Holmes was understandably enraged when he discovered just before the fight started that Secret Service agents had installed a telephone in Cooney’s dressing room, so that President Reagan could call and congratulate him in case he won. No such phone line was placed in Holmes’s dressing room at Caesars Palace.
Holmes was also understandably upset when vandals put up racist graffiti on his property in Easton after the fight, and somebody blew up his mailbox. He felt the racializing of the fight was a no-win situation for him and damaged his popularity. To then find out that his promoter, who is forever talking about black brotherhood, paid more money to the white challenger than the black champion, was a deep wound.
But despite all this, Larry Holmes still covered for King when he testified several times before a federal grand jury in 1981. Holmes was bitter at King, but he still gave no testimony harmful to him.
The final break between King and Holmes came in December 1983, with King trying to have Holmes stripped of the WBC title by Jose Sulaiman for not fighting Number 1 contender Greg Page. Page was then King’s favorite heavyweight, King having swiped him from Butch Lewis in the superficial belief he was the next Ali.*
Holmes was fed up with seeing King secretly root for the fighter in the other corner, which he had seen with Kevin Isaac, Earnie Shavers, and Ossie Ocasio, and felt he would relive that experience with Page, even though he was still the champion.
So Holmes resigned as WBC champion on the last day of the WBC convention in Las Vegas, and accepted the championship belt of a new, rival sanctioning organization based in New Jersey, the International Boxing Federation (IBF).
After the final break, King told Newark-based promoter Murad Muhammad, “I’m going to get Larry Holmes and break him. I’m going to make him crawl.”
Murad says Holmes told him, “You got to be careful. Don’s a killer. He threatened me many times, saying, ‘Don’t let me go back to jail.’”
* * *
* Lewis sued King over this pilferage and won a settlement of $280,000 plus 33 percent from Page’s title fights. King had gotten Page’s loyalty by paying for the burial of his father and weeping over the grave. Lewis also charged that King gave Page $200,000 under the table to sign.
In June 1988 I had the luck and pleasure to sit next to Larry Holmes at the Tyson–Spinks fight in Atlantic City. For two hours the former champion entertained me and my friends with anecdotes and one-liners about King.
“Don looks black, lives white, and thinks green,” Holmes began. “I was loyal to Don for ten years but he was never loyal to me. Don was my automatic partner. After every fight he would say, here’s ten dollars for you, here’s twenty for me.”
As Buster Douglas and Mike Williams were fighting the semifinal, Holmes kept up his sardonic chatter and repeated lines he seemed to have been sharpening for years.
“When I see Don, I see the devil,” he said. “The reason he wears his hair so funny is to hide the horns. The only mistake I made my whole career was getting tied up with Don. I had more fights with Don than I had in the ring. Whenever I wanted to leave him, Don told me he would get my title stripped like Spinks, or my legs broken.
“My first million-dollar purse was supposed to be Alfredo Evangelista, but I got a lot less. My second million-dollar purse wasn’t a million either. He robbed me against Ossie Ocasio, who was his fighter. I made a lot of money, only I didn’t get it.”
When King himself was introduced from center ring, Holmes stood up and booed, along with most of the fourteen thousand other fans. And some fans in our ringside section applauded him for booing King.
Holmes was feeling particularly hostile to King on this night because King had just skimmed his pay for his recent failed comeback fight against Tyson. In January 1988 Holmes had been knocked unconscious by Tyson in four rounds—and then shortchanged $300,000 by King.
Holmes was retired in the fall of 1987 when Don King pulled into his driveway in Easton in a big white limo. King settled into Holmes’s house, ordered Chinese food from his favorite restaurant in New Jersey, and started selling Holmes on a comeback fight with Tyson.
After ten hours of nonstop evangelical rap, King had talked Holmes into taking the hopeless fight for $3.1 million.
“You know I get ten percent of that,” King told Holmes.
“No, you don’t,” Holmes shot back.
