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

by Jack Newfield

  This is about Muhammad Ali, whose genius was agility and eye-hand coordination, the Ali who dodged all of Liston’s punches during the round he was blinded in one eye, who landed seven straight punches to Foreman’s head to knock him out, who could see Frazier’s punches coming and turn his head, whose jab couldn’t miss the moving target of Leon Spinks’s head two years earlier.

  The report also said Ali suffered from “occasional tingling of the hands in the morning.” The Mayo report also noted that Ali “claims that he has always had some mild slurring of his speech for the past ten or twelve years.”

  This was Ali conning a doctor, who should have looked at videotape of Ali in 1970 or 1974 to see that Ali was the greatest talker in boxing history. There was a drastic decline in Ali’s speech clarity and speed that any sixteen-year-old could have noticed, much less a Mayo clinic specialist.

  But the doctor’s report recommended Ali get a license and the Nevada commission gave him one.

  Dr. Pacheco thinks the doctor’s report was scandalous. He says: “Just because a man can pass a physical examination doesn’t mean he should be fighting in a prize ring. That shouldn’t he a hard concept to grasp. In fact, most trainers can tell you better than any neurologist in the world when a fighter is shot. You watch your fighter’s career from the time he is a young man; you watch him develop into a champion; you watch him get great; then all of a sudden he doesn’t have it anymore. Give him a neurological examination at that point and you’ll find nothing wrong… Anybody in the gym can see it before the doctors can, because the doctors, good doctors, are judging these fighters by the standards of ordinary people, and the demands of ordinary jobs.”

  The Nevada commission refused to make the Mayo report available to the press. Reporters who doubted Ali was healthy enough to fight were told they were substituting their layman’s opinion for that of the premier medical institution in America. But the fact is, the report raised more questions than it answered; it should have been made public; and the Nevada commission should have gotten a doctor experienced with fighters to follow up on the hole in Ali’s brain, on his difficulty with the hand-to-nose test, the tingling in his hands, and his slurred speech and loss of memory.

  In the weeks before the fight Ali fooled some people into thinking he had a chance because he got his weight down to under 220. He looked slim and fit and he talked the old talk. The odds against him dropped from 3 to 1 to only 13 to 10.

  But Marty Monroe beat him up every day in the gym. Ali had no reflexes. He couldn’t get out of the way of punches anymore. His own punches had no snap, and his legs had no spring.

  Gene Dibble was one of those who loved Ali unconditionally. He had served as his financial adviser during the 1970s and had done his best to protect Ali from the swindlers and leeches Ali always let into his life and would never get rid of or confront. In his biography, Tom Hauser quoted Dibble on his feelings on the eve of the fight: “Before Holmes, things just weren’t right. He was slow and debilitated physically. He couldn’t run. Hell, he could hardly stay awake. My brother and I saw him the day before the fight. And my brother, who’s a physician, took one look at Ali and said there was no way he should fight. That was enough for me. I said, ‘Ali, why don’t you postpone this thing?’ But he shrugged it off.”

  Ali was not only suffering from the neurological symptoms described by the Mayo Clinic doctors. He was also suffering from the side effects of a medication given him by Dr. Charles Williams, the doctor of his manager, Herbert Muhammad.

  Gene Kilroy was the first to notice the medicine given Ali by Dr. Williams was having a terrible effect on him. Kilroy told me: “Ali was in good shape coming out of Deer Lake. But in the middle of September I was in his room at Caesars when Dr. Williams came in and told him he had some thing to give him that would make him strong. I told Ali please don’t take it, but he did. Right after that Ali started urinating all the time and being dehydrated and sleepy. He started losing weight too fast. He couldn’t run in the morning. I was scared to death. I saw him getting weaker as the fight got closer. I felt so bad I told him one day, to build him up, that I was betting everything I had on him to win. And Ali told me not to do it, that something was wrong.”

