The Gambler

by William C. Rempel

  “My God, what happened?”

  “It’s his ex,” said Lornie. “Lisa Bonder. She’s pregnant. She says it’s his.”

  35

  Rifle Right Takes Iron Mike

  June 28, 1997

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  Crowds were streaming into the MGM Grand Hotel, people from all over the country and around the world. The biggest event in boxing was taking place that Saturday evening in the sold-out Grand Garden Arena. The biggest gate, the biggest purse, the biggest promotion. It was simply a very big night for Kirk and his hotel. So, of course, Kirk was sneaking into his own party through the kitchen by way of a back door and a labyrinth of back hallways. It was a proven route for avoiding small talk and stray reporters. He just wanted to find his seat and dissolve into the crowd.

  The main event would be the much-anticipated rematch of defending heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield and deposed champ “Iron Mike” Tyson in a World Boxing Association title fight. The heavily hyped showdown, billed as “The Sound and the Fury,” would rewrite boxing’s financial records and funnel 18,187 sports fans through Kirk’s casino, making it a very big night for boxing and gambling, too.

  Years earlier, Kirk saw nights like this in his imagination, back when he envisioned the Grand Garden Arena. It would be the first permanent indoor boxing venue ever designed and built into a Strip resort hotel. He had insisted on its inclusion in the MGM Grand’s original plans despite doubts and resistance from Fred Benninger and his bean counters. “Fred, we’re going to have an arena,” Kirk insisted.1 He saw it as his very own Madison Square Garden West.

  Finally emerging from his Employees Only sanctuary, Kirk made his way into the packed arena. He settled into his favorite seat. Tennis pal Lornie Kuhle was there, too. They were not sitting in the elite ringside seats. Kirk could see the fight better from seats along the first tier of risers where his point of view was just above the top rope. Besides, Kirk told friends, people who sit in the ringside seats “are just looking for attention.” He wasn’t.2

  This fight had been scheduled for early May. It was delayed more than seven weeks after Tyson suffered a cut over one eye during a training session in April. It was blamed on a headbutt. There was additional drama leading up to the fight when the Tyson camp demanded that referee Mitch Halpern be replaced. Halpern had worked the previous Holyfield-Tyson bout. Besides stopping the fight to declare a technical knockout in the eleventh round, he had annoyed Team Tyson by ruling that numerous headbutts throughout the match were all accidental. The Nevada State Athletic Commission refused to replace the referee, but Halpern ultimately withdrew voluntarily.

  The title bout would be the fifth in a series of six prearranged Tyson fights at the MGM Grand. The agreement was controversial at the time and required Kirk’s personal intervention. Terms of the contract were negotiated while Tyson was still serving time on a rape conviction in Indiana.

  Rifle Right Kerkorian had been willing to give Tyson another chance that some in his MGM Grand management apparently were reluctant to do. For a publicly owned company that was touting itself as a family-friendly destination, such a prominent business association with a convicted rapist seemed to some executives to be a questionable marketing strategy.

  But Kirk was more than a fan and patron of boxing. He knew what it was like to fight for rent money or a meal. He never forgot the beatings his brother took in the ring to bring home a few dollars that fed Kirk and his parents. And he admired the sheer courage of any man risking pain, humiliation, and failure to stand alone and fight to his last ounce of stamina. Kirk saw himself in every scrappy kid fighting to escape poverty, a poor education, and the low expectations of the street. Besides, he knew that there was a lot of money on the business side of boxing.

  But contract talks between promoter Don King and MGM Grand executives had finally reached a stalemate in March 1995. King let Kirk know that his “high echelon” executives appeared reluctant to make a deal. They “didn’t negotiate fairly and justly,” he complained and seemed “disgusted” to be considering such a deal.

  One of Tyson’s young co-managers, Rory Holloway, described the attitude of MGM executives more crudely: “They’re like, ‘We ain’t giving a fuckin’ jailbird this kind’a money. Never been done before.’”3 Even Kirk’s personal involvement had failed to move the MGM Grand management team. Kirk always tried to avoid overruling the officers of his publicly owned companies, and this was no exception. But he wanted the Tyson deal.

