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

by Jack Newfield

  A.M. Tokyo time) with the WBC and WBA officials, arguing that Tyson should be declared the winner. He browbeat Sulaiman so much that Sulaiman went out at 6:30 P.M. and told the stunned press corps: “At the moment I am suspending the recognition of anybody as champion.”

  Gilbert Mendoza, the WBA president, nodded in agreement. (In his famous quip, Arum once called Mendoza and Sulaiman “two little Noriegas.”)

  Sulaiman said that a decision on who won the fight would be made at a WBC meeting in ten days. Since every boxing writer Regarded Sulaiman as King’s puppet, the result was sure to deprive Douglas of what he had won fair and square, with the performance of a lifetime.

  Later that evening Tyson and King appeared before several hundred angry boxing writers, who were feeling they were witnessing a crime on the scale of Watergate. Tyson said, “I feel I am the champion.”

  After several hostile questions were shouted out to King, Mike Marley of the Post asked Sulaiman: “Shouldn’t it be declared that Mike Tyson is still the heavyweight champion of the world?”

  The other reporters groaned and laughed so loudly that Sulaiman never answered.

  The next day the newspapers around the world began to report what King was trying to do. The New York Times published a front-page story under the headline: BOXING OFFICIALS COULD OVERTURN DEFEAT OF TYSON.

  Mike Lupica wrote in the National the next day:

  So it figures that the first reaction to Buster Douglas would be for Don King and Mike Tyson, and the WBC and the WBA, to think about stealing the night. They can’t help themselves. These are people you wouldn’t trust around silverware….

  Douglas beat up Tyson and finally knocked him out. No one knows better than Tyson. Still Tyson tries to steal the night. Maybe he is nothing more than a common thug after all. Maybe he should look out, because whatever Don King has, you can catch.

  If the WBC and the WBA take away the title the world saw Buster Douglas win, if they take that night and try to leave it in a junk heap, then King has bought them….

  Don King, of course, has become such a complete slob as a promoter, he cannot see how bad Tyson looks trying to win a fight in a hearing room or a courtroom, when he didn’t have the game to win it in a ring….

  King and Tyson, true to their instincts, immediately look to take the other fighter’s wallet.

  In the San Jose Mercury News, the marvelous Pete Dexter wrote:

  Sitting at the same table, of course, is one Donald King, who owns promotional rights to Tyson for the next 100 years, and probably the rights to all his children.

  For 15 cents King will put his boys in the ring, and the girls on the street. He is easiest to imagine as a disease….

  Mike Tyson, beaten up and knocked out in the ring, sitting in sunglasses, complaining he lost on a technicality.

  One by one he has sold out his friends for Don King—sold out even the memory of Jimmy Jacobs, who loved him and took care of him a long time before Tyson was worth anything—and now he has sold himself.

  Sold the last integrity he had left—his physical integrity— for Don King.

  And that is how for a short time this week—until the worldwide public censure finally finds its way even into the dark holes where the governing bodies of boxing do business, and Don King is prompted to say his attempt to overturn what happened in the ring was “misinterpreted”—the greatest warrior of our time is transformed into a crybaby.

  The disease is Don King and Mike Tyson rots in front of our eyes.

  And Joe Gergen wrote in Newsday:

  The man [Tyson] declined to discuss the bout immediately afterward, and when he did appear at a news conference a few hours later, he mouthed the King party line: “I knocked him out before he knocked me out.…”

  So much for truth, justice, and the American way, virtues King trumpets loudly and incessantly, even whilst in Japan. If either Jose Sulaiman of the WBC, or Gilberto Mendoza of the WBA, dismisses Douglas’ apparent victory, it would be the equivalent of Peter Uberroth voiding the results of the 1985 World Series because umpire Don Denkinger missed a call at first base in Game 6.

  Not since Jack Dempsey’s manager/promoter Doc Kearns set out to relieve the good citizens of Shelby, Montana, of their hard-earned money in a 1923 title fight, has a boxing man attempted such a bold scam.

