Don King brought the ring fighting industry to perfection. Now he wants to introduce the world to at least one great fighter

Who knows the names of champion boxers now?

The kids in the schoolyard are no longer trying to be like the new title holder; women in beauty salons do not faint looking at photographs of yet another macho in the ring. Boxing fans haven't seen truly great fights for a long time. Boxing purists meticulously analyze glorious fights from many years ago and discuss the qualities of brilliant fighters, many of whom are no longer alive. These days, heavyweight championship belts change hands in boring bouts on a Saturday, and then come Sunday morning, few, if any, know that a new champion has emerged.

However, do not despair: there is a name left in boxing that is still equally known to fans and complete amateurs. This name - King ("King") - corresponds to the status of its owner.

Frosty January afternoon in New York. Promoter Don King emerges from the depths of the Madison Square Garden sports complex, and a crowd of onlookers immediately gathers around him. They push closer to get a better look at his famous hairstyle of standing on end blond hair, which is already quite gray and thinning. Dressed in a gold-sequined red, white and blue denim jacket emblazoned with his corny "Only in America" motto, he was there to organize a series of fights for the following evening. No one even notices the dozen professional boxers who pour out into the street after him.

“This will be amazing!” King says as he poses for the press. “It will be provocative! You will see fights that were made in boxing heaven!” He repeats this mantra for the thousandth time. But does it mean today what it once meant?

Madison Square Garden has seen many famous fights within its walls. And King, now 74, remembers many of them, from the classic Joe Louis-Rocky Marciano fight of 1951 to the equal Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier "fight of the century" 20 years later. King, however, listened to a report about him on the radio while serving time in prison. In total, over 33 years, he organized at least 600 fights and received about $1 billion in revenue. King's fortune is estimated at $350 million.

He is clearly not going to stop there and now intends to save the American boxing industry, which, as you already understand, is going through hard times. Revenue from the three major fights totaled $168 million in 1996, the sport's financial peak, but fell to $66 million last year. Even NBC's reality show The Contender, where boxing star Sugar Ray Leonard and the main character of “Rocky” Sylvester Stallone acted as hosts, it did not improve the situation: it was taken off the air after the first season. The most important problem in boxing, which Don King's main efforts are aimed at solving, is the lack of a bright heavyweight fighter. It is the super heavyweights who drag the entire boxing along with them. Last year, King himself led four heavyweight champions in four rival federations, but among them there was no worthy replacement for the legendary Mike Tyson.

“Boxing needs a new star,” says King. “I’m always looking for new candidates, but whoever finds this person, only I can make him a star.” I make diamonds sparkle."

By the way, Tyson, who has completed his career and now lives in provincial Arizona, is ready to subscribe to these words. “Boxing needs fighters who inspire people,” he says. “You must be their dream.” You must be their soap opera.”

After Tyson was disqualified for biting off part of Evander Holyfield's ear in 1997, conversations about boxing increasingly focused on various misunderstandings and unsuccessful fights. Even Don King Productions felt the effects of the sport's decline. The number of office employees has decreased by 40%, and now only 30 people work here. King also has 113 fighters from 27 countries in various weight categories with him. Several dozen of them train and live at King's barracks-style camp in rural Ohio.

However, even if King finds the right boxer, it will be very difficult to achieve great success - the intense competition between boxing associations has made it very difficult for the emergence of a new superstar. There is no single monopoly league in boxing like there is in baseball or basketball. The fights take place under the auspices of almost a dozen different organizations, of which the most famous are the WBA, WBC, IBF and WBO. Each system has up to twenty weight categories and simultaneously competes for 200 championship titles. Compare with what it was 30 years ago. In 1975, when Muhammad Ali fought Joe Frazier in their third classic, King's Manila Scramble, the only men who mattered to the world were the two men in the ring. Ali was the only heavyweight champion.

“The champion title has lost its meaning,” sums up well-known manager Shelley Finkel in the boxing world. “You can be a champion, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

Don King worked his way up from the streets of Cleveland, where he was known as Cadillac Slim in the 1950s, running a nightclub and regularly running underground lotteries until they were legalized. A few years ago, promoter Den Duva met with King and was amazed that he remembered the phone number of every person they started talking about. “Your numbers are fine,” Duva told him. “It was my business,” King responded.

Former Showtime Networks executive vice president Mark Greenberg, who worked with King, says he has an incredible ability to pay attention to the smallest financial details: “It doesn’t matter how many times the deal changes, Don remembers every number.” Alex Yemenidzhan, former president of MGM Grand, believes that King "could easily become the CEO of any major corporation."

