Don King perfected and personifies boxing's outlaw economy. He dreams of backing one last great fighter.
Correction Appended
-- A table in this story stated that Bob Arum promoted the 2002 Mike Tyson versus Lennox Lewis fight; in fact, the promoters were Main Events and Prize Fight Promotions.
No one knows the names of fighters anymore.
Kids in schoolyards don't mimic the Champ; women in beauty salons don't swoon over the latest Sugar of the ring. It has been years since fans witnessed a historic bout in the making. Purists of the sport dubbed "the sweet science" by English writer Pierce Egan in the early 1800s now make do dissecting great fights from decades ago and great fighters who, if not dead, are withered remnants of their once beautiful selves. These days heavyweight belts change hands in obscure bouts staged on a Saturday night, and come Sunday morning few people realize, or even care, that a new champion has emerged.
But one name in boxing is recognized by dilettantes and fanatics alike. Fittingly, that name is King.
On a crisp January afternoon in New York, promoter Don King emerges from the bowels of Madison Square Garden and draws a crowd of normally blasé New Yorkers who jockey to get a peek at his trademark light-socket hairdo that has now grown white and stringy. Clad in a sequined, red-white-and-blue denim jacket emblazoned with his hackneyed slogan, "Only in America," he is here to promote a lineup of fights the following night. No one even notices as a dozen professional boxers spill out onto the street behind him.
"It's going to be exciting!" King says as he postures for the press. "It's going to be provocative! It's going to be beautiful! You are going to see fights made in boxing heaven!" He has said this a thousand times before. Does he mean it as much as he used to?
The Garden has played host to some of the great fights in boxing's history, and King, 74, remembers many of them, from the Joe Louis vs. Rocky Marciano classic in 1951 to the matchup of Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier 20 years later in the "Fight of the Century"--which King heard on the radio, while serving time in prison. In 33 years he has staged at least 600 championship bouts and raked in $1 billion in boxing revenue, producing seven of the ten largest pay-per-view events in history. He has amassed a $350 million fortune doing it.
But boxing is in deep peril, and King--according to your point of view, either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to the sport--wants to rescue it. Pay-per-view revenue, which totaled $168 million from the three largest fights of 1996, when the sport was peaking financially, faded to $66 million from last year's three top bouts; tickets sales for the top-three fights of 2005 totaled $13 million, a 58% drop from the top three of 1996.
Even a reality show on NBC--The Contender, hosted by Sugar Ray Leonard and Rocky actor Sylvester Stallone--didn't help; it got canceled after one season. By contrast, a reality series for Ultimate Fighting Championship, whose bare-knuckled, full-contact fights draw legions of young viewers, soon begins its third season on
|
||||||||||||||
Boxing's biggest problem--and Don King's ready-made solution--lies in the fact that it hasn't found a flamboyant and dangerous new heavyweight champion since Mike Tyson went to prison (for the first time) in 1992. Heavyweights drive the entire sport, but can you name the champ today? Late last year King himself controlled four heavyweight champs in four rival organizations, but none came close to replacing Tyson.
"Boxing has to find another star," says King. "I'm in constant search, but whoever finds him, I'm the one who will make him a star. I'm the diamond-polisher."
"Boxing needs fighters who excite people," says Tyson, now 39, retired and living in Arizona. "You have to be their fantasy. You have to be their soap opera."
Since Tyson's exit in 1997, after a disqualification for biting Evander Holyfield's ear, the sport has been better known for one-round letdowns, mismatches, bums and embarrassments. Even Don King Productions, in Deerfield Beach, Fla., has felt the effects of boxing's decline. It recently scaled back on office staff by 40% to 30 full-time employees. King also keeps on his roster 113 fighters in myriad weight classes from 27 countries. Dozens of them train and live at a barracks-style camp owned by King in rural Ohio.
He has high hopes for a few of his fighters, especially Ricardo Mayorga, a 154-pounder who is preparing to face Oscar (The Golden Boy) De La Hoya, who at age 33 is the most financially successful boxer in the sport today.
