The Life and Crimes of Don King: The Shame of Boxing in America

by Jack Newfield

  Wallau also summarized some of the fictional fights he had discovered in the records supplied by Johnny Ort. Arledge asked Wallau to put this information in writing and, with wishful thinking, suggested Ring magazine would now “shape up.”

  The next day King was summoned to a meeting at ABC with Arledge, John Martin, Jeff Rube, and several lawyers. King was asked to respond to some of Wallau’s criticisms, even though Wallau was not invited to the meeting to offer counter-rebuttals.

  * The venerable Philadelphia middleweight Bennie Briscoe says this option clause, giving King future control, was the reason he decided not to enter the tournament. Briscoe was some fighter: He held Carlos Monzon to a draw in Buenos Aires, and knocked out Joe Shaw, Billy Douglas, George Benton, and Vicente Rondon.

  King said that booking fees were routine in boxing and there was nothing wrong with them, although he agreed to eliminate them from now on in the tournament, since they contradicted the stated premise of Ring’s ratings being an automatic ticket in.

  On the option/first refusal contract clause, King claimed they were used to satisfy the terms of his own contract with ABC. He also claimed that if any fighter objected to them, he dropped the clause from their contract, although this was not the case with Bennie Briscoe and other boxers.

  King and Arledge met again the next day, February 17, and at this meeting Arledge asked King to provide him with a complete list of all the invitations sent out, and a chart showing all the matchups for the tournament in future fights. ABC was starting to apply oversight scrutiny to the runaway tournament.

  Also on February 17 Arledge received a letter from Madison Square Garden president Michael Burke containing the latest issue of Flash Gordon’s newsletter. It was yet another densely detailed, abusive rant against King and ABC. Burke’s covering note to Arledge said: “This arrived in my mail without identification. Like most anonymous material, it’s probably garbage.”

  On February 22 Wallau alerted Arledge to the fact that the CBS-TV network program Who’s Who had interviewed Flash for an investigative segment being prepared on King and the tournament. Wallau also gave Arledge a copy of Flash’s February 9 newsletter, yet another exposé of falsified records, favoritism, attempted extortion of fighters, and exclusion of independent managers.

  On the same day, Goody Petronelli, Hagler’s co-manager, wrote his letter to Arledge, alleging that Hagler had been intentionally blacklisted out of the tournament by King and explaining that Hagler had already knocked out Johnny Baldwin, and that Baldwin had gotten an invitation but not Hagler. Petronelli also included Flash’s newsletters dated December 17, 1976, and January 5, 1977. This meant that between Wallau, Burke, and Petronelli, Arledge now had a complete set of Flash’s indictments of himself. Between these newsletters and Wallau’s two December memorandums, he had all the information he needed to terminate the tournament contract at this point.

  But instead of terminating King, Arledge terminated Wallau—in a fashion. At the end of February, Wallau was notified by Chet Forte that he was being “taken off” the next boxing tournament telecast. The reason given was that he had a disruptive personality conflict with Howard Cosell, which was, in fact, the case.

  King was exultant, rightly or wrongly believing he had gotten rid of his most dangerous critic as a result of his own pressure tactics. King later took the credit for Wallau’s removal in an interview with lawyer Michael Armstrong, who investigated the tournament for ABC. Of wanting Wallau out, King told Armstrong, “I wanted to see the bullet in front of me, not behind me.”

  After about a week of feeling deserted and abandoned, Wallau was called in by Arledge and told his independent research had improved his career prospects at ABC, and Arledge wanted him to continue to scrutinize King’s methods and practices. But he was still off the tournament telecasts.

  The third tournament telecast was held on March 16 from the gym of Marion Prison, before thirteen hundred armed robbers, rapists, and murderers. It was billed as King’s “homecoming to my alma mater.” For the occasion, King got off one of his best malapropisms, saying he felt he was returning “like Walden to Thoreau.”

  King strolled through his old prison yard wearing a $30,000 diamond ring, a $9,000 watch, and his usual wad of $5,000 in his pocket, “so I don’t feel naked.”

