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.