  And if King were to succeed, Tyson might well become an unwitting victim. How pathetic a sight it would be then, this macho champion propped up by the transparent rulings of overfed bureaucrats beholden to King.

  It’s hard to imagine what King was thinking. The fight had been witnessed by millions of people on HBO, and the ending replayed on television newscasts. Boxing writers from all over the world had filled the working-press rows and had written second-day stories about scandal and the shame of boxing.

  King can make words dance and violins cry, but he couldn’t convince the world it hadn’t seen what it had plainly seen.

  On Tuesday, February 13, King held a press conference in Manhattan and ended his attempt to change the outcome or withhold recognition of Douglas as the champion. He not only conceded Tyson lost, he denied he had ever tried to change the result.

  “There’s never been a question from my side,” King said, “as to who the heavyweight champion was. No one had designs to overturn the decision.”

  King also said, slyly, that he had only been trying to stir up some controversy to help sell the rematch. King was only ratifying the obvious. The day before he spoke, Sulaiman had announced the WBC would recognize Douglas. The WBA and the IBF had also confirmed what happened in the ring.

  Mike Tyson and Don King in 1990.

  It was, in part, a victory for the profession of sportswriting. The columnists and reporters (except for Mike Marley, who later became a King employee) had all brought honor to their craft by screaming, “Stop, thief!” in their copy.

  Dave Anderson, Jerry Izenberg, Pete Dexter, Wally Matthews, Mike Katz, Ron Borges, George Kimball, Ira Berkow, Phil Berger, Vic Ziegel, Mike Lupica, Joe Gergen, Ed Schuyler—and many others— reported a burglary in progress. They ignited a fan firestorm that not even Don King could contain with his rap-opera filibuster. Jose Sulaiman may be a puppet, but he is not a dummy.

  A few weeks after the fight Tyson admitted in an interview that he had not been in shape to fight Douglas.

  “I abused myself,” he said, “abused my body. Like when you reach a status at that young age, you know what I mean. Being twenty and being the heavyweight champion of the world, you know, you’re really too young.”

  Nine months after his loss to Douglas, Mike Tyson was in a courtroom in Manhattan. He had been found guilty by a civil jury of fondling a woman in a Manhattan disco in December 1988, and there was a hearing to assess damages. As part of the hearing Tyson had to supply a complete statement of his finances and testify before the jury.

  In the course of testifying Tyson had to admit the records showed that Don King still owed him $2,097,000 from the losing fight with Douglas. Normally fighters are paid within a month of a major fight. It was highly unusual to still be owed such a large portion of the contracted purse so long after a fight, especially a fight that had been broadcast on HBO, rather than pay-per-view. HBO had paid King in March.

  This was the first public sign that King was ripping Tyson off. In every fight for Jacobs and Cayton, Tyson had not only gotten his full share quickly, but the Price Waterhouse audit had documented that Tyson had been overpaid $168,000 by Jacobs and Cayton.

  When Tyson was asked if he had received any of his money for the Douglas fight, he responded, “I don’t know. It’s been a long time since Tokyo.”

  In 1992 Mike Tyson went on trial for rape in Indianapolis. And for the first time Don King’s strategic genius seemed to leave him.

  King selected—and Tyson paid—Vince Fuller to represent him. Fuller had won King his acquittal on tax charges in 1985, but he had no experience in rape cases, and he was over the hill by 1992. Tyson would have b
een much better off with a local lawyer from Indianapolis.

  Fuller let Tyson testify before the grand jury—an error even a legal-aid novice wouldn’t make. Then he let Tyson contradict his grand jury testimony during his trial testimony, a blunder the prosecution effectively exploited.

  Fuller also mounted a defense that was demeaning to Tyson. His basic excuse was that the world knew Mike Tyson was an animal, a predator with women, and that the victim, Desiree Washington, should have known about Tyson’s awful reputation.

  The Indiana Court of Appeals actually criticized Fuller’s competence in its decision affirming Tyson’s conviction. It said Fuller failed to raise proper objections to defend Tyson’s rights.