  But King appeared jittery, perhaps because Roone Arledge himself was in the production truck, keeping close track of everything. Or perhaps because the fights themselves stank. They were later described by Mark Jacobson in the Village Voice as “a bunch of smelly mismatches and slow waltzes, causing one guy to yell, ‘Hurry up, I only got 20 years.’”

  Some of the reporters at Marion asked King pointed questions about the tournament, and in almost self-parody, he replied, “I will not wither in the face of this salvo after salvo of invective and vituperation. This tournament is as honest as the day is long, as clean as a spring afternoon.”

  Paddy Flood’s defense was more prosaic and fatalistic. He told Mark Jacobson: “Look, I can find ten guys who are willing to call you a crook. But because I’m in boxing, I can find 100 guys who are willing to call me a crook. That’s boxing.”

  By now King knew his $2 million deal with ABC was in jeopardy, and with it, the power the deal gave him. King went back to his instincts from the jailhouse and the numbers business—attack first and ask questions later. He had prevailed against Wallau, and now he decided to play the race card.

  King’s press spokesman at the time of the tournament was Irving Rudd, one of the most beloved men in sports. Out of Brownsville, Rudd had starting doing public relations for Joe Louis in 1937, gone on to work for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and done some Ali fights. Reporters loved and trusted him, giving him the nickname of Unswerving Irving.

  “Right after the Marion prison show, King flew in about a dozen black newspaper editors, put them up at a hotel, and gave an all-black press conference,” Rudd recalls. “I told him this was wrong, but he ignored me. I pleaded with him not to make this a black–white confrontation, and to answer everything factually. But he yelled at me, ‘Don’t fuck with my mind.’ He was determined to get the message out that he was the victim of a racist conspiracy to keep blacks out of power in boxing.

  “Don felt that if he made himself look like an innocent victim, the black community would stick with him, no matter what the facts were. And that way he could survive anything. He was always thinking ahead. He was a great survivor. And he was right.”

  King stimulated statements of support from the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton, who was then running for mayor of New York. The black press also published stories making King look like a martyr and the victim of a lynching by jealous whites.

  His defenders did not notice that Marvin Hagler was black, or that Ernie Butler, who discovered Larry Holmes before King, was black.

  At the same time, Al Braverman began to give out copies of an anonymous newsletter called “Boxing Beat True Facts.” It was a personal attack on Flash Gordon, written in Flash’s own style but with less fidelity to fact. The newsletter read:

  Known to boxing troops as Degenerate and Sick Gordon… a sewer mongrel and beatnik pothead with Body Odor to boot… refuses to bathe… never goes out with girls (detests them) but goes out with BOYS… he stinks like a skunk… hates blacks and Puerto Ricans… born liar. A faggot.

  But such juvenile nastiness by Braverman was futile. It could not suppress the truth, which was now flowing out of a dozen different places.

  In mid-March, Jeff Rube found out that tournament fighter Kenny Weldon had paid a $2,500 “booking fee” to George Kanter. ABC acknowledged that this had occurred but did not make Kanter’s name public in the press release it distributed.

  On March 23, fight manager Jack Stanton wrote directly to Arledge making the case that his son, Larry Stanton, should have been included in King’s tournament. The father pointed out that lightweight Pat Dolan, managed by Flood, was in the tournament, but his son
had knocked out Dolan in 1976.

  Jeff Ruhe, although only twenty-three, had Arledge’s confidence, and he now began to make the case against King.

  “I was in a few meeting with Roone and King in late March and early April,” Ruhe says, “where King just tried to bullshit Roone. He came up to our offices wearing a white ermine coat and gold chains, and just was not making a good impression. By now we were getting affidavits signed by fighters like Weldon, and from managers, and King was losing his last shred of credibility. Cosell was now against King. Alex was being vindicated. King’s only defender left was Jim Spence.”

  On April 6, Ruhe saw a phone message from Ike Fluellen, the Houston policeman Ort had rated in the top ten. Assuming Fluellen was calling about when he was finally going to get a fight in the tournament, Ruhe called King’s offices first, before returning the call. But King’s staff told Ruhe that Fluellen was being dropped because he had been idle for over a year and a half, even though Ring now ranked him in the top ten without fighting.

