiletto.”
“One’s black and one’s white,” British promoter Mickey Duff offered. “That’s the only difference.”
But there are significant differences other than race, starting with King’s persona.
King has the physical presence and vitality of a man far younger than his eighty-six years. His large, bulky frame (he stands six feet, two inches tall and has weighed as much as 280 pounds), trademark hair, ostentatious bling, booming voice, and high-pitched laugh suggest a force of nature. He’s loud, flamboyant, sometimes vulgar, and has a smile that brightens a room more effectively than theatrical lighting.
Unlike Arum, who stays largely in the background, King thrives on attention. His carnival barker’s style has made it appear at times as though he’s the ringmaster for all of boxing. He takes joy, not just satisfaction, in promoting. His ego is on display for the whole world to see. He’s a brand unto himself and his own monument. His greatest accomplishment is the creation of Don King.
No one who meets Don King forgets him. With the exception of Muhammad Ali, no one in boxing has had more charisma. For decades, King has sold the fights and himself. His presence adds a buzz and entertainment value to a promotion. Even today, casual fans assume that, if King is involved, a fight is big.
“Don King,” promoter Lou DiBella acknowledges, “is the only person in the world who can promote a fight by force of personality.”
King became larger than boxing. Over the years, he has met with Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Leonid Brezhnev, Vladimir Putin, Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, Tony Blair, Fidel Castro, Ferdinand Marcos, and eight presidents of the United States. Also, as he recites, “most of the people who have been president of a country in Africa, some Chinese heads of state, every president of Mexico for thirty years, that woman who’s chancellor of Germany, and more senators, governors, and mayors than you can count.”
Even today, long removed from his glory years, King is one of the most recognizable people in the world. His face is more familiar than that of any active fighter. He has stamped his persona on boxing more visibly than all but a handful of legendary champions.
Arum could walk down any street unnoticed. Wherever King goes, he’s encapsulated in a bubble of public attention. Everyone from high-ranking corporate executives to day laborers stop and stare. People in boxing are asked all the time, “Do you know Don King?” One is rarely asked, “Do you know Bob Arum?”
Any discussion of King’s accomplishments has to include the issue of race.
America dealt King the race card, and he played it brilliantly. “I’m a black man from the ghetto, an ex-convict,” he proudly proclaimed. “I came out of the penitentiary to rewrite history.”
When King got into boxing, black men weren’t sports entrepreneurs. For the most part, they still aren’t. King gave African Americans a feeling of empowerment. For many, he was an inspiration. He walked into rooms filled with white guys from Harvard Business School who thought they were smarter than he was and forced them to treat him as an equal. Eventually, many of them were forced to concede that King played the game better than they did.
Race was a potent weapon in King’s battle to sign black fighters. His appeal to them was personal: “I love you. I love your momma. I come from the same place that you come from.”
Richie Giachetti, who trained Larry Holmes and worked extensively with King, observed, “The man’s greatest asset is that he was born black, because the fighters are black. He knows them. He knows how to rile them, how to sweet-talk them. He’ll say and do whatever it takes to win them over.”
“Don doesn’t get fighters to sign with him just by offering them a lot of money,” legendary trainer Emanuel Steward added. “He signs them by getting inside their heads.”
It’s not easy to put big fights together. Anyone who questions that assertion should ask how many truly big fights Al Haymon has put together on behalf of Premier Boxing Champions with hundreds of millions of dollars in his warchest. The answer is, none.
King made big fights; fights that the public wanted to see. He was the driving force behind “The Rumble in the Jungle” and “The Thrilla in Manila.” Historic co-promotions like Larry Holmes vs. Gerry Cooney and Felix Trinidad vs. Oscar De La Hoya bore his imprint. His showmanship put 132,247 fans in seats for Julio Cesar Chavez vs. Greg Haugen in Azteca Stadium in Mexico City.
At times, King promoted pay-per-view extravaganzas with four legitimate world championship fights on the card. He took an unknown female fighter—Christy Martin—and got her on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
Seth Abraham (former president of Time Warne
r Sports and the architect of HBO’s boxing program) says, “There were times when Don’s promotions seemed like they were from another planet. Bob’s promotions were carried out on a very high level, but they tended to be conventional. If you took a Don King fight and gave it to Arum, Bob might increase the gross a bit. If you took a Bob Arum fight and gave it to King, it became a more important cultural event. Don was incredibly creative in making his fights bigger than just a boxing match and infusing them with sociological importance. Look at how he turned Ali–Foreman into one of the major cultural events of the 1970s by taking the fight to Zaire.”
