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!”