  When Ruhe relayed this information to Fluellen, who had been training for months, the police officer told Ruhe the whole story of his involvement with Cline and Ort, and offered to sign an affidavit. “If I had stayed retired, I could have become champ,” Fluellen joked. The next day, Fluellen signed the affidavit, and this became the next-tolast straw that broke the back of the scandal.

  The last straw was the publication of the 1977 Ring Record Book the next day. This was the smoking gun that would prove the phony fights, padded records, and rigged admissions to the tournament.

  Alex Wallau and Flash Gordon went to the offices of Ring magazine together, purchased several copies, and then rushed to ABC’s offices to look up the career records of fighters like Fluellen, House, Biff Cline, and a dozen others.

  “This is it! We have them!” Wallau shouted as he went through the book. “This is a fraud on paper! This is something we can prove. King can’t talk his way out of this.”

  Wallau and Gordon compared the 1975, 1976, and 1977 Ring Record Books. They saw fictitious fights, listed as taking place in 1975, that were not listed in the 1976 book, but were listed in the 1977 book.

  Before the morning was over, Wallau was able to show the top executives of ABC Sports that at least fifty phony wins were attributed by Johnny Ort to fighters in the tournament, to justify ranking prelim kids as “the best in America.”

  The 1977 Ring Record Book contained five fake one-round knockouts in Biff Cline’s record; four phony wins for Richard Rozelle; two phony wins for Pat Dolan; four fictional knockouts for Anthony House; two imaginary wins in Mexico for the retired Ike Fluellen. Johnny Baldwin was given one phony win in Mexico following his knockout by Hagler, to make him look qualified. Hilbert Stevenson was given five phony wins, plus a draw with Anthony House, both of whom were managed by Chris Cline. Ort couldn’t even make up results that didn’t have a conflict of interest.

  On April 16 ABC finally killed King’s tournament and retained the prominent attorney Michael Armstrong to conduct an in-house inquiry for the ABC Corporation.

  ABC also canceled the fight—the heavyweight final—scheduled to be telecast that weekend between Larry Holmes and Stan Ward, both of whom were managed by Don King. King couldn’t lose the final, no matter who won. The hippie with the ponytail had decked the promoter with the diamond ring.

  ABC gave Alex Wallau a $4,000 raise and a $10,000 bonus for being the Serpico of the Sweet Science.

  New York Governor Hugh Carey suspended James Farley as boxing commissioner for accepting expense money from King to certify the integrity of fights held outside New York. Farley never returned to the job.

  The collapse of the tournament sent a panic through the offices of television and advertising executives. As a result, the competing tournament run by Schwartz and Elbaum was canceled, even though they had tried to warn ABC about King and staged honest, competitive fights themselves.

  Predictably, King was the agile survivor. He blamed everybody except himself for the fraud, shouting, “I’m a nut on the truth bit!” King made a big show out of “suspending” Flood and Braverman, saying they “were not acting in the best interests of the sport we all love.”

  King called Ort a “Judas,” saying, “I am shocked, saddened and appalled that the Ring is no longer the bible of boxing.” (Teddy Brenner quipped, “If the Ring is the bible, then boxing needs a new testament.”)

  Ort blamed devious managers for sending him inaccurate fight results.

  The May 2 edition of Sports Illustrated atoned for the Mark Kram suck-up piece on the tournament by publishing a comprehensive exposé by Robert Boyle. Boyle also revealed for the first time that an unnamed writer for Sports Illustrated may have been “on the take,” and that “SI is investigating the allegations against the staffer.” (This was a blind reference to Kram.)

  In September, on the quiet, lazy Sunday of Labor Day weekend, ABC released a summary of Armstrong’s 327-page report. The report itself was never made public on grounds of confidentiality, although sources at ABC did slip out a few copies to reporters on the sly.

  The Armstrong Report was not quite a whitewash. The facts were all there, but they were presented in the blandest possible way. Overall, the report was timid in its conclusions and protective toward ABC, which was paying Armstrong a big fee. The report was artfully political and did not go much beyond what Flash Gordon and Alex Wallau had found out, on their own, months earlier.

