The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (27 page)

 

I have a special affinity for the Russian people for their resilience. In World War II they stood up and fought and endured the inclement weather, and that was a big part of their victory against the Nazis in Stalingrad and Moscow, and that's something I love about our people, how they resist the oppression and no matter what they say or do they fight and stand up for what they believe in—liberty and freedom and justice and equality—and even if the goal is not fulfilled, you'll find me there with the downtrodden and the underprivileged. Every country I go to I do the same thing. I'm a promoter of the people, for the people, and by the people. My magic lies in my people ties.

 

This is maddening, I know. But if you listen to King long enough, you'll start to trace out patterns that hint at an underlying system of beliefs. Now, it's possible that the symmetries are illusions and nobody will ever know, possibly not even Don King himself, just how much he believes in his own stated politics. But it goes something like this: Over the course of Don King's 81 years, the problem of what W.E.B. Du Bois called “the color line” has gone underground. What used to be a simple proposition—an oppressed people fighting against their oppressors—has gone institutional. Black people, according to King, still live their lives at a distinct handicap, and whenever they try to accomplish anything the white men will discredit them and try to destroy them. King, of course, uses his own life as the great example of this and argues that before his time, boxing was controlled by mobsters like Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo, who fixed bouts and stole much more from fighters than Don King ever did. He points out that his longtime rival Bob Arum has been sued by fighters and managers and pretty much everyone else who came in contact with him.

Today, Don King stands in for every shady backroom deal, every shortchanged interaction, and every time a greedy promoter pushes a shot fighter into the ring to get pummeled to death. In the business of boxing, everyone is a hypocrite and a liar, but in the eyes of the public, Don King is the only hypocrite and the only liar.

 

Notorious men make for bad relics. Don King was vilified throughout his three decades on top, but like all self-made men, his power stood in as its own rebuttal. You didn't need to wonder if a black man could rise to the top of boxing, because Don King was there. But now that the avenues of influence built up over a career have been shut down, Don King has started thinking about what it all might have meant. In his office, he began talking about the “evening of his career” and how he wanted to help poor white people understand that the black man was not the enemy. After he finished his usual 10-minute response, I asked him a follow-up question: “Don, now that you're in your last act—”

“Last act?” he bellowed. “I said evening, not last act!” He turned to one of his advisers, who had come into the room carrying an armload of paperwork. “This motherfucker's trying to bury me,” King said, incredulously, “and I ain't even close to be done yet!”

If King wants to reflect on the past during this, the evening of his career, he only has to look around his offices at Don King Productions, where he has surrounded himself not only with memorabilia, but also with the same people who helped him rise to the top. Dana Jamison, King's vice president of operations, has worked with King for 27 years. His personal photographer has been around for two decades. Of all the people I met associated with Don King, only Tavoris Cloud was under the age of 40. King's productions feel even older and more out-of-date. While waiting for him to show up back at the headquarters of Don King Productions, I squeezed into a long-since-abandoned cubicle, careful not to disturb an ancient Brother typewriter and a stack of press releases and legal documents from the late '90s. In the lobby, there was an old movie theater popcorn machine stamped with Don King's emblem. One of his employees told me that in the '90s, that machine had pumped the smell of fresh popcorn into the vents of the building. He couldn't remember the last time it had been turned on. Out back in a warehouse behind the offices, more than 20,000 square feet of King's possessions—mostly ornate furniture and towering bronze statues of lions—gathered dust along with seven of King's cars. Earlier this month, Jessica Lussenhop of the
Riverfront Times
published an excellent article about King's ongoing legal battle with St. Louis boxer Ryan Coyne, a conflict that started in November 2012. If you go to
donking.com
today, you will find a story titled “Undefeated National Champion Boxer Ryan Coyne Meets Cardinals Three-Time MVP Albert Pujols.”

