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

by Jack Newfield

  Neil Leifer, the great Sports Illustrated photographer (who took the classic shot of Ali standing over Liston), was scheduled to photograph Tyson at King’s home in Ohio. Tyson stood him up for two straight days, making dates and then not showing up, staying in Cleveland. When Leifer finally asked him about his broken promises, Tyson replied, “I guess my word is no fucking good.”

  King arranged for Tyson to get an honorary doctorate degree at a college in Ohio. With degree in hand, Tyson said from the stage, “I don’t know what kind of doctor I am, but with all these fine young foxes here, I hope I’m a gynecologist.”

  Tyson’s public image began to change, from the Cus-and-the-Kid Fairy Tale, the uplifting story of ghetto redemption, of black–white, young–old cooperation, to an antisocial rap lyric. “Welcome to the Terrordome” seemed to become his motto. He began to act like a gangsta rapper, instead of Joe Louis.

  By the summer of 1989, Boxing Illustrated published a cover story called: IS MIKE TYSON BECOMING THE MOST UNPOPULAR HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION IN HISTORY?

  After June 1988, Tyson received no commercial endorsement contracts from major corporations. (He had gotten three lucrative ones under Jacobs and Cayton.) His image was turning too negative.

  Phil Berger wrote in the New York Times: “With Tyson, things happen, and the more they happen, deeper grows the feeling that whatever bad endings await Mike Tyson, the chances are they will happen outside the ring.”

  Mike Katz wrote in the Daily News: “Mike Tyson’s character seems to be developing along wrong lines. He is a bully. He is disloyal. He is arrogant…. Obviously, Cus did not have enough time.”

  As Tyson’s decline became a story line, I thought back to the night he obliterated Spinks, and that look of frustration in his eyes. It was as if he had climbed the highest mountain, kicked in a door, and discovered the room was empty. The look seemed to ask: Is this all there is?

  As a teenager Tyson would hug reporters like me, gently tend to his pigeons, and talk about how he didn’t care about fame and wealth, just success in boxing. He once nodded in agreement when Cus repeated the old aphorism, “The only thing money is good for is throwing off the back of trains to strangers.”

  But now Tyson was a different person. He bought dozens of luxury cars and gold jewelry, and was into a routine of rough sex with women he picked up in clubs, a lifestyle he called “tramping.”

  He was cut off from his old boxing family. Now his two best friends—John Home and Rory Holloway—were on King’s payroll. Tyson had complained to Jerry Izenberg that it was all about money now, but then, in his confusion, he embraced what he had lamented.

  Tyson began to resemble a Greek tragedy searching for a stage. Like Marilyn Monroe, or Brando, or Kurt Cobain, he had both fame and wealth, but he also seemed lonely, and to secretly lack self-esteem. All Tyson knew were strangers and leeches.

  Once Tyson reached the mountaintop he lost some of his desire, his hunger to be the best for its own sake.

  Because of all the old black-and-white fight films that Jacobs had given him, ever since he was a teenager, Tyson had developed a reverence for certain ancestral champions who personified purity and pride. Tyson loved Rocky Marciano, Sam Langford, Gene Fullmer, Tony Zale, Carmen Basilio, Mickey Walker, Ray Robinson, and Henry Armstrong, who was Cus’s favorite fighter.

  Tyson loved them for their unbreakable will, their basic toughness, and their work ethic, preparation, passion, and longevity. But Tyson seemed to be losing these qualities in himself. He seemed to be hemorrhaging his own pride, will, and work ethic.

  Once he fell under King’s domination, Tyson seemed to think he was so good he could rule the sport indefinitely on autopilot, without giving his absolute best each time out. There was nobody in his orbit who could tell him no, who would tell him he was stagnating at an age when most great fighters had not yet reached their physical peak.

  Sometime in 1988, at the age of twenty-two, Tyson stopped advancing as a fighter, stopped learning new things in the gym.

  Teddy Atlas, Tyson’s first amateur trainer under Cus, once told me Tyson might be destined to be “a comet, not a star.” Atlas had a theory that Tyson had some small, hidden defect in his character. He thought it had something to do with a lack of firmer disciplining when he was a teenager, his streak of furtive lawlessness, and a tiny speck of fear, and how Tyson tried to cover it up with jailhouse jive intimidation.