But King also added to the negativity in boxing. He came from the school of “whatever it takes” and played by the rules of the street. Everyone he dealt with was a target to be hustled. “Looking for fair play from Don King,” British sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney wrote, “is like asking a wolverine to use a napkin.”
King could talk faster and shout louder than anyone else. He had ready cash and used it to his advantage. The image of King luring heavyweight champion Hasim Rahman away from promoter Cedric Kushner with a duffel bag filled with $400,000 in cash endures to this day.
Long ago, Lou DiBella declared, “I wouldn’t flip a two-headed coin with Don King if I had heads.”
King’s alliance with WBC president Jose Sulaiman was toxic for boxing. It raised the corruption of boxing’s world sanctioning organizations to a new level. And there were other misdeeds, such as the promotion in the late-1970s of tournaments on ABC, replete with rigged ratings that smeared the entire sport and tarnished The Ring (which was complicit in the phony ratings) in the process.
Ultimately, King’s image was irreparably damaged by the near-universal recognition that he was financially exploiting the fighters he promoted.
Like most business people, boxing promoters profit by taking in as much money as possible and paying out as little money as possible A boxing promoter does not have a fiduciary duty to the fighter.
That said, King raised the exploitation of fighters to a new level. As former HBO boxing analyst Larry Merchant notes, “Neither King or Arum qualifies as a choirboy. Each one probably did as many bad things as the other insofar as boxing is concerned. But when Arum signed a contract with a fighter, the fighter got what he signed for. The number might not have been fair, but at least the fighter got it. And when King signed a contract with a fighter, that was just the starting point for a new round of negotiations. Unless a contract ran in King’s favor, a contract was just a piece of paper with some writing on it.”
“Don King has made a lot of fighters rich,” Larry Holmes (a cornerstone of King’s power) declared. “And Don King has made a lot of fighters poor.”
Jay Larkin, who ran Showtime’s boxing program for years, had his own take on the subject. “Imagine Don King without his false teeth,” Larkin posited. “Then consider Don’s character.”
Arum, like King, made many big fights happen at the right time. He has thrived by being ahead of the curve when it comes to the business of boxing. Like a good fighter, he has made adjustments as time goes by.
Seth Abraham worked with Arum for years and says, “There’s no question in my mind that Bob is the most advanced thinker ever in the marriage of television and boxing. Don operated largely in the present. Bob was always thinking down the road.”
Arum says that his essential strength as a promoter is his ability as an administrator. His companies have always had a strong infrastructure. He surrounds himself with competent people, likes organization, and wants his office to operate like clockwork.
By contrast, much of what happened around King was unplanned. Ten years ago, Alan Hopper (then King’s director of public relations) acknowledged, “Working for Don is crazy. He keeps no schedule. Everything is subject to change. He does what he wants to do when he wants to do it. He might call up and say, ‘We’re having a press conference in China in two days,’ and he expects you to get it done. I never know what will happen when I go to work in the morning.”
Building a boxing superstar is a long, arduous task. Over the years, nobody has done it better than Arum. King tended to excel with already made fighters. His modus operandi was, “You build the fighter, and then I’ll take him away from you.” Arum builds fighters from scratch pursuant to longterm plans that look years into the future.
Oscar De La Hoya was Arum’s promotional masterpiece. Arum promoted De La Hoya’s first thirty-seven fights. Arum also built the careers of Miguel Cotto (forty-one fights), Floyd Mayweather Jr (thirty-five fights), and Marvin Hagler (twenty fights late in Hagler’s journey). Manny Pacquiao was a star when he signed with Top Rank, but Arum lifted him higher.
Arum didn’t invent any new technologies (such as closed circuit, pay-per-view, the Internet, social media). But he has used them well.
When ESPN was launched in 1979, it was far from the colossus that it is today. Lumberjacking and replays of Australian rules football were common fare. Top Rank Boxing on ESPN debuted on April 10, 1980, and continued for fifteen years. The series guaranteed regularly scheduled programming fifty-two weeks a year and enabled boxing to hold onto a fan base that had been dwindling since the demise of Gillette Friday Night Fights.
