This is how Nero listened. His eyes are almost closed, regarding the tablecloth with a slow-burning, unblinking intensity. Once he moves his lips as if rehearsing a pronouncement, and then resumes his distrustful stakeout of the salt cellar to his left.
Away from the cameras and the parades, the pre-arranged spontaneous displays of public adoration, Don King looks terribly tired. He looks like he hasn’t slept since he was poor. A man like this doesn’t sleep. He hibernates. Or he rests. If his name didn’t transform it into a tenuous journalistic pun, one might mention the sleeping habits of heads that wear crowns.
He is resting now, despite the urgent murmuring at his ear and the documents being thrust in front of him. Once it was news of a rebellion in a far-flung province, some local ruffian naive and bloodthirsty enough to challenge the hammer and anvil of Rome. Today it could be negotiations, logistics, unruly fiefs in this new southern province of Don King’s empire; but these secrets of state are not for my ears. The muscled American in the white T-shirt pauses and looks at my Dictaphone.
”You’re not recording any of this, are you,” he says. It is not a question.
I am sitting opposite King in a booth in an upmarket Sandton steakhouse. He and his entourage have been in meetings all day, and a late lunch has been hastily arranged. My photo- grapher and I have been literally jammed in. On my left are the imposing forearms of the man who could yet pop my Dictaphone like a tick. On my right, Carl King, son and right-hand man, makes flamboyant and ineffective enquiries about starters.
”Prawns,” he says to the menu with an inflection straight out the pulpit of a small wooden Baptist church in the Carolinas. Everyone but his father nods. ”Shrimps,” he says, and again all but one nod. ”Whatchew got? Chicken livers!” The maître d’ kowtows. ”Prawns,” says Carl, having established nothing but his ability to name hors d’oeuvres. He raises his glass of wine and peers into its ruby depths. ”Let’s see what’s hapnin’ in the world today.”
It is King Snr who makes the arrangements. The starters are settled, and the muscles depart. He is playing with an unlit cigar: I’ve seen smaller redwoods. The eyes, a curious blue-black, are now half-open and it is time to talk.
There are questions one would like to ask. What’s it like to beat someone to death? Why did New Jersey ban you last month from doing business in the state’s casinos for a year? What would it take for you to punch my lights out, right here, right now? But one senses that the first two questions would answer the third, and besides, one doesn’t want to bleed on Carl’s nice suit.
Besides, the interviewer facing Don King is not there to interrogate. His role is clearly defined by the man’s celebrity. You don’t interview Don King: you present him with cues, and clap when he runs out of breath.
The double-page features on his visit in the local media last week were an indictment of their authors’ inability or unwillingness to critique the ease with which he is drawn into theatrical, incoherent lectures on the nature of everything. Most failed to ask whether what King was saying was worth listening to. Some presented acres of gabble as an invitation to their readers to indulge in smug eye-rolling at a visiting curiosity, ignoring the hypocrisy of 15-paragraph quotes. After all, you get paid per word.
But whatever their insight and motives, all those who have asked King his views on South Africa must have experienced that peculiar feeling of whispering from the wings to a popular ham indulging an infatuation with method acting. His rumbling soliloquies no doubt model themselves on Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan and Martin Luther King, but Al Pacino is also in there somewhere, being tough and noble, drowning the mind with a torrent of words for as long as the camera keeps rolling.
The cameras have stopped rolling now, and he rattles through his lines as if he is trying to find his place in a script. Where most people would draw breath, King says, ”Know what I’m sayin’?”, quickly enough to turn it into a noise — nwadumsan?
”Madiba’s the miracle-man of the century, nwadamsan?” he says, massaging his ring-finger and looking at Carl’s wine. ”He’s indicative, nwadumsan, of what is possible. He snatched the possible out of the impossible, he snatched victory out of the jaws of defeat.” His respect seems real, but he is struggling to hide his boredom.
He reanimates suddenly, picking up the cigar by its stern and jabbing it at me, when talk turns to boxing and Vernon Smith, manager of Corrie Sanders and object of King’s wrath in last week’s sporting press.
Reports quoted a theatrically indignant King saying the unfortunate Smith had ”double-crossed” him and local promoter Rodney Berman. Was this real anger, or some perfectly timed showmanship to generate hoopla around his latest project?
”Not anger, just stating a matter of fact. He really double-crossed himself, nwadumsan?” I don’t, but King joins the dots. ”We were just the steppin’-stone to his self-destruction.