“I don’t even need you to sign,” King countered. “I’ve got your signature on the last page of a lot of contracts.”*
King and Holmes continued to argue about this 10 percent “finder’s fee” all through training and even in the dressing room minutes before the Tyson bout.
After Holmes lost, King deducted the $300,000 for himself from Holmes’s share of the purse.
“I’ll sue you,” Holmes shouted at King.
A few months after I listened to Holmes’s wonderful monologue in Atlantic City, he reached an out-of-court settlement with King. King paid him $150,000—half of what he was entitled to—and Holmes signed a legal agreement promising he would stop giving reporters negative information about King.
Only in boxing can a champion sign away his free speech rights to get back half the money that was skimmed from him.
But Don King signed no such gag order. In March 1991, King was quoted in New York magazine as saying, “Whatever I got from Larry, I deserved it! He couldn’t draw files to a dump. I had to work with Larry on his personality to make him a big star.”
King did not mention Ernie Butler, who is still living in Easton, now seventy, still teaching a few kids how to box for free, still doing what he did on the day in 1968 that he first found Larry Holmes.
* Contract fraud was such a habit with King, he could joke about it. Ernie Butler says King forged his name to a contract. Butch Lewis accused King of forging a contract with Greg Page. And the U.S. government charged King with forging a contract with Julio Cesar Chavez to defraud Lloyd’s of London.
Tim Witherspoon says King made him sign blank contracts and duplicate contracts with different percentages for Carl King.
King posed with Larry Holmes and Earnie Shavers before their 1979 title fight. King was both the promoter and manager of both fighters. Holmes says that he received only about 45 percent of his own purses over the course of his career with King, and that King took 25 percent of his purse for the Shavers fight. Shavers says that in some of his fights he only got a few thousand dollars of his promised earnings from King. NEW YORK POST
8. The Betrayal of Muhammad Ali
Don King was not the only promoter trying to induce Muhammad Ali out of a restless retirement in the spring of 1980. There was also Bob Arum, Harold Smith, Murad Muhammad, and the government of Egypt.
Ali had retired after recapturing the title for an unprecedented third time by defeating Leon Spinks in September 1978. After that he had been honored at a series of retirement dinners and public celebrations.
Gradually his weight ballooned up to 270 pounds. His speech became slightly slurred and slower. And he was starting to feel a little bored, a little concerned about where his next few million dollars were coming from.
The honors at these dinners were nice, but Ali was an addict of fame. He yearned for the solo spotlight of center stage. He loved people, he loved attention, he loved having the press around him all the time, looking for a quote, writing down his rhymes, his nicknames for opponents, his predictions, his political ideas, his sermons.
Ali was missing the unmatchable high of seeing himself on television every night, and of fifty thousand people chanting his name on the way to the ring.
Nobody put a gun to Ali’s head to make him come back. It was his own decision. But people did put a lot of temptation on his table.
Bob Arum wanted Ali to fight WBA champion John Tate, but Tate was unexpectedly knocked out in the fifteenth round by Mike Weaver on March 31. And since Larry Holmes had already knocked out Weaver, he continued to be recognized by most fans and writers as the legitimate champion.
Harold Smith, not yet detected as the embezzler of $21 million from Wells Fargo National Bank, came to Easton to see Holmes with an offer to fight Ali. Smith’s promotional company was called MAPS (Muhammad Ali Professional Sports), but Ali was only being paid a fee to lease his name to the company; he was not part of the company. Smith arrived in a stretch limo and in the company of two beautiful women.
Like so many people in boxing, going back to Jack Kearns and Tex Rickard, Harold Smith was a likable rascal. He had already signed up Tommy Hearns and Aaron Pryor with huge cash signing bonuses transported in pillow cases. He had also signed up Saoul Mamby, one of Holmes’s best friends in boxing, giving him a $75,000 signing bonus that he told Holmes about.
Smith had attempted to sign up Holmes a year earlier, when he had a physical confrontation with King inside Holmes’s hotel suite in Las Vegas. Smith says the pushing and shoving stopped when King pulled out a pistol. This is quite possible since King did frequently carry a weapon.