  The stalemate in fight negotiations came at an extraordinarily busy time for Kirk. He was formulating a buyout plan to take Chrysler public. But as a sign of how important it was to land the Tyson fights for the MGM Grand, Kirk reached out for his key man in the carmaker deal, Alex Yemenidjian.

  Alex was in Toronto when he received the summons from Beverly Hills. “How soon can you get back?” Kirk spoke abruptly, without the usual niceties. As Yemenidjian began to recite the various flights scheduled later that afternoon, Kirk cut him off, saying, “No, how soon can you be here?”

  Yemenidjian immediately understood. “I’ll charter a plane,” he said and headed for the airport.4

  A few hours later and more than halfway across the continent, Yemenidjian walked into a Tracinda conference room where Kirk and Don King sat with MGM Grand chairman Robert R. Maxey and vice president Larry J. Woolf. He barely had time to drop his bags before Kirk stood up and led the MGM Grand contingent toward the door. Everyone was leaving except King and Yemenidjian.

  Kirk’s final instruction to Alex was brief: “Make it happen.” Don King welcomed the change.5 And somewhere in the wee hours of the morning, Yemenidjian and the fight promoter had a two-page memorandum of understanding that worked for everyone. Tyson would come out of prison a short time later to a six-fight deal that guaranteed him more than $100 million.

  The deal made Don King the second-largest stockholder in the MGM Grand Hotel. His six hundred thousand shares worth $15 million came with a Kerkorian guarantee that they would double in value by the sixth fight.

  Tyson returned home to Ohio after his prison release, and Kirk sent his private jet. The fighter and his managers joined Don King for lunch and a chat at Kirk’s Las Vegas Country Club home. Tyson already was Kirk’s favorite fighter.

  His brawling, wild-animal style of fighting made him “the guy,” Kirk said, “I’d pick in any street fight.” But what impressed Kirk when they finally met was the fighter’s encyclopedic knowledge of boxing history. He even thumbed through Kirk’s personal scrapbook and talked about fighters from the era of Rifle Right Kerkorian. Ron Falahi, who served the luncheon, noticed how “Mr. K was completely charmed.”6

  The failure of executives Maxey and Woolf to make the deal that brought Tyson to the MGM Grand may have been a factor in their departures in the following months. Chairman Maxey would resign without official explanation shortly before the first Tyson fight. Kirk replaced him with Yemenidjian who, in turn, replaced Woolf.

  Tyson’s handlers were convinced that the shake-up at MGM Grand was tied to what they considered their rude treatment in negotiations. They also felt confident that their man was now on his way to becoming the world’s first billion-dollar fighter.7

  On that night in June 1997 as prefight tensions mounted in the-house-that-Kirk-built, a record crowd had turned the Grand Garden Arena into the noisiest corner of Nevada. Kirk-the-fight-fan savored the moment—the decibels, the heat, the smell of it, the prospects of a great fight.

  Others in the MGM Grand entourage might be contemplating the record live gate of $17.3 million, the $100 million return from domestic pay-per-view, the tens of millions from foreign closed-circuit broadcasts, and the who-knows-how-much in a postfight casino drop. But not Kirk. Sixty years after his own stint on the canvas as Rifle Right, his focus was still on the contest. The uncertain outcome. The fight.

  Finally, the crowd’s long wait was over. The bell to start Round One sent both fighters to center ring and their fi
rst harmless jabs and tentative feints. The crowd roared at a hard right from Holyfield and again when Tyson’s left hook seemed to slow the more aggressive reigning champ. But Holyfield was winning the crowd as it started to chant his name as the clock ticked down the final six seconds.

  A lackluster second round turned suddenly bloody when Holyfield’s shaved head came up under Tyson’s right eyebrow and opened an inch-long gash over his right eyelid. Referee Mills Lane stopped the fight and the clock. There were about two minutes and twenty seconds left in the round. Tyson’s corner man applied medication to stanch the bleeding and wiped a smeared patch of blood from the fighter’s right cheek. It was ruled an accidental headbutt. Was this fight going to follow the same course as the last Tyson-Holyfield encounter when Iron Mike was half blinded by bloody wounds incurred from what were ruled as “accidental headbutts”?