Outside Madison Square Garden a couple more of King's brightest prospects go unnoticed by the people crowding around the promoter. Jean-Marc Mormeck, 33, is a 200-pound cruiserweight from France; Zab Judah, 28, is a Brooklyn-bred, gazellelike welterweight at less than 150 pounds. Both are slated for bouts at the Garden the next night. Mormeck, with a few devastating victories--and maybe 15 extra pounds--might remake himself into the heavyweight star that King longs for.
Even then, however, King's quest may fall short because of a quirk of capitalism: Too much competition makes it harder than ever to create a new superstar. There isn't a monopolistic league, as there is in baseball or basketball. Fights are overseen by an alphabet soup of a dozen or so rival sanctioning bodies, seven of them widely recognized--the WBA, the WBC, the IBF, the WBO and more; and anyone can set up a new one, anytime. Each group has up to 20 weight classes, yielding 200 different champions at one time. Currently five different punchers lay claim to five different World Heavyweight Champion titles, and two other major titles are vacant. In 1975, when Muhammad Ali fought Joe Frazier in their third classic matchup, the King-staged "Thrilla in Manila," just two sanctioning bodies held sway. Ali was the only heavyweight champ.
"The title of champ is diluted," says top boxing manager Shelly Finkel. "You can be a champ, but it doesn't mean anything."
Don King has spent his life feinting, slipping and hustling his way from the streets of Cleveland, where as a young man in the 1950s he was known as Cadillac Slim, ran a nightclub and operated a daily numbers racket before lotteries were legalized. Some years ago the late promoter Dan Duva met with King and marveled at his ability to rattle off the telephone number of every person whose name came up. "You're pretty good with those numbers," Duva told him. "It used to be my business," King replied.
Mark Greenberg, a former Showtime Networks suit who has negotiated with King, says the man has an uncanny mastery of financial details. "No matter how many times the deal changes, Don knows every number," he says. Alex Yemenidjian, former president of MGM Grand, says King "could have been chief executive officer of a major corporation. He's as smart as anyone."
By the time King struck it rich, he had killed two men. One was a burglar whom King shot in 1954, in what was ruled justifiable homicide. The other was a fellow small-time street hustler who allegedly owed King a few hundred dollars. King, who insists he was defending himself once again, stomped the man to death in 1966 and served not quite four years in prison for manslaughter.
He was virtually unknown when in 1974 he guaranteed a then unprecedented $10 million purse to Muhammad Ali and George Foreman for a fight in Zaire, one of the great fights of all time. King was such a salesman that he persuaded Ali to let him promote the fight, then talked Foreman into signing a blank sheet of paper so King could fill in details of the contract later.
In 1979 King brought the fledgling HBO pay-TV channel its first heavyweight fight and three years later sold another bout to the network for $2 million, putting the now huge
King has an uncanny ability to quickly judge character and figure out what motivates someone. "You don't get stars to sign with you just by offering them a lot of money," he says. "You get them by getting in their heads."
That's how he got Mike Tyson. In 1988 Tyson was the youngest heavyweight champion in history and one of the most fearsome fighters ever. But he was vulnerable: His manager, Jim Jacobs, had just died; his trainer and father figure, Cus D'Amato, had died three years before; and his marriage to actress Robin Givens was coming to a volatile end. King seized the moment, convincing Tyson he would make him richer and help fill the void in his life.
Tyson went to prison in 1992 for rape, and King cemented their bond by lending him $14 million. King depicts this as a bold business risk: "You go to the slammer, there ain't no guarantee you're coming out." Tyson served three years, and by his release King had landed a $70 million deal for six fights at the MGM Casino in Las Vegas. "I knew he was certifiably unpredictable," King says. "But he was salable."
For this King received $15 million in MGM shares, with the right to sell it back to the company once the stock price had doubled; it did and King pocketed $30 million. For a time King was the second- largest individual shareholder in MGM, after Kirk Kerkorian. At one point King also was the largest individual taxpayer in the state of Nevada, he says.
"I made the stock rise just talking about MGM and Las Vegas," King boasts. "The deals I've made should be textbook deals. They should be taught at Harvard and at historically black colleges."
