Over the course of the next two weeks, I heard King talk about Goebbels and Willie Lynch and the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson and W.E.B. Du Bois and Frederick Douglass and dozens of other historical people, events, and phrases. When I read books and articles about King, some written as far back as 20 years ago, I’d find those same phrases, almost verbatim. In the past, several boxing writers would make fun of King for mispronouncing the names of prominent philosophers or misquoting famous passages in their work. Having spent enough time with him to watch the repetition of these mistakes (my favorite example: “Beware the Ids of March, young man! Beware the Ids of March!”), it’s ludicrous to believe that Don King’s famous malapropisms are unintentional.
For Don King, everything is strategy and payback. And if someone thinks King is a buffoon because he mispronounces “Nietzsche,” the real buffoon will pay at the negotiating table. King might mispronounce “Sun Tzu” and misquote him, but he sure as hell understands The Art of War better than anyone who might point out his mistakes.
“There’s nothing I love more in life than turning around a bigot,” King told me repeatedly. I took him at his word on this statement, not because I thought Don King relished the opportunity to teach people about the history of Willie Lynch or Joseph Goebbels, but because I believed that he takes outsize pleasure in outsmarting someone who has underestimated him because of who he used to be—a black numbers runner from the streets of Cleveland. King told me that when he arrived in New York in the mid-’70s, he made sure everyone in town knew that he was an ex-con. “They’ll always underestimate you for who you are,” he said, “and then they’ll try to use all that against you. So you’ve got to use that to your benefit, because they’re never going to change.”
This strategic intelligence extends to every part of King’s life. He does not answer questions as much as he circles and hypnotizes them to the point of exhaustion, but in our later interactions, he could quote back, verbatim, questions I had asked him several days before. He could recall the specific numbers that people in his old neighborhood in Cleveland would play back in the 1950s. He could recite almost any line of any contract that he had ever signed. When Norman Mailer wrote about meeting King in Zaire, he portrayed King as a self-proclaimed genius who sprayed every negotiable issue with a cloud of fast-talking bullshit. In his account of the Rumble in the Jungle, Mailer wrote, “It would be hard to argue that King was not a genius.” This is undeniably true. Don King, even at 81, possesses the sort of bullying intellect that lets you know, almost immediately, that you will never, ever outsmart him.
Four days before Cloud vs. Hopkins, King arrived at the Barclays Center for the last press conference. He had been in Panama the night before, setting up the details of a fight he wanted to hold in Russia in the upcoming months. His flight into New York had arrived at four in the morning. When he saw me in the open-air concourse in front of Barclays, King yelled, “Jay, baby! I want you to listen up because I was so saddened to hear about the death of my dear friend, mi hermano Hugo Chavez last night. I first met Chavez when he was a lieutenant in the Venezuelan army in 1971. He was my security when we opened the Poliedro de Caracas!”*
Once inside, King held court with the 20 or so reporters who had shown up. He talked to anyone who would listen about Chavez and all the medical care he gave to the poor mountain people of Venezuela. A vaguely European reporter shoved a camera in King’s face and asked, “Is your story possible in any other country?” King took the bait and bellowed, “Only in America!”
It had been a while since anyone had seen Don King at one of these things, especially in a city like New York. Before Cloud, King’s last notable fighter was Devon Alexander, whose last two fights with Don King Productions had been held at the Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan, and at the Family Arena in St. Charles, Missouri. Onstage in front of an audience of about 50, King sang the praises of New York City—“The city so great, they named it twice!”—and talked about the importance of promoting the spirit of the people, but he did not talk very much about Tavoris Cloud. Earlier in the week, I talked to Cloud at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn. When he realized that all my questions were going to be about Don King, Cloud threw his head back and chuckled sarcastically. He then gave one minute of boilerplate about Don King’s greatest hits. When asked if he felt any pressure for being Don King’s last hope, Cloud said, “Nobody’s going to ever stop Don King from promoting, man.”