Mort Sharnik, who was the boxing consultant for CBS-TV in the early 1980s, recalls a dispute he had with King in San Juan in 1980, after Michael Dokes, managed by Carl King, was given a draw in a fight most observers thought was won by Ossie Ocasio. As they argued, “a pearl-handled pistol fell out of the breast pocket of King’s tuxedo,” Sharnik recalls. “The gun had to be illegal because King didn’t have his pardon yet.”
A gun also fell out of King’s pocket in 1987, as Bob Arum was wrestling with him to prevent him from jumping into the ring right after the Sugar Ray Leonard–Marvin Hagler fight that Arum had promoted and King had nothing to do with.
Larry Holmes had no desire to fight Muhammad Ali. Ali was his idol and he loved the former champion. Holmes had been Ali’s sparring partner from 1973 to 1975, an experience he would treasure the rest of his life. Ali had given Holmes his first quality boxing equipment when he saw the falling-apart junk his sparring partner was using. The first week of sparring Ali had given Holmes a black eye, and Holmes was so proud to have it, he wouldn’t let anyone put an ice pack on it. He wanted to be able to show it off to his buddies in Easton. A shiner from the Greatest was a trophy of honor to the young Larry Holmes.
Now Harold Smith was sitting in his office in Easton offering him millions to fight his idol. Holmes was thinking Ali at thirty-eight was in no condition to fight anyone, much less himself at his peak. Holmes had sat next to Ali at a lot of boxing functions lately and seen the gray in his hair and the bulge around his middle.
But such was the remorseless cycle of boxing history. Rocky Marciano had to knock out his hero, Joe Louis, to get to the top. The young Ray Robinson had to beat his hero, an old Henry Armstrong. The ritual slaying of fathers is another reason boxing is the cruelest sport. Holmes had every impulse not to do it, but he also had been instructed it was his job to do it, as heavyweight champion.
Harold Smith seemed direct and confident as he made his offer to Holmes, and Holmes’s lawyer, Charles Spaziani. They were sitting in Holmes’s office in downtown Easton, in a building Holmes owned as part of his dream of being the Bugsy Siegel of Easton, constructing a commercial strip in the middle of nowhere—a disco, a motel, a gym, a restaurant, an office building.
“I’ll give you five million dollars to fight Muhammad Ali,” Smith said. “I’ll give you two million now for signing, and three million later. If I can’t get Ali to sign, you keep the two million.”
This was the offer Holmes had always dreamed about getting. Now it was on the table, and he started to waver and stall. Before the meeting he had, on some peculiar compulsion, called Don King in Manhattan and told him Smith was about to arrive in Easton, and told King to get there fast himself and match any offer. Holmes knew King was driving ninety miles an hour and would arrive shortly to play out a scene in a B-movie Holmes was directing without an ending in mind.
Smith handed Holmes two checks, each for $500,000, drawn on the Wells Fargo Bank of California.
“If they don’t clear, we don’t have a deal,” Smith said. “Take them. What have you got to lose?”
Holmes felt dizzy from temptation and indecision. He was sweating and remembers walking over to the window to catch a breeze on a warm May afternoon.
Then Harold Smith brought out his magical leather pillow case and showed Larry Holmes what he said was $1 million in cash. The pillow case was full of old bills—hundreds, fifties, and twenties. Spaziani looked at the money and was speechless.
“Here’s one million in cash if you agree to the fight,” Smith said.
A few minutes later Holmes heard Don King’s limo screech to a halt outside the Alpha Building. He had gotten to Easton in record time. Nobody outworked or outhustled Don King.
The two promoters threatened and cursed each other, with King screaming Smith’s money was “drug money.” Smith claimed he had investors who were oil millionaires in the Middle East.
Holmes summed up the confrontation this way in his unpublished memoir: “Don tried physical intimidation, but Smith didn’t scare. That impressed me.”
But in the end Holmes didn’t take the million in cash, or the million in Wells Fargo checks. He was nervous about the origins of the money. It didn’t feel like the way real businessmen made serious propositions. And King still had a strong emotional control over him.
