King smiled, but not the smile you remember. That smile—the screwed-on mask of boundless optimism—had been on full display throughout this week of promotions, but at the Carnegie, King had finally succumbed to exhaustion. “When I’m doing good, the hair goes straight up,” King said, a bit wearily. “Now that things are difficult, the hair has gotten a little flatter.”
I had been trailing Don King for two weeks between Boca Raton, Florida, and now New York City. This was the closest he had come to admitting that things just weren’t what they used to be. In three days’ time, Tavoris “Thunder” Cloud, King’s last fighter of any consequence, would step into the ring against Bernard Hopkins at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The story of the fight should have been about the 48-year-old Hopkins and his quest to become the oldest champion in boxing history. But because Don King was involved, the focus during fight week had been on Don King and his uncertain future. If Cloud lost to Hopkins—especially in a boring way—his short career as an opponent in televised events would be put in serious jeopardy and King would have very little left to promote. In a prefight interview, Hopkins, who, like so many other fighters, had worked with King before an inevitable falling-out, had this to say about his old promoter: “What a way to put the last nail in the coffin. Who thought it would be me that would shut him down?”
At the Carnegie, nobody was talking much about Tavoris Cloud or Bernard Hopkins or the impending end of Don King Promotions. King had come to one of his favorite New York landmarks to enjoy a quiet lunch with three longtime employees. They talked, mostly, about music and old times in Manhattan, the city where King lived and worked during the majority of his reign at the top of boxing. The conversation eventually turned to James Brown. Don King, still digging his fingers into his sandwich, muttered, “James Brown died owing me $50,000. But I loved James Brown.”
Don King no longer sits on boxing’s throne, but he has nostalgia by the balls. Fights are best enjoyed through old film, which means that if you want to watch Muhammad Ali or Larry Holmes or Mike Tyson or Julio Cesar Chavez or Evander Holyfield raise his arms in triumph at the end of a fight, you’re also going to see the big man with the bigger hair climbing in through the ropes. You see him in the Philippines in 1975, hovering over a near-death Muhammad Ali after the Thrilla in Manila. You see him in Japan, 15 years later, looking more or less like the same man, crowding in on a battered and finally defeated Mike Tyson. He has negotiated deals with Mobutu Sese Seko and counted Hugo Chavez as a personal friend. Nobody alive, save some presidents, has taken more photos with world leaders and celebrities. As a boxing fan growing up in the ’80s and early ’90s, I cannot remember a single fight that didn’t end with Don King in the ring, cigar clamped between his teeth. He is one of those big American men who distort our collective memory—I’m sure King’s rival Bob Arum promoted some of the fights I watched as a kid, but when I think of the final bell, I still see the menacing hulk of Don King smiling for the cameras.
So it’s a little sad to sit across from Don King at the Carnegie Deli and see the tourists line up at our table to take a photo with him, and to overhear them talk about the man in the past tense as if he were already dead. Not because Don King deserves our sympathy, but because it’s always jarring to see a once-robust American institution fall into disrepair and decay. The cuffs on King’s “Only in America” denim jacket—the same coat he wore to the Thrilla in Manila—are badly frayed. He sometimes stumbles over his words. There’s a distinct sag in his once-static face. Don King never thought he would live past 50. He is 81 years old now and has been in the public’s eye since the early ’70s.
Don King was born in Cleveland in 1931 and grew up in the city’s numbers racket, a lottery-style game that King describes as “hope for people who don’t have hope.” As a kid he wanted to be Clarence Darrow, and set himself up to study law at Kent State University. The summer before he was to matriculate, King’s older brother Connie recruited him to “take numbers,” whereby the younger King would walk around Cleveland’s black neighborhoods and record $1 lottery-style bets. Players would submit a three-digit number to King, who was somehow able to keep track of everything in his head. At the end of the business day, if a player’s number matched up with the middle three digits in a predetermined market quote, he or she would win somewhere around $600. King’s phenomenal memory and his talent for talking made him a natural at the numbers game, and before too long he started his own production.