Tyson, after paying a cut of his earnings to his management and to King, kept $120 million for himself during a 15-month stretch in the mid-1990s. During that period King's own earnings peaked at $70 million annually. He paid the federal government $30 million in income taxes for 1996 and issued a press release to say what a good American he was. "I was so happy," King recalls.
Times were good, yet in 1998 Tyson left King and sued him for $100 million, claiming King had cheated him. (They later settled for $14 million, and King recently made his last payment to the fighter.) Tyson grossed more than $400 million in his career but kept only 25%. During the years he was represented by King, he paid 30% to the promoter, 20% to two managers, and half of what was left to taxes. What Tyson kept, he spent lavishly. He filed for bankruptcy in 2003 and has been repaying several million dollars in back taxes owed to the feds.
"If I had not come along, guys would not be making the kind of money they earn," Tyson says. "Before I came along a big payday was $10 million. In my heyday I would spend that much in one week."
King says Tyson's biggest mistake was ending their partnership. "Mike was not a traitor, he was just shortsighted. He should have been the first billionaire athlete in history," King says. He figures a hundred of his fighters have earned at least $1 million each. "They spend their money, then they get mad at me for keeping mine."
"He's done some bad things, he's done some good things," says King's longtime rival Bob Arum. "Let the bodies be buried."
For much of the 1970s and 1980s, King says, he had to fight "unfair" and "untrue" allegations that he had ties to organized crime. "I'm blamed for everything," he bemoans. In the early 1980s he got sued by Muhammad Ali, who accused King of shortchanging his purse from a fight against Larry Holmes. King settled for less than $100,000. In 1985 King was tried for and acquitted of tax evasion.
By the late 1990s King was so bombarded by litigation that he spent $30 million on lawyers' fees in a single year. In 1998 King was tried for and acquitted of insurance fraud. After the trial he paid for a vacation in the Bahamas for members of the jury. In the late 1990s the feds raided the Florida headquarters of Don King Productions. While media helicopters hovered above, agents rummaged through files and documents. King says no charges resulted.
Recently King paid $7.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed by a former super welterweight champ, Terry Norris. Earlier this year King settled a suit brought by another heavyweight champion, Christopher Bird, by agreeing to release the fighter from his contract. Fighting charges of impropriety is commonplace for King.
"I've had scandals and indictments, and I'm still standing, still fighting," King says. "I'm a black man from the ghetto, an ex-convict. I came from wrong to right, out of the penitentiary to rewrite the history of this business. There ain't no way I would get back into the cycle of doing wrong. The mere fact that I'm still standing is a phenomenon."
King has invested some of his wealth in other businesses. In 1998 he paid $700,000 for the Call & Post, a Cleveland newspaper targeting the black community. He owns the rights to new advertising technology: a robot that moves freely around malls and public areas. King holds 7,000 tapes of fights, press conferences and other boxing-related events and wants to create a cable channel devoted to boxing and other entertainment.
For decades King and his wife of 40 years, Henrietta, have owned a 2,000-acre ranch outside of Cleveland. They spend lots of time in Manalapan, Fla., where King in 1997 paid $8 million for a 54-acre oceanfront property. He put 30% down but still got rejected for a bank mortgage. On closing day King walked in with a cashier's check for $5.6 million to clinch the purchase. "The next day the guy next door to my property put up a for-sale sign," King says. "So I bought that property, too." King then installed a scaled-down replica of the Statue of Liberty on his lawn, facing the Atlantic Ocean.
Cash is part of the King persona. He says he has kept as much as $70 million in his checking account. He paid $5 million in cash for an airplane, and he always has a huge roll in his pocket, peeling off large bills to pay for restaurants, hotels and tips. On fight nights King insists that casino officials cash multimillion-dollar checks made out to him. To oblige, the casinos send staff and security officers to a private room to count out bills. Eventually King emerges, carrying bags crammed with money.
As rich as he is, King lusts for more--and longs for one more great fighter. The profusion of rival sanctioning bodies impedes this search but is unlikely to change. Each sanctioning entity takes a 3% cut of the gross purse, and three or four can profit from a single fight when a title is being "unified."