  On the eve of the trial, King imported the anti-white hatemonger Louis Farrakhan to speak at a pro-Tyson rally in Indianapolis. This was suicidal in such a predominantly white and conservative city. It could not have made a helpful impression on the Tyson jury pool.

  King also picked Alan Dershowitz to represent Tyson on appeal, another blunder, since Dershowitz kept attacking the integrity of the prosecutor and the fairness of the Indiana court system. He even condemned the popular local prosecutor in an article published in the May 1993 issue of Penthouse magazine. This only created more enemies for Tyson in conservative Indiana.

  All of Dershowitz’s motions and appeals were rejected by Indiana judges, and Dershowitz and Fuller together cost Tyson millions in legal fees, leaving him with little of the $77 million he had earned during his career.

  During nineteen months as champion, when Cayton and Jacobs controlled his career, Tyson earned $48.5 million, and was undefeated in eight fights from November 1986, till June 1988. He received endorsement contracts from Toyota, Diet Pepsi, and Nintendo.

  In October 1988, Tyson rejected the six-bout, $50 million plan Cayton proposed to him—fights Tyson probably would have won if he had retained Kevin Rooney as his tough-love trainer.

  Under Don King, from 1989 to 1991, Tyson also had eight fights, earning $29 million on paper. He received no commercial endorsement contracts.

  Under Don King’s tutelage, Mike Tyson lost his crown, lost his money, and lost his freedom.

  On March 25, 1995, Mike Tyson was paroled from prison. He emerged wearing a traditional Muslim skullcap and went directly to a mosque to pray.

  For a few days the boxing world—and news pages—were filled with reports that Tyson was about to take a Muslim name and drop King as his exclusive promoter.

  But on March 30, Tyson read a prepared statement that took less time than his ninety-one-second knockout of Michael Spinks. He affirmed that King would remain his promoter, that Showtime would be his cable network, and that the MGM Grand would be the site of his comeback fights.

  “Don is the greatest promoter in the world, as we know,” Tyson read, in an echo of King’s signature self-description.

  The night before, in one of his greatest rap-opera diva solos, King had begged, wept, and conned Tyson into retaining him as his exclusive promoter.

  King had come to this meeting fortified with a $36 million, six-fight deal with the MGM Grand—and a $20 million advance from the casino, controlled by Kirk Kerkorian.

  Tyson did not wait to hear any other offers, although HBO would have certainly topped the Showtime deal since it is owned by Time Warner, which has much greater financial resources.

  Tyson also did not listen to the offers from other promoters, including Butch Lewis, Madison Square Garden, Harold Smith, Bob Arum, and Akbar Muhammad and Bilal Muhammad, both of whom came to Tyson’s press conference expecting him to convert to Islam and entertain their offer.

  But just before Tyson took the podium, Bilal, Akbar, and former champion Matthew Saad Muhammad were ordered to leave the room by Tyson’s bodyguard, Anthony Pitts.

  “He couldn’t face me,” Saad, who was once a hero to Tyson, said to boxing writer Wally Matthews.

  Tyson could have revolutionized the feudal economics of boxing by declaring himself a free agent, as Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard had done. He could have put his services up for the highest bid, in the free market, on a fight-by-fight basis.

  Tyson could have announced he didn’t need any exclusive promoter. Or that any promoter had to work for him, not the other way around.

  Tyson could have acted like a star, not a serf. All he really needed was an accountant and a lawyer. All the offers were ready to flow to him because, somehow, during his exile in prison, he had become an even bigger attraction than before he had gone away in public disgrace, and in boxing stagnation, if not decline.

  But the tricks of memory, the alchemy of absence, and the dearth of a new heavyweight star to displace him, all conspired to make Tyson bigger than ever upon his release.

  Don King was still the best in the world at what he does. And Tyson, although now twenty-nine years old, remained a follower, a sad case of arrested development, unable, for all his jailhouse talk, to think independently and take responsibility for his life. He still needed a father figure to take care of everything for him.

  As Lou DiBella, HBO’s vice president in charge of boxing, said, “Mike was playing poker with a full house. And then he switched and decided to play solitaire.”

