promoter
Personal Information
Born August 20, 1931, in Cleveland, Ohio; son of Clarence (a steelworker) and Hattie (a baker) King; married Henrietta King; children: Eric, Carl, Deborah;
Education: Attended Case Western Reserve University for one year.
Memberships: Operation Push; Martin Luther King Center for Social Change; Trans-Africa; The Anti-Apartheid Association; board member, President's Council on Physical Fitness.
Career
Ran illegal gambling operation, c. 1950-66; promoted Ali-Foreman heavyweight title fight, 1974; Don King Productions, founder, chairman, and CEO, 1974--; promoted Jacksons' "Victory" tour, 1984; has promoted hundreds of championship fights throughout the world.
Life's Work
Even if he sported a conventional hair style, Don King might still be one of the most recognizable people in sports today. During the last 20 years, no individual has wielded more power in the big- money sport of boxing. At the same time, probably no individual in all of sports has been more controversial. Some observers call him an African American role model, while others call him a ruthless scoundrel. Whichever view one takes of King, the story of his transformation from a Cleveland street thug to the most prominent promoter in the history of boxing is nothing short of remarkable. Through a combination of business wizardry and personal flair, King has managed over a relatively short period of time to trade in his prisoners' coverall for a tuxedo, and he now hobnobs with presidents and royalty.
Don King was born in Cleveland in 1931. When he was ten years old, his father Clarence King, a steelworker, was killed in an explosion at the steel mill, leaving Don and his six siblings in the care of their mother, Hattie King. Hattie used the insurance money from her husband's death to relocate the family from the ghetto to a nearby middle-class neighborhood. To support the family, Hattie baked pies and roasted peanuts, which her sons would sell throughout the neighborhood. As a promotional gimmick, Don and his brothers would insert a slip of paper with a lucky number on it into each bag of peanuts. Those bags became popular among local gamblers, thereby making the King boys acquainted with some of the city's prominent numbers racketeers.
As a high school student, King became involved in Golden Gloves boxing. It soon became clear that he was more talented as a hustler than as a fighter, and after being knocked cold in one of his first bouts, he decided to forget about boxing as a career. Meanwhile, King had gone to work as a numbers runner for one Cleveland's illegal lottery operators. He was accepted to Kent State University after graduating from high school, and he worked for the numbers boss all summer to raise money for tuition. Before he had saved enough for college, however, King misplaced a winning betting slip and had to pay the money out of his own pocket. Instead of going off to college, King stayed in Cleveland and began a numbers business on his own. Although he spent a year taking classes at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, he had more or less decided that college was an unnecessary sidetrack. By the time he was 20, King was a successful, yet illicit, businessman, who was married to a woman named Luvenia Mitchell.
King spent the next decade developing his illegal gambling operation. By the time he was 30, he was running one of Cleveland's biggest numbers games. He was making serious money, and he became a flamboyant figure in the town possessing flashy clothes and flashy cars. He was also making enemies. In 1954 King killed a man named Hillary Brown, who was allegedly trying to rob one of his numbers stations. King successfully claimed self-defense in the killing. A few years later, the front of King's house was blown up by a gangster named Alex "Shondor" Birns, to whom King had refused to pay protection money. Shortly before King was to testify against Birns on extortion charges, King was shot in the back of the head with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Amazingly, he was not seriously injured in the attack.
Meanwhile, King's business continued to flourish. In the late 1950s he bought into a popular Cleveland supper club. It was there that he met a young Olympic boxing champion named Cassius Clay in 1960. King and Clay became friends, and King began following Clay all over the country to attend his fights. By this time, King's first marriage had fallen apart, and he was now married to Henrietta King, the ex-wife of one of his business associates. Aside from occasional trouble with the Internal Revenue Service, King was riding high through the first half of the 1960s.
King's life took a dramatic turn in 1966. That year, he got into an argument with an employee, Sam Garrett, over a sum of money King felt Garrett owed him. Although accounts of the event vary, the fight became physical, and somehow in the course of the scuffle Garrett's head hit the pavement. He eventually died from the injuries. Some witnesses indicated that King had beaten the smaller, sickly Garrett mercilessly, while King claimed that Garrett had attacked him and he was merely defending himself. King was convicted of manslaughter and sent to the Marion Correctional Institution in Ohio.
King used his time in prison to give himself the education that he had earlier chosen to bypass. For four years he immersed himself in classic literature and philosophy. When he was released on parole in 1971, King was, as he told a TV Guide interviewer in 1980, "armed and dangerous. Armed with wisdom and knowledge." King was eventually granted a full pardon by Ohio Governor James Rhodes in 1983.
Determined to leave the numbers game behind him, King began to look for legitimate business opportunities after his release from prison. Around this time he adopted his trademark hair style, a gravity-defying affair that he has repeatedly maintained happened by itself as a "sign from God." It did not take King long to settle on boxing as his new racket. His initial stint as a boxing promoter was innocent enough. In 1972 he organized a benefit to help keep Cleveland's only black hospital, Forest City Hospital, from shutting down. For the benefit's main attraction, he was able to lure Muhammad Ali (the former Cassius Clay) into fighting a ten- round exhibition against four different opponents. The event raised over $80,000 for the hospital. It also convinced King that there was money to be made as a boxing promoter and manager.
King's big breakthrough as a promoter came in 1974, when he was one of the main architects, along with closed circuit television company Video Techniques, of the famous "Rumble in the Jungle" heavyweight title fight between Ali and champion George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire. With only a very limited background in boxing promotion, King used his natural salesmanship to talk the government of Zaire into putting up more than $10 million in financial backing for the event. The fight was a huge financial success, and it vaulted King to the top of the heap among boxing promoters. Since that time, he has had a hand in the pot of major boxing matches.