  Once, in an amateur fight, Tyson wanted to quit after the second round, and Atlas had to talk him into coming out for the third round. Before another amateur fight—in an incident captured on video for a documentary—Tyson cried on Atlas’s shoulder, sobbing that no one would like him anymore if he were to lose.

  Even before some championship fights, Tyson’s hair fell out because of nerves, and he bolted from camp and disappeared for a few days to get himself back together.

  The combination of these hidden, and unresolved, vulnerabilities made Atlas think Tyson might burn himself up after a short, bright arc in the heavens. Atlas said this when Tyson was twenty-one and everyone else was already comparing him to Ali and Liston.

  The deterioration of Tyson’s character was accompanied by the deterioration of his boxing skills. The erosion of his ring mechanics was more subtle, but it was unmistakable.

  When he fought Frank Bruno, he won in five, but didn’t look like the same Tyson who beat Spinks. He fought only in spurts, and lacked the intensity that was the essence of his style. He accepted clinches in a way he never did before. He moved his head much less, and was easier to hit. He stopped using particular combinations, like the left to the body, followed by another left to the head.

  Head movement was one of the things Kevin Rooney used to stress in repetition drills, but Kevin was no longer in Tyson’s corner. Or in the gym. Or in his face at 6:00 A.M., nagging him to run five miles when no one else was watching.

  Tyson signed to fight Razor Ruddock in Edmonton, Canada, in November 1989, but he hardly trained for the fight. He was getting beaten up in the gym by Greg Page, the aging former champ, now his sparring partner. Three weeks before the fight, Tyson pulled out. Tyson claimed he had pleurisy—a lung infection—but he wouldn’t let the Edmonton promoter give him any tests in the local hospital. Canadian reporters on the scene said Tyson had only a minor cold. Three days after the fight was canceled, Tyson was seen having a drink in Sharks, a Las Vegas club, by boxing writer Wally Matthews.

  The pre-King Tyson never pulled out of a fight on a flimsy excuse. That Tyson was a warrior like Jack Johnson and Dempsey. The consensus was that he just wasn’t in any shape, and feared he might lose, so he pulled out as a precaution.

  There was nobody in the Tyson camp who could tell him things he didn’t want to hear. He had no one who loved him, the way Cus, Jimmy, Lott, Rooney, Breland, and Torres loved him. His only friends were on King’s payroll, and afraid to offend him with responsibilities.

  Don King, so brilliant at business, so sensational at strategy, didn’t seem to see that Tyson was on a path of self-destruction as a human being. Most boxing writers could see it, but not the only person Tyson looked up to. Not the only person who might be able to alter Tyson’s conduct, and values, and save him from himself. King’s passivity during this period remains a mystery.

  Then again, he let the same thing happen to his earlier heavyweights, Jeff Merritt and Michael Dokes, both of whom squandered their gifts and became drug addicts. Or Tim Witherspoon, Tony Tubbs, and Greg Page, who became overweight, demoralized examples of wasted talent. There was just some basic, caring humanity that was absent from King’s relationship with his fighters, and from the environment he created around his fighters.

  In February 1990, Don King promoted a fight in Tokyo between Mike Tyson and Buster Douglas. On paper it was a gross mismatch. Tyson was the undefeated twenty-four-year-old champion, and Douglas was a mediocre journeyman. He had lost four of his thirty-five fights, quitting in the tenth round of a title opportunity against Tony Tu
cker. He had been knocked out by David Bey and Mike White. Even King went around saying Douglas was “a dog with no heart.” On the fight contract, King crossed out “25” and wrote in “zero” for Douglas’s allotment of free tickets.

  To King the fight was just programming for HBO, activity for the idle Tyson, and a moderate payday for himself of about $2 million. In Las Vegas most bookies wouldn’t take bets on the fight, although the book at the Mirage made Douglas a 42 to 1 underdog.

  Tyson didn’t train rigorously for the fight. His mechanics continued to erode—no head movement, less stamina, less intensity, fewer jabs, less body punching.