But nothing about Don King feels older than those interchangeable phrases, quotations, and exclamations that make up his public persona. His is a civil rights gospel straight out of 1974—everything King talks about when it comes to race in this country has since been co-opted and turned inert. (I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that the phrase “playing the race card” was coined by someone who wanted to figure out a way to shut up Don King.) It's a commonly held belief among boxing people that King ran boxing with the same exact ruthless street ethic that carried him to the top of Cleveland's numbers game, and that he is categorically incapable of change. This might very well be true. But that's not why every conversation with Don King inevitably circles back to Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, and W.E.B. Du Bois. King talks about those great men because he believes himself to be in their company as a pioneer for his people.

In an otherwise scathing book about King's career in boxing titled
The Life and Crimes of Don King
, investigative reporter Jack Newfield wrote,

 

The great tragedy is that if Don King had gone straight after [the Rumble in the Jungle], he could have become one of the great black role models in contemporary history. He could have been the black Horatio Alger hero. King could have become a universal inspiration, a black man given a second chance, who rose from prison to the pinnacle of entrepreneurship by hard work, desperado bravado, grand ambition, evangelical salesmanship and by the mean standards of boxing—merit.

 

I asked King on several occasions if he saw himself as a civil rights hero. It took five tries, but he finally gave me something of a straight answer. We were riding in a limo down Second Avenue in Manhattan. King had just accompanied Tavoris Cloud for an appearance on
Good Day New York.
In the green room of the Fox studios in the Upper East Side, King ran into the actor Terrence Howard. “They should create an Oscar category for black actors who play Uncle Toms,” King said to Howard. “And the award should be given to Samuel L. Jackson for his role in
Django Unchained.
” Once Cloud and King got on the air, the show's host asked King about his relationship with Mike Tyson. King gave his standard answer to all questions about Tyson and claimed that Tyson loved King and said those horrible things only because he had been conditioned to believe that the only way a black man could get attention in America was to denigrate another black man. King then started yelling about Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, and ended the interview by waving a miniature Venezuelan flag and yelling some more about Hugo Chavez. The segment did little to promote Cloud or the fight, but the rare spotlight had put King in a good mood. He talked to me about his life in Florida, a place he calls “God's waiting room,” and reiterated that he would retire only when he was dead. I wondered aloud whether King saw himself as a transformative figure, if he believed that his accomplishments could serve as inspiration for the breaking down of his despised color barrier. “They'll never give me the credit for what I accomplished!” King shouted. “Who else came out of poverty and desperation and got to where I got? Who else brought millions of dollars to young kids who didn't have nothing? Who has lived a life like mine? And still, they demonize me!

“Sheeeeeeeit,” King spat. “They'll
never
acknowledge me!” He reminded me of something he had told me in his offices back in Florida about the prospects for minorities, including myself, to really get their due respect in America: “If you poor, you a poor n——, if you rich, you a rich n——, if you dancing, sliding, and gliding n——, you a dancing, sliding, and gliding n——. If you have intellect, you're an intelligent n——. But you're going to be a n—— till you die.”

Then, with all the brass in his body, King bellowed, “They'll shut you out, man, they'll shut you out. I can't get eye water to cry with.”

 

In the locker room before the fight at Barclays, a subdued Don King sat next to Thomas Hauser, a former lawyer and longtime boxing writer. In 1992, Hauser and Joseph Maffia, the former chief financial officer of Don King Productions, put together a series of affidavits that ultimately led to King's indictment on nine counts of wire fraud. Early on in the investigation, a lawyer from a Senate subcommittee investigating corruption in boxing came to interview Maffia and asked him if Don King was tied to organized crime. Hauser, who was in the room as Maffia's legal adviser, told the lawyer, “You don't understand. Don King
is
organized crime.”

