He kicked a man to death, he’s made a sucker of Mike Tyson – and he hasn’t much time for journalists. Kevin Mitchell chats to Don King
Let’s get personal. I don’t particularly like Don King. But, parked in front of the 68- year-old dandy from Cleveland in a London hotel recently, I found myself drawn, helplessly, into a conspiracy of fake familiarity.
It’s not that he is personally objectionable. Indeed, there are not many genial hucksters in sport or business who are more entertaining. But King is never less than frightening. You do not quite expect him to cut you down and kick you to death, as he did once to a man who owed him money; neither, unless you are a former business partner, are you likely to be sued. But there is a chill in the air, regardless.
The last time I’d been this close to King was in the small hours after his fighter Oliver McCall had knocked out the British heavyweight Lennox Lewis at Wembley four-and- a-half years ago. That night, intoxicated with his coup, he rocked powerfully in front of me as the poor junkie McCall and his family partied around him.
A lackey held a paper plate of chicken legs at a convenient height for King, who ploughed into the bird and then, in the manner of Henry VIII, tossed each wasted leg casually over his shoulder.
“Why you white guys always on my case?” he bellowed at me that night. “It’s a black thing! Don’t deny it! If I white, no damn, motherfuckin’ problem! You need educatin’. That’s the sturry [not story, mind] here. That’s the sturry here. Heh, heh!”
I remember feeling relieved to escape. Now, though, back in a controlled environment, King is not so real, easier to consume. He’s in London to talk up the March 13 fight at New York’s Madison Square Garden between Lewis and Evander Holyfield for the undisputed heavyweight championship of the world.
A sample: “I’ll tell you the secret. If you go into investment, you want recoupment and bottom-line profit. All right? But, if you say, I’m paying a million dollars, the million dollars becomes the sturry. But the million dollars ain’t the sturry. The sturry is the attraction. And the attraction makes the investors pay a million dollars, or more, ya understand?”
What he’s getting at is the art of selling nothing. To the people who provide the money, a fight is nothing until King makes it “an attraction”. He is a boxing alchemist, one of the true bunkum merchants of this or any other century.
For students of the scam, King is in the fine tradition of another entrepreneurial magician, Doc Kearns, who sold the world Jack Dempsey. In 1923, Kearns took Dempsey to the sheep town of Shelby, Montana, accepted $300E000 of the citizens’ money for a fight against the noble, but boring, Tommy Gibbons and bankrupted the entire town.
King has gone one better: he came pretty close to putting a country, Zaire, out of business. In a long, entertaining ramble about how he magicked up the Rumble in the Jungle, the dawn clash there in 1974 between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, he tells of his gratitude to one John Daly, a south Londoner whose investment company, Hemdale, raised the front money of $1,5-million to convince then president Mobutu Sese Seko to stage the most outrageous sporting event of the century. “You say why I love the United Kingdom? I love the UK coz of John Daly. I started my career in the UK. God sent me the UK.”
For King, a visit to the UK is a holiday from the American establishment he so brilliantly exploits, and hates. He was the first promoter to recognise the possibilities of pay-per-view sport. It has made him, and, it must be said, some of his boxers, very, very rich.
“I readily accept advice from an expert who knows what to do in this business,” he says, “but it’s very difficult for me to have a tweed suit, or a herringbone suit with a pipe, telling me how to run the business. What he do is handcuff and fetter you. I can fail by myself, I don’t need no help to fail. I need help to succeed.”
King’s strongly held opinion is that white America couldn’t beat him so they have tried to kill him off, one way or another. “They couldn’t compete with me, so they start propogandisin’, to say I’m robbin’ the fighters. What they didn’t realise is that I paid the fighter and, if I want to pay him less, I do not have to steal from him, since I set the payroll. If I want a little more, I just gotta pay you a little less. I ain’t gotta give you no money and then try to steal it back.”
The language of boxing, and in particular of boxing and money, takes some getting used to. British promoter Frank Warren, for instance, sees his recent court loss to King somewhat differently from those of us who would regard being asked to pay out $12-million to a former partner and implacable enemy as something of a setback.
“It’s not a question of losing,” Warren said after the verdict, “it’s what I paid to buy out the rest of the business and, for me, it’s cheap at the price. I’m my own man now, I’m free to do as I please in my business, and that’s where I wanted to be .” You can see what Warren meant, though. He has unclasped King’s grip, checked his ring finger and run down the street shouting to the neighbours that the bully from Cleveland has left town.
Except he hasn’t. He’s right here, still. He has merely exchanged one Frank for another: exit Frank Warren, enter Frank Maloney, Lennox Lewis’s manager, a man whom King used to call the “mental pygmy”, but who now is “my fine little friend”. Maloney, who sits on the arm of King’s sofa, for part of our interview, looks on quietly while the King show continues: “What you should be writing,” he says, seriously, “is where was all the money from all these other promoters prior to my advent? That’s the sturry. It ain’t the sturry whether Don King done robbed the fighters, know what I mean?”
He cites in his defence Larry Holmes, the former world heavyweight champion who split with him over money but who conceded King wasn’t all bad. “Larry Holmes said in my defence, if he’s robbin’ me, I get more bein’ robbed with him than the 100% I get with someone else.”
That’s as true as it gets in boxing. Fighters do not deal in equity, any more than do promoters, managers or TV executives. The main process at play is an arbitrary division of wealth. If a fighter who might otherwise be excluded from this party is granted admission – through his promoter’s links with corruptible and weak ratings committees and purblind television companies – he is in no position to argue over missing noughts.
As tough as he might be in the ring, he is like a lamb when a pen is placed in his hand and a contract laid before him.
During his divorce from Robin Givens, King’s former charge Mike Tyson was asked by the judge what percentage of his money he reckoned he kept. “What’s percentage mean?” Tyson asked. The fighter had heard his manager use the word, but all he knew was he got paid. He did not learn until later that King’s daughter was earning $50E000 a year to run his fan club. He did not learn until later that King actually owned the fighter’s “intellectual property” – his image.
Tyson did not even have the rights to his own ugly mush. Tyson, who has earned the best part of $200-million with King yet is virtually broke, dreams of recouping maybe half of that by suing King.
Other fighters have tried. Jeff Merritt, King’s first heavyweight, had been admitted to the party in the early Seventies. When he started losing, King let him go. I last saw Merritt a few years ago outside a King promotion at Caesar’s Palace, shoeless and begging. “I’m Jeff Merritt,” he said. “I used to be a fighter.”
King, as always, is still concentrating on the business in hand: “The theme of the [Holyfield/Lewis] fight is the greatness of womanhood,” he explains, oddly, “which I am carrying around the world. I want to pay tribute to their greatness and we have a standing invitation to Margaret Thatcher, hopefully we can get her to come in, we got Mo Mowlam, we got Mary McAleese from Ireland!”
Winding up now, King reveals how he will also be offering invitations to “the spirits of the old” – “Yessir. Sherlock Holmes, and Dr Moriarty, heh! Elementary my dear Holmes. Dr Watson, too!”
And then King is suddenly on his feet, offering a handshake – with a hand that has killed, that has signed a thousand contracts, slapped a million backs. And that’s the whole damn sturry.