  13. “I’m coming back to kick your ass”

  Ten days after Don King had attempted to steal the championship of the world from Buster Douglas, he tried to become Buster Douglas’s promoter.

  On February 21, 1990, King and his son Carl came to the $750 per night bungalow at the Mirage Hotel occupied by Douglas’s manager, John Johnson, an intense former assistant to former coach Woody Hayes at Ohio State.

  King arrived as the angry, aggrieved party, feeling no shame for what he had tried to do in Tokyo. He had forced Douglas into signing a contract that gave King options on all his title defenses should he upset Tyson. King was acting like he now owned Douglas and he could command Douglas to give Mike Tyson an immediate rematch.

  John Johnson thought this was crazy, and was in the final stages of negotiating a two-fight, $50 million contract for Mirage owner Steve Wynn to promote Douglas’s first two defenses. Johnson felt that he and Douglas had been coerced into signing the exclusive option contract with King, and that King had breached the contract by not acting in Douglas’s best interests by attempting to reverse his victory.

  “You can’t deal me out, John, you can’t deal me out,” King began, belligerent and not deterred by the presence of two reporters in the bungalow.*

  “This is where I make my bonanza,” King continued. “The sad thing is we’ve got this turkey sitting here ready to eat, and we can’t slice it up.”

  Johnson told King he would pay him $3 million to step aside from Douglas’s first defense, if he would let Steve Wynn promote a Douglas–Evander Holyfield match. Wynn wanted to become a promoter like King, not just be a host and pay a site fee like Donald Trump.

  King acted hurt by the offer of $3 million.

  “I’ve got an office full of people I have to support,” King said. “This is my business. You give me back the money I put into it for five and a half years? I put in three million, getting nothing back, subsidizing you for five and a half years, and then I’m supposed to get back what I put into it, and nothing more? That’s a good business deal?”

  “Not two weeks ago,” Johnson answered, “you convinced the governing bodies to withhold recognition of Buster as champion of the world. If you could have spent those five or six hours in the hotel with us, agonizing over whether he was going to get those championships, that those championships are going to be taken away from him, after what he did.”

  King claimed he had no power over the governing bodies, and that he was only trying to promote interest in a rematch.

  “I’ve got a deal,” Johnson told King, “that’s gonna pay James Douglas twenty-five million to fight Holyfield, and you offered him ten million to fight Mike Tyson again.”

  “That’s bullshit, bullshit,” King shouted. “No such offer was made.�
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  “You won’t take the money from James Douglas, that’s for sure,” Johnson replied, getting more emotional himself in response to King’s raising his voice and lying about what he knew to be the truth. “He’s making more money than anybody else, and that’s the way it should be.”

  * The account of this meeting is based on two weeks of testimony during a King–Douglas civil trial in July 1990, and on an excellent article by Ian Thomsen that appeared in the October 18, 1990, issue of the National.

  “He’s not making more. He’s making all of it,” King roared.

  “That’s the way it should be,” Johnson, the football romantic, answered.

  “That’s not the way it should be,” countered King. “There’s enough money for everybody. Buster just shouldn’t make it. Everybody should make it. It’s not just for the fighter. You go from [earning] fifty thousand to one point three million [for Tyson], to twenty-five million, and he should keep all of it?”

  Johnson smiled and nodded vigorously in the affirmative.

  “John, you are a stupid motherfucker,” King repeated twice. Each time he said “motherfucker” he slammed the palm of his hand down on the table.

  King then warned Johnson that he had control over Holyfield, which was not true, and Johnson knew it was not true.

  “You’re in way over your head,” King shouted, now in the kind of rage I had experienced myself in the Mirage Hotel.

  “You’ll find out. I’m coming back to kick your ass,” King warned.

  Johnson calmly responded, “You can make you own deal with

  Steve Wynn, but James Douglas isn’t taking any less money.”

  With the argument at an impasse, King then turned away from Johnson and started to engage Buster’s trainer and uncle, J. D. McCauley.

  “It isn’t Buster who wants to fight Holyfield, it’s Johnson,” King said, trying a little divide and conquer between the white manager and the black trainer of the new champion.