by Glenn Stout
Within a year of his release, Don King was putting together his first fight. With the help of Lloyd “Mr. Personality” Price, a close musician friend of King’s from the Corner Tavern, King convinced Muhammad Ali to come to Cleveland to put on a boxing exhibition to help save a black hospital from going under. As part of the night’s festivities, King put on a concert featuring Marvin Gaye, Lou Rawls, and Wilson Pickett. The Don King template for big-time promotions was set—a superstar boxer, some vague social mission, and a whole lot of great music. He also found his cash cow in Ali, and although Ali’s camp never fully trusted Don King, the champ was impressed by the new promoter’s grand visions. In 1973, King attended the George Foreman–Joe Frazier title bout in Kingston, Jamaica. King, as his own legend goes, rode to the fight in Frazier’s limousine, and after Frazier got knocked out in the second round, King jumped into the ring, hugged Foreman, and left Jamaica with the new champ. By 1974, King’s ambition and hustle produced the Rumble in the Jungle, arguably the greatest sporting event of the 20th century. Everything else—the notoriety, the Thrilla in Manila, the hundreds of millions of dollars, the multiple investigations by Interpol and the FBI and CIA, the dozens of lawsuits, Larry Holmes, Mike Tyson, Julio Cesar Chavez, Tito Trinidad—came as a direct result of King pulling off the impossible in Zaire. An ex-con numbers runner, three years removed from the penitentiary, somehow brokered deals with Mobutu Sese Seko, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, James Brown, the country of Liberia, Barclays Bank of London, and several other operations that could have killed a fight that was perpetually in danger of being canceled or moved back to the United States.
But none of that—the killings, the jail time, the extraordinary hustle—matters much when it comes to Don King’s legacy. In the eyes of the public, Don King is a monster because he stole from his fighters. After Muhammad Ali’s brutal loss to Larry Holmes on October 2, 1980, King shortchanged Ali about $1.2 million of an $8 million guaranteed payout. While Ali was laid up in Los Angeles, his career finally dead and buried, King coerced Jeremiah Shabazz, one of Ali’s trusted associates, to bring the champ a suitcase filled with $50,000 and a contract that not only released the right to pursue any further punitive damages, but also gave King the option to promote any of Ali’s future fights. Ali, wearied and confused, signed the contract and took the briefcase. King repeated this process with nearly every fighter he worked with in the ’70s and throughout the ’80s. In doing so, he violated Mike Tyson, Larry Holmes, Evander Holyfield, and a long list of other fighters who came up, like King, from impoverished backgrounds to claim glory found “Only in America!”
King speaks of himself as a transformative figure, someone who through sheer intellect, hard work, and determination overcame racism, both overt and institutional, and brought millions of dollars and international adulation to the young black men he promoted. All of this is undeniably true. But Don King’s PR problem is that we don’t see him as a civil rights pioneer. We see him as a gangster—and as a gangster, he must adhere to the strict ethics of a gangster movie. He stole, without a hint of mercy or contrition, from his own people.
There is no forgiveness for the hypocritical gangster.
It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
—Theodore Roosevelt
As King recited the quote above, he slapped excitedly at my wrist. Certain words deserved a certain emphasis, and Don King delivered them by slapping me a little harder. “Valiantly” was one of those words. So were “worthy,” “greatly,” and, of course, “victory.” We were standing in the museumlike hallways of Don King Productions in Florida. The Roosevelt quote, printed out in neat, uniform calligraphy, hung directly underneath a letter from Jimmy Carter and the 1980 Democratic National Convention that thanked Don King for his work as “the cornerstone of the Mideast Treaty between Egypt and Israel.” After King finished his recitation, he looked down at me, his face lifting up into one hellish grin, and said, “You and I are colored people and therefore we operate at a psychic handicap. White people, institutionally, have made us believe that we cannot achieve what we, in our hearts, know we can achieve.”
I shrugged and tried to suppress a smile. King caught me slipping and squawked with laughter.