Don King had talked him out of fighting Young Sanford Houpe for Bob Arum in 1976 for more than seven times the money King was paying him. And now he was willing to fight his idol for half the money Harold Smith was offering him.
It would take almost three more years, and getting shortchanged in the Gerry Cooney and Tex Cobb fights, before Holmes was strong enough to walk away from Don King.
But once he rejected the $5 million offer from Smith, it became inevitable he would let King promote the fight with Ali, although Murad Muhammad would tempt Holmes with a $3 million offer to fight Ali in Egypt. But Holmes did not want to give Ali the home court advantage of a country that had such a large Islamic population.
Harold Smith left saying, “The money is good and it’s always there for you, Larry.” Neither would prove to be the case. But that’s boxing.
Nobody tells the truth, not even nice guys who would like to be good guys.
By the end of June Don King had put the deal together. He promised Ali $8 million, Holmes $2.5 million, 25 percent of which King would take back for himself. King negotiated a site fee from Caesars Palace, but for the first time he had to place his own money at risk to make the fight. This investment was new, and King never forgot it for a moment. He cut corners to save money every possible way, even serving skimpy ham and cheese sandwiches at press conferences, forgetting, or ignoring, the Muslim religious injunction against ham that Ali and part of his entourage obeyed.
For a few days King considered putting the fight into Cairo, even telling reporters, “We’re going to dedicate this fight to peace in the Middle East.” But Holmes balked and Caesar’s came up with the money.
After the fight was announced, King told boxing writer John Schulian, “You see, as an afoxidando [sic] and a good friend of Ali, I didn’t want him to come out of retirement and fight Holmes. Ali couldn’t believe that. He told me he was fighting for equality and justice, for the future of our children. When I heard that, I said, ‘You’re right, Ali.’ And I promised him I would help make the fight, which is what my businessman’s instincts had been telling me to do all along.”
Ali should never have taken the fight. He never seemed right from the start. His long-term personal physician, Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, told him to stay retired and would have nothing to do with the fight.
In March, Ali was sparring in the gym with Jeff Sims, a slow heavyweight. Ali spat out his mouthpiece to taunt his foe and Sims smacked him in the mouth. The punch sliced an inch-long gash that needed ten stitches to close. If Dr. Pacheco’s counsel needed a second opinion, this punch should have been it.
Instead, without one tune-up fight, Ali dyed his gray hairs, closed his eye
s to all of nature’s messages, and signed to fight Larry Holmes in October.
He went to Deer Lake and hired Tim Witherspoon, then a kid with seven pro fights, to be one of his sparring partners. After a few days in the gym Ali asked Witherspoon not to hit him in the body.
“I hit him in the head pretty easy,” says Witherspoon, another who still idolizes Ali. “They never asked me to stay off his head. I feel bad about it now.”
Many of the writers who visited Ali in Deer Lake came away disturbed. Some had not seen him for two years and they could perhaps better notice the deterioration in his speech and reflexes. In the gym he seemed lethargic and easy to hit. Some of the same writers thought they saw the same conditions before he beat Foreman in Zaire, so they were reluctant to believe their own eyes. Was he letting a kid like Witherspoon hit him for a reason?
But enough of the writers did stories questioning the wisdom and morality of the fight so that the Nevada State Athletic Commission required that Ali get a full neurological and renal examination at the Mayo Clinic, as a precondition for licensing Ali to fight. Ali spent two days at the famed Rochester, Minnesota, clinic on July 23 and 24. The doctor’s report, sent to the Nevada commission, is written partly in medical jargon. It said: “A CT scan of the head was performed and showed only a congenital variation in the form of a small cavum septum pellucidum.”
This is a hole in the membrane separating the ventricles of the brain that can be enlarged by blows to the head.
Other parts of the report are in plain English: “He does not quite hop with the agility that one might anticipate, and on finger-to-nose testing there is a slight degree of missing the target” and he had “some difficulty with memory.”
The Life and Crimes of Don King: The Shame of Boxing in America Page 16
