Don King talks to Jeff Powell about jail, making champions, a Manny Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather super fight and a life in boxing
THE Godfather of the hardest game of all is delivering his own King?s speech, a tale of ghetto to incarceration, then on to glory.
Don King is in suitably reflective mood, remembering how he changed not only boxing but ?the whole damn world?? by persuading Muhammad Ali and George Foreman to fight in Zaire.
That was 37 years ago, but King is not done yet. He has just loaned Floyd Mayweather Jnr $500,000, which, although it goes unsaid, might result in him co-promoting the richest fight of all time with his royal and ancient rival Bob Arum, who just happens to handle Manny Pacquiao. Bet against it at your own risk.
King has been lampooned for his mangling of the language when promoting his fights. Yet, when he talks at his offices, his desk crowded with memorabilia and his walls lined with photographs of himself with princes and presidents, he does so in a quiet and precise manner.
His education was achieved while serving four years in prison for the killing of a thief, whom he shot in the back. That time was used obtaining a postal graduate course with an Ohio university, reading ?books written by the likes of ?Shakespeare the Bard, Proust, Goethe, Churchill and many others??.
?Those great words from great men prevented me from falling back into the streets, as everyone predicted I would do,?? King says. ?Machiavelli taught me it was better to be feared than loved. Because if you are loved they sense you might be weak. I am a man of the people and help them, but it is important to do so through strength.??
His strength hasn?t always been appreciated, even by the boxers he took to the world; Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali, Lennox Lewis and Tim Witherspoon are among those who were world heavyweight champions, but each at one point turned on him with law suits. King explains today: ?Voices whispered poison to them about money they might have deserved and it became the vogue to sue me. For me, it was heart-rending. Worst of all when the bad words came from those I had helped the most.
?As I said at the time, Mike got every penny that was coming to him, but I would have needed 36 hours in a day to refute them all. I can?t say it didn?t wound me, but I knew I had made more money for them than anyone in their careers. Fighters like Lennox had their biggest single pay-days with me.
?In the end, for the most part, they have all come back to me one way or another. Guys like Mike and Muhammad are my friends again. That is my vindication.??
As he reflects on the men who have stood before him, King acknowledges Tyson as ?the most destructive force ever to enter the ring . . . no one has been more committed to the knockout nor more able to deliver it.??
As for Ali, King wonders in awe at how much greater The Greatest might have been. ?Had he not been banned from the ring for four years in his prime, we would have been searching for a word beyond phenomenon, which he already was. What sets him apart is that he took the selfless decision to refuse to fight in Vietnam on behalf of every American?s right to make his own choice.
?As he proved in the ring, he was a genius. Ali could have been whatever he wanted. He supplied the funds for an old folk?s home for people of all faiths in New York when it was threatened with closure and never told anyone until it came out many years later. With that mind and compassion, yes, he could have been the first black president of the United States.??
Despite turning 80 last month, King is still up for the fight, but involvement in the projected and long-awaited Mayweather-Pacquiao $100 million super-fight depends on contractual issues with Golden Boy Promotions, with whom King is engaged in typical tussle.
King expects Mayweather ? ?the best boxer in the world?? ? to beat Pacquiao, ?who has made the most of Floyd?s absence from the ring??. He has also not given up on a stagnant heavyweight division, ?even though the Klitschkos, who are good big men, are more champions of Germany than of the world??.
King adds: ?(David) Haye would never have fought that feebly if he had been with me. He had the charisma and style to revive heavyweight boxing, but, in a stadium full of Germans, he became one of many fighters I?ve known who were afraid to hit the white man.
?The least he could have done was go down fighting. I don?t think his confidence can ever recover from what happened. Certainly not with his current crew around him.??
Boxing is King?s business. ?My game needs heroes and those young men will rise from the poverty and unemployment they are suffering now and fill that need,?? he says.
But equality of men of all colours is his crusade.
?I?m a man of the people and I draw my strength from the people,?? he says. ?I will fight for America until the day I drop. We have come a long way, but it?s not over yet. Not close. Only weeks ago I bought a nice new house and I was driving to it when I was stopped by police because I was a black man in a big car wearing all my bling.
?Hypocrisy is the mother of all evil and racial prejudice is still her favourite child. That is why, in this new age of unemployment, there are twice as many blacks without jobs as whites. Abraham Lincoln said, ?Freedom ain?t free?, and still many a neighbour thinks that where black men go, the grass don?t grow.??
When asked some years ago to write his own epitaph, King suggested: ?He worked for the day when everyone would be clothed in dignity.??
A quotation among the many on his office walls puts him even better: ?Can Don King save the world? If not, he knows somebody who can.??