  King took Tyson to business meetings in Japan when he should have been in the gym, including meetings to see to the foreign rights. King even took Tyson to meetings to discuss a “match” with wrestler Hulk Hogan, on pay-per-view. Vince McMahon, the president of the World Wrestling Federation, flew to Tokyo two weeks before the fight and held two days of meetings with King and Tyson, trying to find Japanese investors for this grotesque farce.

  “It would be a matchup of superheroes,” King crooned to reporters. “If Vince can come up with a hundred million, we’ll do it.” King, letting his P. T. Barnum instincts get out of control, was trying to imitate the 1976 charade in Tokyo, when Muhammad Ali entered the ring against Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki.

  The negotiation never went anywhere, but it was a further distraction for the already disengaged Tyson. King dragged him to the meetings as a trophy of his control.

  Ten days before the fight Tyson was sparring with Greg Page. He was slow, lethargic, and overweight, and Page knocked him down with a right hand. It was a real knockdown with padded gloves and headgear. It should have been a wake-up call to King and Tyson. But it did not cure their overconfidence, or focus their discipline on the fight at hand.

  King seemed in denial about what was going on. Afraid to alienate the surly Tyson, he continued to pamper the champ, letting him run when he felt like it, spar when the spirit moved him. Tyson didn’t even look at any videos of Douglas’s past fights, sticking exclusively to his collection of martial-arts films. Tyson missed the fierce and fearless prodding of Kevin Rooney, a disciplinarian who knew—and cared—when Tyson was faking his preparation.

  Tyson’s only lesson from the knockdown was to stop eating so that he would lose weight and appear to be in shape. This superficial self-deception, however, probably only served to weaken him. He came in at 220 pounds but wasn’t really fit or strong. Larry Merchant recalls that at the weigh-in Greg Page told him, “Mike could definitely lose this fight.”

  Although what happened after the fight was one of the lowest moments in boxing history, the fight itself was one of the redeeming glories of the sport. It was the real-life Rocky, it was a night of common-man courage, a shining hour of pure drama.

  Walking to the ring, waiting through the introduction, Tyson did not seem to be there mentally. He wasn’t the caged-up, pacing beast he was before Spinks and Berbick. He seemed almost bored.

  On the other hand, Buster Douglas was inspired to be better than he was, a Born Again believer on a mission for God.

  The mother of his eleven-year-old son was dying of a terminal disease. His wife had left him. And just twenty-three days before the fight his beloved mother, Lula Pearl, had died of a stroke. Douglas fought like he had nothing more to lose.

  As the Kris Kristofferson song “Me and Bobby McGee” says, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

  Freedom made Douglas fearless, relaxed, and determined. He jabbed hard, and moved, and won the early rounds. Tyson had no intensity, no fire, no focus. He was like a sleepwalker, and soon his left eye began to puff, and swell, and then begin to shut into a slit.

  During the fight King sat next to Donald Trump, who was his guest in Tokyo. During the early rounds King assured Trump that Tyson would soon warm up and knock out Douglas. King was openly rooting for Tyson, and could be heard shouting, “Come on, Mike.”

  But as Tyson fell behind in the fight, and seemed to be weakening, King began to renegotiate a rematch deal and site fee with Trump as the fight entered the fifth round. They agreed that the rematch would be at Trump’s hotel-casino in Atlantic City.

  At one point Trump said to King, “You have options on both guys. You can’t lose.”

  “That’s right, I can’t lose tonight,” King replied.

  After seven rounds Douglas had thrown a total of 272 punches, and 50 percent of them had landed. Tyson had stopped moving his head side to side, neglecting Cus’s cornerstone credo of “elusive aggressive.” Tyson had thrown only 132 punches, less than half of the Douglas output.

  Tyson’s corner was completely unprepared for crisis. Aaron Snowell and Jay Bright were an inadequate substitute for Rooney. They offered no tactical adjustments to Tyson. And, incredibly, they had no Enswell in the corner to treat his closing left eye. Enswell is a fundamental. Trainers in six-round fights keep it in their pockets to stop an eye from closing. It is a flat, chilled iron bar that can reduce swelling with pressure. Instead, Snowell and Bright had a soft old ice-bag—that looked like Dizzy Gillespie’s hat—that they applied with no effectiveness.