  What was wrong was that Dr. Williams had misdiagnosed Ali’s underlying malady as a thyroid condition. He prescribed a potentially lethal drug called Thyrolar, and instructed Ali to take one tablet a day, starting three weeks before the fight.*

  The drug actually put Ali’s life in danger. It accelerated his heart and prevented him from sweating, causing dehydration. It could have caused a stroke or bleeding inside his head. The truth is: There was no medical evidence that Ali had a thyroid deficiency, and Dr. Pacheco says, “Ali is lucky he lived through the Holmes fight.”

  The day of the match there were three giant cardboard cutouts hanging over the entrance to Caesars Palace. They were life-size pictures of Holmes and Ali, and an even bigger one of Don King, who dominated the two champions. It was the crude Las Vegas version of King in Gleason’s gym, giving out photos of himself after Holmes and Shavers had sparred in 1973. King would always be the greatest modern self-promoter, even better than Madonna.

  * Without consulting his physician, Ali tripled the dosage. He says he “thought the pills would he like vitamins.”

  The fight itself was like watching the public torture of an international hero. Ali just took a sickening beating. He winced, and shuddered, and cringed under the blows. It was like watching a middle-aged impostor who’d invaded his body and stolen his face. He could not punch, he could not move, he had no strength, he was fatigued after the first round. All he had left were pride and stoicism.

  Holmes did not know what to do. He didn’t want to hurt Ali, but he also wanted to put him out of his misery as quickly as possible. He felt like he was beating up his father. He tried to make it a mercy killing at some points, but at others he just stepped back and took it easy, hoping the referee would have the sense to stop it.

  In the fourth round Holmes hit Ali with a powerful right to the kidney and heard his hero moan. Ali started to fall, but wouldn’t go down. In describing the kidney punch in his unpublished memoir, Holmes wrote: “There’s not another man on earth who would have stayed on his feet after that punch. That same pride is why he took so many beatings in fights, even in the fights he won. And it was why he was one of the greatest fighters of all time. In my opinion, the greatest.”

  By the ninth round a tear stained my notebook and I had to look away. Ali had come to carry so much meaning for me that I couldn’t bear to watch his end.

  Ali had come to represent the Zeitgeist of the sixties, the purest personification of a decade and a state of mind. In the decade of black assertion, he was black power. In the decade of antiwar protests, he was the most famous and punished resister to the war. He had more styles than Dylan and he was more fun than the Beatles. In the decade when fame killed Joplin, Hendrix, and Jim Morrison, he rode fame like it was a skateboard. He symbolized change, rebellion, and liberation in an era defined by those qualities.

  Now he was a hollow shell, taking a beating, when he belonged under a doctor’s care. It was the public flogging of a generation’s youth and idealism.

  I had seen Ali upset Liston with his speed, beat Cleveland Williams with his power, Foreman with his imagination, Frazier with his bravery, and Spinks with his memory. And now he was being pummeled in the parking lot of a casino, so other men could make money.

  After the tenth round Herbert Muhammad made a gesture that was the prearranged signal to stop the fight.

  “That’s all,” Angelo Dundee told referee Richard Greene.

  “One more round,” begged Bundini, tears in his bulging eyes, as he grabbed on to Dundee’s sweater.

  “Fuck you, no!” Dundee screamed, and the massacre was stopped.

  As soon as the fight was over, Larry Holmes started to cry, right in the ring. He went over to Ali, slumped on his stool, and kissed him.

&
nbsp; “I respect you, man, I love you,” Holmes said between his own tears of mixed emotions. “I hope we’re always friends.”

  After the fight Ali was too sore and weak to even take a shower. He was helped to his room at Caesars and he lay down on a bed still wearing his trunks and robe. Only his shoes were off, and the room was dark.

  Holmes told Gene Kilroy he wanted to see Ali and that was how Holmes, feeling only sorrow in victory, saw his mentor an hour after the fight.

  “I didn’t want to hurt you out there,” Holmes said. “Please don’t fight again. If you need any money I’ll give it to you.”

  After a long silence, Ali sat halfway up in the bed and cupped his hands around his mouth. He started to mimic the collective sound a big fight crowd makes.

  “I… want… Holmes… I… want… Holmes,” Ali began to chant. “I fed you, I taught you how to fight. And look what you did to me. I’m coming back to whip your ass.”