“But real life, boy, is stranger than fiction,” he yelled. “Who could ever dream up a life like mine? I still can’t believe it! I wake up every morning and I’m shocked that I’m alive.”
Don King Productions moved from the Upper East Side of Manhattan down to South Florida in the late ’80s. Today, King works out of a two-story office building in Deerfield Beach. Out the back, you’ll find a low-slung stretch of I-95 and a slow line of Buicks heading up to Boca Raton. Out the front, it’s pure Florida office park—smelly tropical trees, overgrown lawns, all of which cast an eerie, green glow on Don King’s two-tone blue-and-stainless-steel Rolls-Royce Phantom. Like all tropical places, Don King Productions is in a state of decay—the carpets have picked up the mold that can only be kept out with the greatest vigilance in South Florida. The plants droop. Throughout the late ’90s and early aughts, when King promoted Felix Trinidad, Bernard Hopkins, Roy Jones Jr., Hasim Rahman, and a host of other big-name fighters, somewhere around 50 employees worked at DKP. Today, no more than 10 of King’s longtime advisers and employees remain.
We moved on down a hallway filled with framed photographs. “That’s the former president of Pepsi,” King reported, pointing at a black-and-white photo of himself with four people in businesswear. “We did the biggest endorsement deal in the history of America together.” The next photo was of the Jackson Five. “That’s from the Victory tour,” King explained, referring to the 1984 worldwide showcase that brought in a reported $75 million. “We set the record for the most money ever made on a tour.” King then pointed at the image at the end of the hallway and smirked. “And that’s Mobutu Sese Seko.”
Don King’s office takes up two large rooms on the second floor. Memorabilia has been crowded onto every available surface—in one corner, you’ll find a LeRoy Neiman painting collection. In another, you’ll find a truly unusual number of swords from every culture around the world. At a desk littered with bags of candy and gum-ball dispensers, Don King took phone calls and signed contracts for an upcoming fight he wanted to put on in Germany. During pauses in his work, he talked to me about what should have been a variety of different subjects. But when you’re talking to Don King, all discussions quickly funnel back down to what he calls “the color barrier.” Our talks almost always returned to the history of racism, and it struck me as strange that a man whose work ethic and unfailing optimism placed him so squarely in the present seemed to only be concerned with the past.
He rambled on about Frederick Douglass and Adolf Hitler and Martin Luther King Jr. and Simon Wiesenthal and Porfirio Diaz and Shimon Peres. All these anecdotes and references seemed strangely rehearsed—propelled by a meandering yet insistent boredom. Like many men in their eighties, King seemed to be talking mostly because he could not believe the young man sitting across the desk was so dumb. By way of example, during our first interview, King lectured for 10 straight minutes about Joseph Goebbels and Nazi propaganda. By the time it was over, I had already forgotten the question that launched this particular history lesson. Upon review, I had asked him something about Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and the new Barclays Center.
Over the course of the next two weeks, I hea
rd King talk about Goebbels and Willie Lynch and the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson and W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass and dozens of other historical people, events, and phrases. When I read books and articles about King, some written as far back as 20 years ago, I’d find those same phrases, almost verbatim. In the past, several boxing writers would make fun of King for mispronouncing the names of prominent philosophers or misquoting famous passages in their work. Having spent enough time with him to watch the repetition of these mistakes (my favorite example: “Beware the Ids of March, young man! Beware the Ids of March!”), it’s ludicrous to believe that Don King’s famous malapropisms are unintentional.
For Don King, everything is strategy and payback. And if someone thinks King is a buffoon because he mispronounces “Nietzsche,” the real buffoon will pay at the negotiating table. King might mispronounce “Sun Tzu” and misquote him, but he sure as hell understands The Art of War better than anyone who might point out his mistakes.