Even the sanctioning bodies and the fighters get confused. At the weigh-in for a 2004 cruiserweight bout between Kelvin Davis and Ezra Sellars, Davis showed up weighing 200 pounds, the mark set by various sanctioning groups--unaware that the overseer of this fight, the International Boxing Federation, still had the class set at the old weight of 190. Davis had to lose 10 pounds for the fight the next day. He lost the weight--and knocked Sellars out.
Don King had three "world champs" on the card at Madison Square Garden set for a chilly night in January. At the weigh-in the day before, boxing's most famous hairdo works the crowd. Colorful characters in fur, sequins, baseball caps or warm-ups abound, and King seems to know every face present, from retired fighters to grizzled writers. They call him "D.K.," and he has nicknames for everyone. "Craig Boogie!" he beckons to one young man. He greets another, who sports a fur jacket and fur cap and recently survived gunshot wounds, leading King to coin a name: "Bulletproof Zip!" he yells.
King's heavyweight hopeful, the cruiserweight Jean-Marc Mormeck, holds two title belts and has a record of 31--2. He is expected to easily dispense of his opponent, O'Neil Bell of Jamaica. King's other hot prospect, 147-pound Zab Judah, is a three-time world champion and is one of the fastest punchers in boxing. He faces an unknown from Argentina, Carlos Baldomir. A victory for Judah will land him a multimillion-dollar payday to fight Floyd Mayweather Jr., who is 35--0, with 24 knockouts and currently the most unbeatable man in boxing. Judah, as if looking beyond his bout with Baldomir, is so bored during the press conference that he sits on stage, answering calls and text messages on his cell phone.
A dozen other fighters will match up in preliminary bouts, including boxers who were stopped short of their glory ("Guys who deserve another chance," King says) and a few who, like King, have done time in prison. "Fellow alumni," he says.
The next night, as the main bouts are about to begin, King paces the ring in his tuxedo, holding an unlit cigar in one hand and waving a small American flag in the other. An announcer introduces King and, as always, boos break out, eliciting nothing but a broad grin from the man.
Mormeck, a chiseled boxer with a bald head and a bleach-blond beard and mustache, looks like a menacing character from a sci-fi movie. He pounds on Bell for a few rounds but is unable to hurt him. Finally, in the tenth round, with Mormeck tired from throwing his heavy punches, Bell catches him with a flurry and BAM!--Mormeck, one of King's great hopes, is out cold. For several minutes he lies flat on the canvas.
By the time that Judah enters the ring for the last event of the night, the New York crowd is ready to see its hometown hero make quick and dazzling work of his opponent. But Judah never gets his punches up to speed. After 12 unspectacular rounds he loses by unanimous decision, then immediately blames King for not giving him enough time to train.
"All I did was put on a great show, and it's all my fault," King gripes. It has been a bad night for the king, yet his search will continue. "I ain't never failed," King says. "The word 'failure' has been totally eradicated out of my vocabulary."
Bloodied But Unbowed |
|
Boxing's Weakening Punch |
|
| $168 million Total pay-per-view from Mike Tyson's 3 fights in 1996. |
$66 million Total pay-per-view from the top 3 fights of 2005. |
| $31 million Total live gate from Tyson's 3 fights in 1996. |
$13 million Total live gate from the top 3 fights of 2005. |
Total Heavyweight Champs |
|
| 1 in 1975 (year of the Thrilla in Manila), Muhammad Ali. |
5 in 2006, plus 2 vacant heavyweight titles. |
Recognized Sanctioning Bodies |
|
| 2 in 1975, the WBC and the WBA. |
7 in 2006, plus several fringe organizations. |
The The Largest-Grossing Fights Ever* |
||
| $130 million Mike Tyson vs. Lennox Lewis; 2002; Main Events and Prize Fight Promotions, promoter. $115 million Evander Holyfield vs. Lennox Lewis; 1999; Don King, promoter. $110 million Mike Tyson vs. Evander Holyfield; 1997; Don King, promoter. |
||
| Tyson swinging in his 2002 loss to Lewis. | ||
| * Based on pay-per-view and live gate; all are heavyweight bouts. | ||
Sidebar: Not Quite Great Enough