Arum’s deal with ESPN established basic cable as a significant new outlet for boxing programming. In 1981 he moved a step further, contracting for Marvin Hagler to appear three times on HBO. It was the first multi-fight contract ever for an elite fighter to appear on a premium cable television network.
Arum also championed boxing’s lighter weight classes. In part, that was out of necessity. By the early 1980s, the number of good heavyweights was dwindling, and King had a stranglehold on the heavyweight division.
One can argue that it was a no-brainer to build lucrative championship fights around Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, Roberto Duran, and Thomas Hearns. Ditto for Aaron Pryor and Alexis Arguello. But Arum took 108-pound Michael Carbajal out of the 1988 Olympics and promoted him to a million-dollar purse in a matchup against Umberto Gonzalez. Boxing’s two biggest stars in recent years—Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao— have been “small” fighters.
Also, before and more than any other major promoter, Arum understood the wisdom in targeting the Hispanic market.
Not all of Arum’s ventures reflected well on the sweet science. The demeaning Muhammad Ali vs. Antonio Inoki (boxer vs. wrestler) competition comes quickly to mind. But it was Arum who sold the world on the possibilities inherent in a comeback by a washed-up, overweight, hamburger-eating heavyweight who hadn’t fought in ten years.
When George Foreman returned the ring in 1987, his comeback was mocked as a Quixotic quest. Big George’s early opponents (Steve Zouski, Charles Hostetter, Bobby Crabtree, Tim Anderson, Rocky Sekorski, Tom Trimm, and Guido Trane) did little to dispel that notion. But in 1994, Foreman knocked out Michael Moorer to reclaim the heavyweight championship of the world.
Arum is still a force in boxing. His current roster of fighters is headed by Terence Crawford, Vasyl Lomachenko, and Manny Pacquiao (who still has some earning power left in him).
King has been humbled in recent years. Control of the heavyweight championship in the person of Ali, Holmes, Tyson, and their brethren was his most valuable asset. He played that leverage to the hilt. But after King took Tyson to Showtime in the mid-1990s, HBO made a decision to license fewer fights from him. Then King lost Tyson, and Showtime also moved away from him.
King managed to thrive for a while with lighter-weight fighters like Felix Trinidad and Julio Cesar Chavez. But the power dynamic was shifting against him. Network executives found other promoters easier to deal with. What had worked in the past no longer worked as well as it had before. King had enough money and enough trappings from the glory years that he chose not to adapt. The times changed. Unlike Arum, King didn’t change with them. His stable of fighters today consists of a few fringe contenders.
“That makes me sad,” says Don Elbaum, who began teaching King the nuances of p
romoting more than four decades ago. “Don was the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey of boxing. They just closed down the circus, and Don is closing down, too. I’ll miss them both.”
Most professional sports are structured so, in many respects, a win for one is a win for all. Tiger Woods’s dominance in golf meant higher TV license fees and greater income streams that benefited his competitors on the PGA Tour. Tom Brady and LeBron James generate a lot of money for themselves and more for their respective leagues’ coffers. A rising tide lifts all boats.
Not so in boxing. There’s virtually no cooperation among rivals, no sense that anyone is part of a larger whole. Each promoter is an island unto himself, as are most fighters.
Within that framework, what will the legacies of King and Arum be?
“Tex Rickard left boxing better off than when he found it,” historian Mike Silver answers. “You can’t say that about King and Arum. They exploited boxing and, particularly in King’s case, brought boxing down to their level. They helped drive the process that has led to boxing having more than one hundred so-called world champions at any given point in time.”
A gentler view might be that greatness in a promoter is measured by four criteria:
1. Did the promoter promote big fights that the public wanted to see? For decades, King and Arum did.
2. Did the promoter match fighters in a way that helped them grow as ring craftsmen and build the fighters as commercial attractions? Here, Arum has the upper hand, but King was no slouch.
3. Longevity: Arum has been a force in boxing since the 1960s. King was a dominant player for more than thirty years.
4. Did the promoter take boxing to a new level? For both King and Arum, for better and for worse, the answer is “yes.”
Arum, more than anyone else, brought the business of boxing into today’s era. King had an enormous impact in shaping the public perception of boxing.
Just as Muhammad Ali was at his most important in the 1960s when he was a revolutionary force, King was at his most dynamic and important in the 1970s when, fresh out of prison, he redefined himself and boxing. With his extraordinary personal gifts, he could have been a great man. Instead, he settled for being a rich man and an icon.
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