“There’s nothing I love more in life than turning around a bigot,” King told me repeatedly. I took him at his word on this statement, not because I thought Don King relished the opportunity to teach people about the history of Willie Lynch or Joseph Goebbels, but because I believed that he takes outsize pleasure in outsmarting someone who has underestimated him because of who he used to be—a black numbers runner from the streets of Cleveland. King told me that when he arrived in New York in the mid-’70s, he made sure everyone in town knew that he was an ex-con. “They’ll always underestimate you for who you are,” he said, “and then they’ll try to use all that against you. So you’ve got to use that to your benefit, because they’re never going to change.”
This strategic intelligence extends to every part of King’s life. He does not answer questions as much as he circles and hypnotizes them to the point of exhaustion, but in our later interactions, he could quote back, verbatim, questions I had asked him several days before. He could recall the specific numbers that people in his old neighborhood in Cleveland would play back in the 1950s. He could recite almost any line of any contract that he had ever signed. When Norman Mailer wrote about meeting King in Zaire, he portrayed King as a self-proclaimed genius who sprayed every negotiable issue with a cloud of fast-talking bullshit. In his account of the Rumble in the Jungle, Mailer wrote, “It would be hard to argue that King was not a genius.” This is undeniably true. Don King, even at 81, possesses the sort of bullying intellect that lets you know, almost immediately, that you will never, ever outsmart him.
Four days before Cloud vs. Hopkins, King arrived at the Barclays Center for the last press conference. He had been in Panama the night before, setting up the details of a fight he wanted to hold in Russia in the upcoming months. His flight into New York had arrived at four in the morning. When he saw me in the open-air concourse in front of Barclays, King yelled, “Jay, baby! I want you to listen up because I was so saddened to hear about the death of my dear friend, mi hermano Hugo Chavez last night. I first met Chavez when he was a lieutenant in the Venezuelan army in 1971. He was my security when we opened the Poliedro de Caracas!”*
Once inside, King held court with the 20 or so reporters who had shown up. He talked to anyone who would listen about Chavez and all the medical care he gave to the poor mountain people of Venezuela. A vaguely European reporter shoved a camera in King’s face and asked, “Is your story possible in any other country?” King took the bait and bellowed, “Only in America!”
It had been a while since anyone had seen Don King at one of these things, especially in a city like New York. Before Cloud, King’s last notable fighter was Devon Alexander, whose last two fights with Don King Productions had been held at the Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan, and at the Family Arena in St. Charles, Missouri. Onstage in front of an audience of about 50, King sang the praises of New York City—“The city so great, they named it twice!”—and talked about the importance of promoting the spirit of the people, but he did not talk very much about Tavoris Cloud. Earlier in the week, I talked to Cloud at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn. When he realized that all my questions were going to be about Don King, Cloud threw his head back and chuckled sarcastically. He then gave one minute of boilerplate about Don King’s greatest hits. When asked if he felt any pressure for being Don King’s last hope, Cloud said, “Nobody’s going to ever stop Don King from promoting, man.”
At the press conference at Barclays, Cloud spoke softly but firmly about his confidence heading into the fight. Like so many other fighters, Cloud carries himself with an almost genteel modesty. He does not crave any spotlight. It’s not even clear whether he enjoys boxing, or simply sees it as a way to support his growing family. As Cloud spoke unsteadily into the microphone, King punctuated the end of each sentence with a “Yes!” or a “That’s right!” or a “Thunder and Lightning Cloud!” Earlier, King had rambled on about Tito Trinidad’s post-9/11 fight against Bernard Hopkins and how Tito had not really been in the proper state of mind when he entered the ring. He then talked about a possible rematch between Trinidad, who is 40, and Oscar De La Hoya. It was unclear if King was talking about the past or if he was proposing Trinidad–De La Hoya II for the immediate future, but if you want to know how far Don King has fallen, consider that in his first meaningful press conference in years, he talked, mostly, about the “Fight of the [Last] Millennium.”