  Ali was smiling now, although his swollen face and shut eyes made him look like a gargoyle. He saw Holmes was depressed, and he was trying to cheer up Holmes by playing around despite his pain.

  “Gimme Holmes, gimme Holmes,” Ali was play-acting as Holmes prepared to leave the darkened room.

  Later Holmes would tell Ali’s biographer, “I want people to know I’m proud I learned my craft from Ali. I’m prouder of sparring with him when he was young than of beating him when he was old.”

  Like many others, I believe that the point-blank beating Ali took in this fight has a direct causal relationship with the decline in his health and his current medical condition.

  Interviewed by Tom Hauser nine years after the fight, John Schulian was still emotional: “I hated Don King for promoting that fight… that lying, thieving motherfucker. That he could stand there and say, ‘Oh, Muhammad, I love you, I’m with you, Muhammad; you’re the greatest!’ And then make a fortune off Ali getting brutalized that way. Well, fuck you, Don King. The man is a total scum-bag…. They sacrificed Ali. That’s what it was, a human sacrifice for money and power. That night went far beyond Ali. One of the great symbols of our time was tarnished. So many people—blacks, whites, Muslims, Americans, Africans, Asians, people all over the world— believed in Ali. And he was destroyed because of people who didn’t care one bit about the things he’d stood for his entire life.”

  And Daily News boxing writer Mike Katz told Hauser: “I don’t know what happened behind the scenes in Vegas. I just know that it was essential to Don King for Ali to go ahead with the fight. This was one of the few times King had his own money on the line, as opposed to someone else’s. If Ali–Holmes had fallen through, or failed at the gate, King would have been in trouble.”

  But the worst was yet to come.

  When the fight was over, and Ali got out of the hospital, Don King paid him $1,170,000 less than the signed contract stipulated. The contract called for Ali to be paid $8 million and it contained a clause saying there could be no amendment except in writing, and there had been none.

  About a week before the fight King had started to tell Ali that the expenses had been high, and the closed-circuit ticket sales were not as brisk as he had hoped, and his own money was at risk, and that Ali might have to accept a $1 million cut in his earnings.

  Ali had retained Michael Phenner, a corporate lawyer from Chicago, of impeccable integrity, and in the days before the fight, Charles Lomax was following him all around Caesars trying to amend the contract down to $7 million. Phenner flatly refused and warned Lomax not to let King cheat Ali on his purse. Despite King’s anxieties, the fight made a substantial profit.

  After the fight Phenner talked to Ali and they agreed the contract had to be enforced as written. When Ali was shortchanged by almost $1.2 million, he asked Phenner to file a lawsuit against King for the money he had surely earned with his torn flesh, lost platform, and diminished dignity.

  On June 9, 1982, Muhammad Ali sued Don King in the Northern District Court of Illinois. The suit asked for “statutory interest and reasonable attorney’s fees” in addition to the $1,170,000. By the time the suit was filed, Ali had permanently retired and his health had deteriorated considerably.

  This lawsuit scared Don King. To be perceived as cheating Ali would be a damaging blow to King’s stature and credibility in the boxing universe, especially with fighters. King feared the Muslims and didn’t want any more conflict with them. He had reported to the FBI a death threat from a Muslim earlier in 1982, and he had been beaten by four Muslims in the Bahamas in December 1981, at the direction of another Muslim, James Cornelius.

  And King knew that Ali was standing on firm legal grounds, backed by a top-of-the-line corporate lawyer. Phenner and most legal experts expected Ali to win a quick summary judgment verdict.

  That’s when King called on Jeremiah Shabazz. King had a sixth sense for the weaknesses people had, who could influence whom, how to make someone yield to his single-minded purpose. He knew Shabazz was a person he could trust, a person Ali did trust, and that he would be the best possible intermediary to get Ali to drop his lawsuit.

  Shabazz was now the Muslim minister in Philadelphia, but King knew he had been the minister in Atlanta and Miami who first introduced Ali to the Nation of Islam, back in 1961, and had been important in Ali’s conversion to the Islamic religion. Shabazz had always been part of Ali’s camp and Ali saw him as a religious leader as well as savvy about boxing.