But all that seemed in the past. King sat in a chair near the locker-room door, an iPod Touch cradled in his massive hand. He took Hauser through four decades of photographs and gave long, rambling captions for each one. He told stories about Christie Brinkley, Henry Kissinger, Ali, Martin Scorsese, Michael Jackson, and Jacques Chirac. As the two old men, awash in nostalgia, stared down at those tiny, digital images, Cloud went through his prefight preparation. Once Cloud's hands were taped up and gloved, he sat down in a corner and tried to have a quiet moment to himself. King was talking to Hauser about Shimon Peres and Israel and Cloud yelled out, “Don, you giving
interviews
now?” King grinned and waved him off. King then talked about his plans to take a victorious Cloud to fight in North Korea. “It'll be my show this time,” King said while waving the flags of North and South Korea. “A real event for the people!”

On a TV in the locker room, the last round of the last undercard fight came to an end. Cloud hopped up and down and slapped his gloves together. His trainer and his childhood boxing coach both shouted their encouragement. The excitement in the room finally drew King out of his melancholy mood. He pointed at Cloud and yelled, “We gonna keep going where we gonna go and that man there is gonna strike a blow to free us all!”

 

Cloud lost. In the ring after the fight, Bernard Hopkins screamed something at Don King that nobody in his camp would repeat. In his postfight press conference, Hopkins said, “Who would ever think in anybody's wildest dream? I wouldn't even bet on it! That Bernard Hopkins would be the one that put Don King out of business. I did Richard [Schaefer] a favor, I did HBO a favor, I even did Bob Arum a favor. I did everybody a favor. Don King, whether you like him or not, is no more.”

King did not attend the press conference. He was back in the locker room with Cloud and the remaining employees of Don King Productions. There was still the matter of paying out everyone who had worked on the fight, including the fighter himself. King sat slouched in a folding chair. Dana Jamison, his longtime assistant, knelt on the floor in front of a calculator and a giant three-ring binder. This was Don King's checkbook. Someone in the room told me that King had been shaken by Hopkins's outburst in the ring. When he saw me enter the locker room, King raised his head and gave a weak smile. Cloud, who was undefeated going into the fight, didn't seem to be too upset. After about five minutes of quiet payouts, King ordered everyone out into the hallway. It was time for him and Cloud to negotiate a payment.

After about an hour, King and Cloud emerged from the locker room. I asked King what he had planned next. King said, “This is a setback. You get back up, you dust yourself off, and you get back in the game. We had a great singer named Ray Charles who wrote a song called ‘Drowning in My Tears.' You can't afford to drown in your tears. You gotta go back, rededicate yourself, redouble your efforts, and persevere.”

In our prior conversations, King had talked frequently about setbacks. Every time he said the word “setback,” he would immediately follow it with this phrase: “I have completely eradicated the word ‘failure' from my vocabulary.” This time, he did not.

FROM OUTSIDE

 

T
HE POLICE REPORT
listed the name of the deceased as Joseph Adam Randolph and his age as 48. It did not mention the name he had given himself, Stealhead Joe. The address on his driver's license led police to his former residence in Sisters, Oregon, where the landlord said that Randolph had moved out over a year ago and had worked as a fishing guide. In fact, Randolph was one of the most skilled guides on the nearby Deschutes River, and certainly the most colorful—even unforgettable—in the minds of anglers who had fished with him. He had specialized in catching sea-run fish called steelhead and was so devoted to the sport that he had a large steelhead fly with two drops of blood at the hook point tattooed on the inside of his right forearm. The misspelling of his self-bestowed moniker was intentional. If he didn't actually steal fish, he came close, and he wanted people to hear echoes of the trickster and the outlaw in his name.

 

I spent six days fishing with Stealhead Joe in early September of 2012, two months before he died. I planned to write a profile of him for this magazine and had been trying for a year to set up a trip. Most guides' reputations stay within their local area, but Joe's had extended even to where I live, in New Jersey. Somehow, though, I could never get him on the phone. Once, finding myself in Portland with a couple of days free, I drove down to Sisters in the hope of booking a last-minute trip, but when I asked for him at the Fly Fisher's Place, the shop where he worked, I was told, in essence, “Take a number!” Staffers laughed and showed me his completely filled-out guiding schedule on a calendar on an office door, Joe himself being unreachable “on the river” for the next
x
days.