The assembled press mostly chuckled at King’s outbursts and asked him questions about the past. But there was a hard edge to their laughter. In the past, these same journalists would have either cowered or steeled their nerves for a confrontation over a question that Don King didn’t want to answer. The menace and the power have left Don King—to most people these days, he’s little more than a rap sheet and a haircut. Old American icons should never play their younger selves in public. When the aura fades, the seams start to show. And Don King, with his bombast, his circuitous way of talking, and his faded set of affectations, is nothing but seams.
Most people will look at the black and believe that he is what they say he is—lazy, lethargic, can’t rise to the occasion, all lies, cheat and steal, shiftless, worthless, no good, no account, he’s a heathen and a savage.
Martin Luther King Jr. said, “No lie can live forever.”
I’m a promoter of the people, by the people, and for the people, and my magic lies in my people ties.
Yesterday’s nobody becomes today’s somebody.
You must be able to deal with what is real.
How long? Not long!
They blamed me for the Lindbergh kidnapping, World War II, the invasion of Poland, they made me the villain and tried to tarnish my reputation.
I’m a promoter of peace, unanimity and zeal, constricting negativism to its narrowest form and working for the betterment of mankind.
When asked a direct question, especially one about money, Don King hems dozens of these phrases together into a dazzling yet utterly meaningless tapestry of pretty much everything that has ever happened in the history of the world. By the time he’s done quoting Saint Thomas Aquinas and Frederick Douglass and William Cullen Bryant, you’re so confused and exhausted that you’re willing to accept any statement that’s not tied to a historic event or quotation. It’s a performance worthy of a Borges story—Don King is one of those rare orators who understands the inverse value of words, whereby the most momentous phrases, especially those that have been stamped by history, can stand in for straight bullshit. There was always a bullying element to King’s plundering of history. In the past, as long as King talked about matters of political importance at a loud volume—especially those that make white people uncomfortable—nobody would cut him off and redirect him to the matter at hand. At the height of his considerable powers in the ’80s and ’90s, King used these types of historic words to help convince young black fighters to sign with the only black promoter in the game. Now, they’re mostly used as a diversionary tactic, a way to duck questions about Ali, the briefcase, and Mike
Tyson’s expense accounts.
It’s almost as if the man dislikes the act of giving a straight answer so much that he’s figured out a way to play a puzzle game that would make Baudrillard swoon. There’s a library of puffed-up phrases stored inside Don King’s head and if you take Quotation 1.4 and match it with Historic Event B7 and then transition over to Quotation 2.17, you’ll get something like Don King’s explanation for why he wants to put an upcoming second-tier fight in Russia.
I have a special affinity for the Russian people for their resilience. In World War II they stood up and fought and endured the inclement weather, and that was a big part of their victory against the Nazis in Stalingrad and Moscow, and that’s something I love about our people, how they resist the oppression and no matter what they say or do they fight and stand up for what they believe in—liberty and freedom and justice and equality—and even if the goal is not fulfilled, you’ll find me there with the downtrodden and the underprivileged. Every country I go to I do the same thing. I’m a promoter of the people, for the people, and by the people. My magic lies in my people ties.
This is maddening, I know. But if you listen to King long enough, you’ll start to trace out patterns that hint at an underlying system of beliefs. Now, it’s possible that the symmetries are illusions and nobody will ever know, possibly not even Don King himself, just how much he believes in his own stated politics. But it goes something like this: Over the course of Don King’s 81 years, the problem of what W.E.B. Du Bois called “the color line” has gone underground. What used to be a simple proposition—an oppressed people fighting against their oppressors—has gone institutional. Black people, according to King, still live their lives at a distinct handicap, and whenever they try to accomplish anything the white men will discredit them and try to destroy them. King, of course, uses his own life as the great example of this and argues that before his time, boxing was controlled by mobsters like Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo, who fixed bouts and stole much more from fighters than Don King ever did. He points out that his longtime rival Bob Arum has been sued by fighters and managers and pretty much everyone else who came in contact with him.