The Best American Sports Writing 2014(44)
There is no forgiveness for the hypocritical gangster.
It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
—Theodore Roosevelt
As King recited the quote above, he slapped excitedly at my wrist. Certain words deserved a certain emphasis, and Don King delivered them by slapping me a little harder. “Valiantly” was one of those words. So were “worthy,” “greatly,” and, of course, “victory.” We were standing in the museumlike hallways of Don King Productions in Florida. The Roosevelt quote, printed out in neat, uniform calligraphy, hung directly underneath a letter from Jimmy Carter and the 1980 Democratic National Convention that thanked Don King for his work as “the cornerstone of the Mideast Treaty between Egypt and Israel.” After King finished his recitation, he looked down at me, his face lifting up into one hellish grin, and said, “You and I are colored people and therefore we operate at a psychic handicap. White people, institutionally, have made us believe that we cannot achieve what we, in our hearts, know we can achieve.”
I shrugged and tried to suppress a smile. King caught me slipping and squawked with laughter.
“But real life, boy, is stranger than fiction,” he yelled. “Who could ever dream up a life like mine? I still can’t believe it! I wake up every morning and I’m shocked that I’m alive.”
Don King Productions moved from the Upper East Side of Manhattan down to South Florida in the late ’80s. Today, King works out of a two-story office building in Deerfield Beach. Out the back, you’ll find a low-slung stretch of I-95 and a slow line of Buicks heading up to Boca Raton. Out the front, it’s pure Florida office park—smelly tropical trees, overgrown lawns, all of which cast an eerie, green glow on Don King’s two-tone blue-and-stainless-steel Rolls-Royce Phantom. Like all tropical places, Don King Productions is in a state of decay—the carpets have picked up the mold that can only be kept out with the greatest vigilance in South Florida. The plants droop. Throughout the late ’90s and early aughts, when King promoted Felix Trinidad, Bernard Hopkins, Roy Jones Jr., Hasim Rahman, and a host of other big-name fighters, somewhere around 50 employees worked at DKP. Today, no more than 10 of King’s longtime advisers and employees remain.
We moved on down a hallway filled with framed photographs. “That’s the former president of Pepsi,” King reported, pointing at a black-and-white photo of himself with four people in businesswear. “We did the biggest endorsement deal in the history of America together.” The next photo was of the Jackson Five. “That’s from the Victory tour,” King explained, referring to the 1984 worldwide showcase that brought in a reported $75 million. “We set the record for the most money ever made on a tour.” King then pointed at the image at the end of the hallway and smirked. “And that’s Mobutu Sese Seko.”
Don King’s office takes up two large rooms on the second floor. Memorabilia has been crowded onto every available surface—in one corner, you’ll find a LeRoy Neiman painting collection. In another, you’ll find a truly unusual number of swords from every culture around the world. At a desk littered with bags of candy and gum-ball dispensers, Don King took phone calls and signed contracts for an upcoming fight he wanted to put on in Germany. During pauses in his work, he talked to me about what should have been a variety of different subjects. But when you’re talking to Don King, all discussions quickly funnel back down to what he calls “the color barrier.” Our talks almost always returned to the history of racism, and it struck me as strange that a man whose work ethic and unfailing optimism placed him so squarely in the present seemed to only be concerned with the past.
He rambled on about Frederick Douglass and Adolf Hitler and Martin Luther King Jr. and Simon Wiesenthal and Porfirio Diaz and Shimon Peres. All these anecdotes and references seemed strangely rehearsed—propelled by a meandering yet insistent boredom. Like many men in their eighties, King seemed to be talking mostly because he could not believe the young man sitting across the desk was so dumb. By way of example, during our first interview, King lectured for 10 straight minutes about Joseph Goebbels and Nazi propaganda. By the time it was over, I had already forgotten the question that launched this particular history lesson. Upon review, I had asked him something about Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and the new Barclays Center.