  Shabazz lived by his wits and King had paid him over the years for various services. In the spring of 1982 King had called Shabazz in a panic because he believed that some Muslims from New Jersey, affiliated with a rival promoter, had a murder contract to kill King. Shabazz had rushed up to New York and helped defuse a potential assassination of King. King had taken the threat seriously enough to notify the FBI and have his office filled with agents and bodyguards when Shabazz arrived to work the phones.

  “I saved his life,” Shabazz recalls. “He relied on me that day more than he did on the government people.”

  So in late July 1982, Don King asked Shabazz to come to his office on East Sixty-ninth Street in Manhattan. When Shabazz arrived, Don King had $50,000 in a suitcase on his desk, all in cash.

  “I want you to give this cash money to Ali,” King said, “but only after you get him to sign this document.”

  King showed Shabazz a letter to himself ending the lawsuit, releasing King from all legal and financial obligations, and containing a space for Ali’s signature at the bottom. King also gave Shabazz a first-class, round-trip airplane ticket to Los Angeles, and promised Shabazz a sum of money for himself if he returned with Ali’s signature on the document.

  “Don definitely owed Ali that one million,” Shabazz says now. “But Don had gotten Herbert Muhammad to tell Ali that the lawsuit wasn’t worth fighting. Don had gotten Herbert to see it his way. Ali was ailing by then and mumbling a lot. I guess he needed the money.”

  The last thing King said to Shabazz was to repeat, “Don’t give him the money until after he signs the paper.”

  King always operated on the premise that any fighter would be more impressed with $10,000 in cash in his hands than with a bank check for $1 million. He had dazzled dozens of fighters with fresh green cash from casino cages and bank vaults, to get them to sign pieces of paper.

  He knew even the great Ali was vulnerable to the magic powers of cash money in stacks. Especially in failing health and retirement.

  So Jeremiah Shabazz flew to California with the suitcase held tightly on his lap. He did not let it out of his grasp during the five-hour flight.

  When Shabazz arrived in Los Angeles, he hired a notary public for $100 and took her with him to see Ali, who was in the UCLA Medical Center, receiving treatment for his failing health.

  The notary read Ali the letter and asked him if he understood what he was signing, as she and Shabazz sat at his bedside.

  Ali mumbled yes and signed the piece of paper Shabazz had carried from King’s office. The letter said:<
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  “I acknowledge receipt by me and Muhammad Ali Enterprises, Inc., of $7 million as full and complete consideration of Don King Productions, Inc., and Don King’s obligation to me under the Bout Agreement dated June 25, 1980, and hereby release Don King and Don King Productions, Inc., from any and all monies due to me, or for which I may have been entitled under the said Bout Agreement.”

  The letter Ali signed even gave King the right to promote any future comeback fight Ali might decide to engage in. The last paragraph read: “I further agree that you shall have the exclusive first right of refusal to promote any and all bouts referred to above subject to the terms and conditions agreed upon by my manager Jabir Muhammad.”

  Ali had taken the beating of his life to earn this money. Now he had taken $50,000 from a friend and given up the right to collect $1.1 million.

  “I regret what I did very much,” Shabazz told me. “I got used.”

  When Ali told Michael Phenner he had signed a release ending the lawsuit without telling him, the tough corporate litigator sat in his office and cried.

  Muhammad Ali (left) and Jeremiah Shabazz. In 1982, Ali sued King for shortchanging him by $1 million for the Larry Holmes fight. Jeremiah then delivered $50,000 in cash to Ali from King, and Ali dropped the lawsuit. Jeremiah now regrets acting as King’s bagman. HOWARD BINGHAM

  9. The Teflon Don

  On July 11, 1980, FBI agents Joe Spinelli and John Pritchard, in the company of former boxing champion Jose Torres, drove the two hours up to Catskill, New York, to see Cus D’Amato. It was a happy ride, full of old stories and shared experiences because all three men were good friends. Spinelli was the godfather to Torres’s Puerto Rican son and Pritchard’s black son.

  This journey marked the beginning of the FBI’s investigation into professional boxing as an industry. It did not start as an investigation into Don King, and it never concentrated exclusively on King. It was an inquiry into a derelict system.