”He said I’d given Sanders a slave contract. But even at slave wages he gets more than just about everybody else.” There seems to be some logic here: most of the slaves I know earn only hundreds of thousands of rands, rather than millions. I am about to ask where I can sign up for a slavery contract when more wine arrives with fresh miscommunications over prawns.
Like all conscientious salesmen, King is resolute that his latest product, last weekend’s Carnival City event, is the greatest of his career. ”You know each time I reach the epitome, I never cease to amaze myself,” he says. ”God steps in and makes another fight, one that eclipses the one before.”
Nothing about Zaire or Manila ring any bells? ”Of course,” he concedes, ”the continent of Africa and the Philippines, with [Joe] Frasier and [Muhammad] Ali and [George] Foreman, they set the tone for international relationships.”
With global politics thus covered, we move on to the great fighters. He begins with Ali, Foreman, Larry Holmes, but quickly accelerates until he and Carl are bouncing names off each other like an Ali right hook off a Frasier mandible. Julio Cesar Chavez earns special praise — ”he got the largest live date in history, 36 000 people, nwadumsan?” — but it seems that every fighter King has ever promoted is a pugilistic god.
Suddenly he seems distracted by the noise and bustle of the restaurant. His patter deserts him, and for a moment he gropes for words, quickly truncating a fresh hypothesis about the importance of his fighters to the Third World, where they ”bring hope to the hopeless”. Again he looks too tired to recite his lines.
What about purists’ complaints that there is too much money in the fight game, and too many divisions and champions, mainly because of the machinations of people like King? ”I think that those people are …” He pauses, thinking. The intense introspection of earlier returns, and I wonder if this is what Don King is like when he’s brushing his teeth at night. ”Pessimists,” he decides.
”They just want to think about holding on to tradition and custom. The only good thing about the good old days is that they’re gone.” He says it with feeling and flair, and we laugh. As quickly as his banter abandoned him it returns, and to illustrate a grim past in which a single boxing organisation called the shots, he declares that, ”On the island of the Cyclops, the one-eyed man is king.”
The bad old days aren’t all gone, it seems. I ask King if he thinks his perceived persecution by the law and the criticism levelled at him personally and professionally are a result of racism. ”Yes,” he says emphatically. ”There are always people who say it’s too much money for you to have, too much of everything, unless you’re being obsequious, sweatin’ when it ain’t hot, scratchin’ when it don’t itch, laughin’ when there ain’t nothin’ funny, nwadumsan?”
But it is not only black Americans and black American boxing promoters who are discriminated against, he asserts. His support for Jewish organisations in the United States, including the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, has been well documented by his acolytes; but his motivation is more candid than some minority lobbies at home might like.
”African-Americans don’t hold exclusivity on slavery,” he says. ”They don’t hold exclusivity on suffering and torment, on denial and deprivation.”
Is this gung-ho political incorrectness or old-fashioned Republican rhetoric? It’s hard to tell as King comes to the defence of his president and country. At least I think he comes to the defence of his president and country. If this is fence-sitting, it is fence- sitting of the most decisive variety.
”I support George Walker Bush. He’s one of the strong, innovative, imaginative, creative presidents. I’ll leave the foreign policy up to the diplomats, but if you can get to George Walker Bush, and you can show him the error of his ways, you can effect change.”
Bush should be applauded for advancing integration, says King. ”He put two blacks in the top of government, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, and not in token roles either. He’s bold, audacious.”
But Bush’s most admirable trait, King seems to imply, is his absolute power. It takes some explaining, but it seems that Republican dominance of both the Senate and the House is a boon to democracy in the free world.
”You can get much more done if you can persuade them to be righteous,” he says. ”If you bring a new guy in, he’s going to take four years to disassemble that machine and reassemble a new one, and by the time you’ve done that the people are going to be screaming in the streets because they lost their jobs and the economy’s finished.”
He launches an attack on the countries that want a ”share of the booty” in Iraq without having done any fighting. ”If you’re going to criticise, then you gotta stay out, like Nelson Mandela who stayed out for 27 years. Though really, he stayed in for 27 years!”
The conversation ends when the food arrives. King hefts his still-unlit cigar again, and squints at it through one eye as I am encouraged to disappear. In his corner of the booth, marooned in a sea of chicken-livers, he is a solitary giant. On the island of the Cyclops, the one-eyed man is King. Nwadumsan?