On a TV in the locker room, the last round of the last undercard fight came to an end. Cloud hopped up and down and slapped his gloves together. His trainer and his childhood boxing coach both shouted their encouragement. The excitement in the room finally drew King out of his melancholy mood. He pointed at Cloud and yelled, “We gonna keep going where we gonna go and that man there is gonna strike a blow to free us all!”
Cloud lost. In the ring after the fight, Bernard Hopkins screamed something at Don King that nobody in his camp would repeat. In his postfight press conference, Hopkins said, “Who would ever think in anybody’s wildest dream? I wouldn’t even bet on it! That Bernard Hopkins would be the one that put Don King out of business. I did Richard [Schaefer] a favor, I did HBO a favor, I even did Bob Arum a favor. I did everybody a favor. Don King, whether you like him or not, is no more.”
King did not attend the press conference. He was back in the locker room with Cloud and the remaining employees of Don King Productions. There was still the matter of paying out everyone who had worked on the fight, including the fighter himself. King sat slouched in a folding chair. Dana Jamison, his longtime assistant, knelt on the floor in front of a calculator and a giant three-ring binder. This was Don King’s checkbook. Someone in the room told me that King had been shaken by Hopkins’s outburst in the ring. When he saw me enter the locker room, King raised his head and gave a weak smile. Cloud, who was undefeated going into the fight, didn’t seem to be too upset. After about five minutes of quiet payouts, King ordered everyone out into the hallway. It was time for him and Cloud to negotiate a payment.
After about an hour, King and Cloud emerged from the locker room. I asked King what he had planned next. King said, “This is a setback. You get back up, you dust yourself off, and you get back in the game. We had a great singer named Ray Charles who wrote a song called ‘Drowning in My Tears.’ You can’t afford to drown in your tears. You gotta go back, rededicate yourself, redouble your efforts, and persevere.”
In our prior conversations, King had talked frequently about setbacks. Every time he said the word “setback,” he would immediately follow it with this phrase: “I have completely eradicated the word ‘failure’ from my vocabulary.” This time, he did not.
IAN FRAZIER
The Last Days of Stealhead Joe
FROM OUTSIDE
THE POLICE REPORT listed the name of the deceased as Joseph Adam Randolph and his age as 48. It did not mention the name he had given himself, Stealhead Joe. The address on his driver’s license led police to his former residence in Sisters, Oregon, where the landlord said that Randolph had moved out over a year ago and had worked as a fishing guide. In fact, Randolph was one of the most skilled guides on the nearby Deschutes River, and certainly the most colorful—even unforgettable—in the minds of anglers who had fished with him. He had specialized in catching sea-run fish called steelhead and was so devoted to the sport that he had a large steelhead fly with two drops of blood at the hook point tattooed on the inside of his right forearm. The misspelling of his self-bestowed moniker was intentional. If he didn’t actually steal fish, he came close, and he wanted people to hear echoes of the trickster and the outlaw in his name.
I spent six days fishing with Stealhead Joe in early September of 2012, two months before he died. I planned to write a profile of him for this magazine and had been trying for a year to set up a trip. Most guides’ reputations stay within their local area, but Joe’s had extended even to where I live, in New Jersey. Somehow, though, I could never get him on the phone. Once, finding myself in Portland with a couple of days free, I drove down to Sisters in the hope of booking a last-minute trip, but when I asked for him at the Fly Fisher’s Place, the shop where he worked, I was told, in essence, “Take a number!” Staffers laughed and showed me his completely filled-out guiding schedule on a calendar on an office door, Joe himself being unreachable “on the river” for the next x days.
The timing sorted itself out eventually. Joe and I spoke, we made arrangements to fish together, and I met him in Maupin, a small town on the Deschutes about 90 miles from Sisters. Joe had moved to Maupin for personal and professional reasons by then. On the day we met, a Sunday, I called Joe at nine in the morning to say I was in town. He said he was in the middle of folding his laundry but would stop by my motel when he was done. I sat on a divider in the motel parking lot and waited. His vehicle could be identified from far off. It was a red 1995 Chevy Tahoe with a type of fly rod called a spey rod extending from a holder on the hood to another holder on the roof like a long, swept-back antenna.