  An angry Tyson seemed primed to retaliate, poised like a sprinter to burst back out to center ring in the third round, but he was called back to his corner. The fighter had forgotten his mouth guard. Or maybe not.

  Like a wild man unleashed, Tyson came out throwing punches that at first hit nothing but air. He recalibrated enough to finally land a series of powerful body blows with left hooks and explosive uppercuts. Holyfield tried to slow things down with one bear hug clinch after another. The crowd was starting to chant “Tyson. Tyson.”

  With about thirty seconds left in the round Holyfield broke out of his latest clinch, this time spinning and jumping up and down and shrieking, “He bit me!” His right ear was, in fact, a bloody mess. The fight was halted.

  Referee Lane consulted a doctor who said the fight could go on, that Holyfield was not unfairly handicapped. The ref docked Tyson two points. Tyson tried to argue that the bloody ear was the result of his left hook. “Bullshit!” Lane shouted and ordered the ring cleared to resume the round where it had been suspended.

  The clock was restarted at 00:30. But almost immediately Lane stopped it again, after another clinch, at 00:10. In those twenty seconds Tyson had taken a bite out of Holyfield’s other ear. The fight was over. Tyson lost by disqualification. A chorus of boos and epithets rained down from the rafters. MGM security and uniformed Metro Police piled into the ring to keep order as scuffles erupted in and out of the ring.

  In the stands, hotel security quickly escorted Kirk and his friends through a side door and out to a secure and private room. Meanwhile, rioting broke out as 18,187 fight fans turned into an outraged mob. The casino had to be closed and cordoned off, but not before gaming tables were looted and overturned and an estimated forty people were sent to area hospitals for cuts and bruises and one broken ankle.

  Kirk was disappointed but carried no grudges. Tyson was suspended by Nevada boxing authorities and docked the maximum 10 percent of his $30 million purse. The sixth fight at the MGM Grand had to be canceled. Kirk met with Don King, and they worked out a settlement that, as promised, still doubled the value of King’s MGM Grand shares. Kirk bought them all back at a price well over market value—paying a premium above market of about $9 million in order to deliver on his original guarantee.

  “He was a man of his word,” King said, calling Kirk a great man. “He was bound by his handshake. That’s the kind of man he was—a man whose word meant more than money.”8

  36

  Genocide and Generosity

  Summer 1998

  Aboard Kirk’s private jet

  Harut Sassounian sat quietly across a low table from Kirk Kerkorian, both men gazing out their windows as Kirk’s private Boeing 727 seemed to crawl across the rugged brown landscape below. Neither man had spoken for more than a half hour. Kirk broke the silence.

  “We’re going over Turkey,” he said. “Our historic Armenian lands.”1

  Harut nodded, a bit surprised that Kirk was so aware of their flight path and their relative proximity to old Armenia. Harut had made this flight nearly a hundred times—and as recently as a few days earlier. For Kirk, this flight was his first to Armenia.

  “Yes, that’s our land down there,” Harut fervently agreed. It felt to him as if Kirk might want to talk about Harut’s favorite subject—Armenian grievances against Turkey. His weekly California Courier columns were filled with unsparing criticisms of the Turks dating back to the early-twentieth-century genocide.

  “Harut,” Kirk continued, “why don’t we go and take back our lands?”

  Was Kirk teasing or turning radical? Harut wasn’t sure. He stammered something about the impossible dream and then the two men lapsed back into silence. About an hour later they were disembarking at the airport in Yerevan where, despite Kirk’s insistence on a low-key reception, he was greeted by the president of Armenia, Robert Kocharyan. Kirk was welcomed warmly to the Armenian capital as a beloved and heroic figure. It made him fidgety.

  Kirk and Harut adjourned as quickly as politeness allowed to a once-impressive Soviet-era palace reserved for visiting dignitaries and heads of state. Big industrial fans provided noisy but inadequate air-conditioning against the sweltering summer heat. The rooms had high ceilings, short beds, rusty plumbing, and an eager Armenian-speaking staff.