  Armstrong found “no criminal conduct,” but did find “a good deal of unethical behavior by individuals involved in the administration and organization of the tournament.”

  The ABC press release stressed that Armstrong “concluded ABC was not guilty of any wrongdoing. ABC’s presentation of the tournament and response to various charges could not be characterized as grossly negligent in any way.” This was a friendly inoculation against any future lawsuits by managers or fighters against ABC.

  The worst thing Armstrong said about King was that his $5,000 cash payment to Johnny Ort “seriously compromised the integrity of the selection process.” The report also said that Ort admitted receiving money from managers whose fighters got into the tournament.

  But the report did not hold King responsible for any of the documented kickbacks paid to get into the tournament, or the takeovers of fighters, or the bribing of Ring, or the blacklisting of fighters who wanted to remain free agents, like Hagler. It did not propose prosecution of Flood and Braverman, who seemed guilty of extortion and fraud.

  The Armstrong Report essentially said everything went wrong, but nobody violated any laws. Once again, Don King was the unsinkable survivor.

  A good idea had been implemented in a crooked way, when it could just as easily have been executed in an honest way. When King was caught, he just blamed his subordinates, tried to get his critics fired, and screamed racism. That habit would repeat itself.

  The ABC scandal should have been the Early Warning to the legitimate corporate world that King was a grifter in his heart. But in a few months it would all be forgotten, and King would be back doing business with ABC, HBO, and the hotel-casinos of Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

  In September 1977, Don King celebrated his comeback with a lavish party to mark the opening of his new corporate offices at 32 East Sixty-ninth Street, in a million-dollar townhouse he had purchased on one of Manhattan’s most fashionable blocks, between Park and Madison avenues. More than one thousand people were invited.

  The invitation contained a quotation from Robert Kennedy—“Only those who dare to fail greatly can achieve greatly.”

  It also contained a message from Don King: “I dare to fail greatly. I believe in America…. Only in America could a Don King happen, and I am not about to let America down.”

  7. The Stealing of Larry Holmes

  Ernie Butler first met Larry Holmes in 1968. Butler was then a forty-four-year-old ex-fighter, and Holmes was an eighteen-year-old living in the poor south side of Easton, Pennsylv
ania, a dying factory town with no future.

  Butler worked in a shoeshine parlor and Holmes had been working at the jet Car Wash ever since he dropped out of school in the seventh grade. They got into a dispute, and the cocky kid with a temper told the older man, “I’ll kick your ass, man.”

  “You’ll find me at the PAL gym,” Butler told the teenager.

  A few days later Larry Holmes swaggered into the gym and asked Butler to go a few rounds with him. The former pro showed the tough kid some of his moves—a triple jab, dipping his head at just the right instant to make a punch miss.

  “After that afternoon I started coaching Larry,” Butler said in 1993. “We began training at the gym and Larry was fast. We started pointing toward the 1972 Olympics.”

  Butler had been a solid professional with over one hundred fights. He had fought future lightweight champion Joe Brown in Newark in 1947. He had given away nine pounds to middleweight contender Rocky Castellani, and lost a close decision in Wilkes-Barre. And he remembers fighting Jimmy Doyle in Doyle’s last fight before Sugar Ray Robinson killed him in a match in Cleveland in 1948. Butler had been around and knew a few things.

  By the time of the 1972 Olympic trials, Butler was optimistic about the chances of young Larry Holmes, a quick learner with a work ethic. But in the trials Holmes had an episode of panic and disgrace. He quit and was disqualified in his match with Duane Bobick. Holmes was knocked down and tried to crawl out of the ring, an event that was videotaped and replayed several times. It was to haunt Holmes for years to come.

  Managers frozen by first impressions, and writers looking for a lazy pigeonhole, called him a quitter with no heart for years afterward. He hated it, but it would lead many people to underestimate him. Holmes was similar to the young soldier in The Red Badge of Courage who surrenders to fear and runs away in his first combat experience but redeems himself later by proving he has courage.