King following up the "Rumble in the Jungle" with the 1975 "Thrilla in Manila" between Ali and Joe Frazier, considered by many to be one of the greatest heavyweight bouts of all time. King promoted several more of Ali's championship fights, cementing his position as the sports leading matchmaker. Although Ali eventually defected to the camp of King's archrival Bob Arum of Top Rank, another closed-circuit firm, many more top-ranked boxers were waiting in line to sign up with King. Larry Holmes, who dominated the heavyweight division in the post-Ali years, was one of them. Several boxers expressed a preference for doing business with a fellow African American, and King, the only top-line black promoter in the business, was more than happy to exploit that preference.
Even as a "legitimate" business person, King was unable to avoid scandal and controversy. In 1977 a series of fights set up by King with the ABC television network was canceled when the FBI turned up evidence that King had doctored some of the fighters' records. In the early 1980s he again received the FBI's attention as part of a large-scale investigation of the entire boxing industry. Although all sorts of shady practices were uncovered, no charges against King came out of that investigation. In 1984 King and his secretary Constance Harper were indicted on tax evasion charges. Amazingly, the jury acquitted King and convicted Harper. King thanked members of the jury by supplying them with first-class plane tickets and ring-side seats for heavyweight fights. The same year, King tried his hand at a different branch of the entertainment industry when he promoted the Jacksons' (Michael and brothers) Victory Tour. As with his boxing events, the tour brought in mind-boggling sums of money.
Through the rest of the 1980s, King continued to dominate his end of boxing, with the only real competition coming from Arum. Among the heavyweight champions with whom he had exclusive promotional contracts during this period were Michael Dokes, Mike Weaver, Tim Witherspoon, Bonecrusher Smith, and Trevor Berbick. In many top matches, both combatants had business relationships with King. Some fighters claimed that they were coerced into signing with King, and many of those deals included managerial contracts with King's son Carl that gave him as much as half of the purse for each fight. In the late 1980s, Mike Tyson ushered in a new era of heavyweight dominance and money-making for King.
The role that race has played in King's success has been, like almost everything else in his life, controversial. At times he waxes utterly patriotic about his success. Only in America, the land of equal opportunity for all, could a poor kid from the ghetto rise to such heights of fame and fortune. Just as often, however, King has loudly denounced the racism that permeates every facet of life in the United States. And while he has been active in and frequently recognized by such organizations as the NAACP, the United Negro College Fund, and Operation Push, many of the boxers he has promoted feel that he uses his blackness as just another tool of exploitation. King was quoted in Vibe in September of 1996 as saying "I never got a fighter because I'm black. Every fighter, including Mike Tyson, came to me after they've been screwed by the other promoters."
In the early 1990s, King suffered a handful of setbacks. More and more boxers went public with claims that King had cheated them. Larry Holmes was widely quoted as saying that King "looks black, lives white, and thinks green." Witherspoon sued King and came away with a sizable settlement. King's biggest meal ticket, Tyson, lost the championship to the virtually unknown James "Buster" Douglas, and then went to prison for rape. King's ongoing business relationship with cable-TV giant HBO went sour. In 1992 King's former accountant came forward with evidence of an insurance scam, for which King was subsequently indicted. A scathing biography, Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King, was published in 1995. In it, King is portrayed as a ruthless charlatan, albeit a brilliant one, whose exploits in the world of boxing have been no more legitimate than those of his earlier life in the Cleveland underworld.
As usual, however, King managed to emerge from it all relatively unscathed. Tyson was released from prison and began earning big money once again for both himself and King. Spurned by HBO, King turned to rival Showtime, with whom he formed a joint venture called KingVision to air Tyson's fights on pay-per-view. His trial for wire fraud in connection with the alleged insurance scam was declared a mistrial in 1995, and although prosecutors planned to retry the case, King considered himself vindicated.
The line between a successful businessperson and a successful scam artist is often a blurry one. Regardless of which side of that line Don King eventually falls on in the eyes of the public when his career is over, there is no question that he will have contributed something of value to boxing in at least two ways. More people certainly receive far more money from a boxing match than was ever the case before his arrival on the scene. And his charisma has made the business end of the sport almost as interesting to observe as the fights themselves. A lot of people think the boxing world would be better off without King around. But while it's possible that boxing would be a cleaner sport without him, there's no doubt that it would be a less colorful one.
Awards
Man of the Year, National Black Hall of Fame, 1975; Urban Justice Award, Antioch School of Law, 1976; Heritage Award, Edwin Gould Society for Children, 1976; Man of the Year, NAACP; World Boxing Council Promoter of the Decade, 1974-1984; National Black Caucus Awardee of the Year, 1981; World Boxing Council Humanitarian Award, 1984; Black Entertainment and Sports Lawyers Association Merit Award, 1986; Freedom Award, Indiana Black Expo, 1986; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award, Jamaica American Society and U.S. Information Service, 1987.
Further Reading
Books
- Newfield, Jack, Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King, William Morrow, 1995.
- Esquire, March 1991, pp. 52-54.
- Nation, August 28, 1995, pp. 189-190.
- New York, March 18, 1991, pp. 40-46; October 30, 1995, pp. 42-43.
- Time, November 27, 1995, p. 83.
- Vibe, September 1996, pp. 148-152.
— Robert R. Jacobson