  Dinner that first evening was with the president and his entire cabinet at a Yerevan restaurant that had a view of Mount Ararat. Sassounian was seated near the Armenian defense minister, and in making conversation he mentioned Kirk’s comment over Turkey about taking back Armenian lands.

  The amused minister laughed. “Tell Kirk if he gives us $50 million, we’ll go get them back,” he said.

  Kirk was sitting next to the president. He asked if there was anything besides humanitarian aid that Armenia needed. Kocharyan talked about infrastructure—more housing, for instance, but especially the need for a highway through the heart of the country, a major thoroughfare linking the country’s northern border with Georgia and its southern border with Iran.

  “Would $100 million help you?” Kirk asked.

  Kocharyan hesitated just a moment, but only to let the reality of the offer sink in. “Of course!” he blurted out.

  “We’ll do it,” Kirk said.

  The president asked about issuing a press release first thing in the morning. The usually anonymous donor asked if such publicity would be useful. Kocharyan grinned. “I want our enemies to know that we have a rich and powerful diaspora.”

  Kirk shrugged. “If it would be helpful,” he said, “go ahead.”

  Harut was surprised. Kirk had agreed to let Armenia tell the world that this son of Armenian immigrants was putting up $100 million to help the homeland of Ahron and Lily Kerkorian. Mr. Anonymous was letting Armenia use him in a way that was unprecedented.

  After dinner Harut warned Kirk that U.S. government sanctions against the Tehran government might complicate this $100 million offer. By building a modern highway through Armenia connecting the Georgian and Iranian borders, Tehran would benefit right along with Armenia. It could be a violation of American sanctions. Kirk didn’t want to hear that his Lincy Foundation could be legally barred from making such an important and useful investment on Armenia’s behalf.

  Besides, he said, “If I paid attention to lawyers and accountants, I would’ve never amounted to anything.” Subject closed.

  Harut was awakened the next morning by the sounds of people running up and down the hall. He stepped out of his room to see if there was an emergency.

  “We have a problem,” said an attendant in Armenian.

  Kirk had been asked the night before to write on a slip of paper what kind of fresh fruits he would like served with his breakfast. The attendant showed the list to Harut. It said: guava, mango, and pineapple. Members of the hotel staff had consulted an English-Armenian dictionary and were aghast to learn that they had none of Kirk’s requests.

  “What kind of fruit do you have?” Harut asked

  They had apricots, grapes, oranges, and bananas. Harut assured them those would do very nicely. But Kirk was also asking for a cereal bowl. He had brought his own daily s
upply of cereal in sealed plastic bags. Harut’s Armenian vocabulary lacked a word for cereal bowl. He tried describing it as a “deep dish.” Later, when he went to Kirk’s room to see how his breakfast was going, Kirk nodded toward his “cereal bowl.” It was a very large vase resembling some Ming dynasty museum piece.

  Kirk summoned Harut back to his room about a half hour later. He led Harut to his shower and turned on the water. It came out chunky, gushing with a thick red-brown gunk. Kirk deadpanned, “Are they trying to poison me?” It was a case of seldom-used and badly rusted plumbing. It was also the last straw.

  Harut had a suggestion. They should move into the updated Marriott. It had modern conveniences, fax machines, cable television. “Can I get CNBC?” Kirk asked. That sealed the deal.

  News of the move was a blow to the palace staff. The manager was stricken: “If I have offended such an important guest, I could be fired . . . or killed!” But Harut assured him that Kirk was delighted with the staff and would be lavish in his praise. The problem, he explained, was beyond the manager’s control. “Unfortunately, the palace doesn’t have cable television,” he said.

  Kirk was missing his access to daily stock market reports, relying instead on updates from spotty telephone connections to business advisers in the States. Even as he was touring Armenia he was trying to arrange major financing deals affecting MGM studios and negotiating long distance to buy out his biggest MGM partner, Seven Network. He needed a Western-style, full-service hotel.

  Word of Kerkorian’s visit to Armenia had spread overnight like a California brush fire. On their second morning, as Kirk and Harut were leaving the hotel, they encountered a line of people that stretched nearly a block—dozens of Armenians clutching photos and documents. Harut invited them to leave their documentation and he would personally get back to them.