  Behind for the first time in thirty-eight fights, all Tyson heard from Snowell after round seven was “You gotta relax. You’re down.”

  Late in the eighth round Tyson ducked a jab and landed a right uppercut that knocked Douglas down. But Douglas was not badly hurt. At the count of “two” he pounded the canvas with his right glove in a gesture of self-disgust for getting careless. Douglas followed the referee’s count closely and was up at nine, just before the bell rang.

  Between rounds, Don King went berserk. He screamed at Jose Sulaiman, “Look what you’ve done! What kind of fucking referee did you bring me from Mexico? Stop the fight! The fight’s over. Your referee is getting my fighter beat.”

  As referee Octavio Meyran walked over to hand the scorecards for the round to Sulaiman, King screamed at him, “What the fuck were you looking at? You should have known the man was out. You should have counted him out.”

  The first minute of the ninth round was the turning point of the fight. The old Tyson would have rushed out of his corner to finish off a wounded challenger who had just been knocked down. He knew Douglas had quit against Tucker when he was ahead, and had a reputation for wilting in adversity. But it was Buster Douglas who had the inspired will on this night.

  Douglas rushed from his corner and won exchange after exchange with Tyson. He regained command of the fight, and it was the champion who looked like his will was ebbing. With a minute left in the round Tyson almost went down along the ropes. The crowd was now screaming for Douglas, and the reporters at ringside began composing Cinderella leads in their heads, describing a miracle, as the round ended.

  In the tenth round Douglas knocked Tyson out with a monster three-punch combination that started with a picture-perfect right uppercut.

  Tyson’s head banged off the canvas and his mouthpiece fell out. Tyson fumbled for it with his glove, trying to put it back in, but it fell out on the canvas.

  He finally retrieved his mouthpiece, which was the transitional object of his scrambled brain. He stuffed it backward into his mouth, where it dangled oddly.

  He got up just a fraction after the count of ten, but he was in no condition to continue, lurching into the referee, who saved him from falling again and then signaled the fight was over. Tyson left the ring without giving Larry Merchant an interview. When Merchant got to the delirious new champion, Douglas stammered, “My mother. Mother. Mother. God bless her heart.” Then he broke down in tears.

  As soon as the fight ended, Muhammad Ali, who was home in Los Angeles, telephoned his biographer, Tom Hauser, who was in New York.

  “Do you think folks will now stop asking if I could have beaten Tyson in my prime?” Ali asked.

  An hour after the fight, King got the officials of the WBC and the WBA into a room and convinced them to withh
old recognition of Douglas as the new champion. King pleaded that the referee had missed four seconds when he picked up the count from the timekeeper when Douglas was down in the eighth round.

  King’s logic violated all boxing rules that say a fighter who is knocked down must follow the count conducted by the referee in the ring, and rise before the referee says ten. The timekeeper is irrelevant. Douglas had no obligation to pay any attention to the timekeeper. There was a four-second discrepancy between the referee and the timekeeper—which occurs often—but the discrepancy had no legal meaning.

  Sam Donnellon, the boxing writer for the now defunct National, happened to see King come out of the secret meeting with the international regulating bodies. Donnellon’s tape recorder memorialized Don King’s intense, emotional words: “Here’s the facts. Mike Tyson knocked out Buster Douglas. The man knocked the man out officially in the ring. And the count went to thirteen. I issued a protest to Mr. Mendoza and Mr. Sulaiman…. It’s a grave misjustice here. It’s a grave misjustice here if the decision holds that Mike Tyson is knocked out…. The fact is Buster Douglas got knocked out first, and if that knockout had been officially recorded, it would have been a second knockout of Mike Tyson. That’s what I’m saying.”

  A reporter interrupted to ask, “Do you expect it to be overturned?”

  King answered, “I expect them to do justice. If they do justice that’s what they’re here for.”

  Jose Sulaiman then said, in support of King: “There was a violation of the rules.”

  A few minutes later, King told reporters, who were still filing their copy: “The first knockout obliterated the second knockout…. Tyson won.”

  King then met privately all afternoon (the fight was held at 9:00