However, there is another side to King’s life. By the time our hero achieved prosperity, he had killed two people. One of them was a robber whom King shot and killed in 1954 in what the court considered a justifiable killing. The other was a small-time street pimp who supposedly owed a future promoter several hundred dollars. King killed this man in 1966 - he beat the debtor to death, as he himself claims, in defense of himself, and spent almost four years in prison.

King was still virtually unknown when in 1974 he promised a then-unprecedented $10 million payment to Muhammad Ali and George Foreman for a fight in Zaire that became one of the greatest fights of all time. King had such a talent for persuasion that he not only persuaded Ali to give him the opportunity to organize the fight, but also forced Foreman to sign a blank piece of paper so that he could then fill in the details of the contract.

In 1979, King first came to the then actively developing pay television channel HBO with a proposal to broadcast a heavyweight fight. Three years later, he sold them another fight for $2 million. A year later, King became the first promoter to simultaneously sell the rights to multiple fights to cable television, pay-per-view satellite channels and a broadcast network.

King generally has the gift of quickly assessing a person’s character and understanding what motivates him. “You can't get stars just by offering them a ton of money,” he says. “To do this you need to penetrate their soul.” That's how he got Mike Tyson. In 1988, Tyson was the youngest heavyweight champion and one of the most formidable fighters in boxing history. But he was vulnerable: his manager, Jim Jacobs, had recently died; his trainer Cus D'Amato, who became his second father, had died three years earlier; marriage with actress Robin Givens has cracked. King managed to use this moment, convincing Tyson that he would make him richer and help him fill the void in his life.

In 1992, Tyson went to prison for rape, and King sealed the deal by lending him $14 million. Tyson served three years, and after his release, King entered into a $70 million deal for six fights at the MGM Casino in Las Vegas. “I knew he was completely unpredictable,” King says. “But there was a demand for it.”

As payment, King received $15 million in MGM shares with the right to sell them to the company if the price doubled. It grew, and King pocketed $30 million. For a time, King became the second largest private shareholder in MGM after Kirk Kerkorian. King, he claims, was also the largest private taxpayer in the state of Nevada. “MGM stock went up just because I talked about them and Las Vegas,” King boasts. — The deals I made should be included in visual aids. They should be taught at Harvard and at black colleges.”

In the mid-1990s, King earned $70 million a year. In 1996, he paid $30 million in taxes to the federal treasury and issued a press release in which he talked about what a good American he was. “I was so happy,” King recalls.

[page break]

However, in 1998, Tyson left him. And he didn’t just leave, but began to demand $100 million from his former promoter through the court, claiming that he had deceived him. (They later settled for $14 million, and King recently made his final payment.) Tyson earned more than $400 million during his career, but received only a quarter of that money. During the years that King represented him, he paid 30% to the promoter, 20% to the two managers, and gave half of the rest as taxes. What remained for him personally, he spent extremely wastefully. As a result, Tyson was declared bankrupt in 2003.

Is he worried about this? “If it weren’t for me, the guys wouldn’t be getting as much as they are getting now,” Tyson says. “Before I started fighting, $10 million was a very large fee. When I was at my peak, I spent that much in one week.”

King states that Tyson's biggest mistake was leaving him: “Mike is not a traitor, he's just short-sighted. He could become the first billionaire athlete in history." King estimates that out of his hundreds of fighters, each one received at least $1 million. “They spend their money, and then they get mad when they see that I still have my money.”

During the 1970s and 1980s, King says, he constantly had to refute "unfair" and "unmerited" suspicions of links to organized crime. “They just blame me for everything,” he laments. For example, in the early 1980s, he was sued by Muhammad Ali, accusing him of underpaying his fee for a fight with Larry Holmes. King then settled the case for less than $100,000. And in 1985, he was accused of tax evasion, but the court acquitted him.

By the late 1990s, lawsuits against King had become so frequent that he was spending up to $30 million on attorney fees each year. In 1998, King was charged with insurance fraud and acquitted. (After the trial was completed, he paid for a vacation to the Bahamas for all the jurors.) After some time, the FBI raided the headquarters of Don King Productions. While helicopters belonging to various media outlets circled the sky above the building, agents reviewed files and documents. And this time King got away unscathed - according to him, no charges were brought as a result of the inspection.

“I've had to fight my way out of scandals and accusations many times, and I'm still standing, still fighting,” King says. “I’m a black guy from the ghetto, I did my time.” I was bad and became good, I came out of prison to rewrite the history of this business. You can't wait for me to do something illegal again. The fact that I’m still standing is amazing in itself.”

King invests his money not only in boxing. In 1998, he paid $700,000 for the Call & Post, a Cleveland newspaper for black Americans. He owns the rights to a new advertising technology - a robot that moves around shopping centers and public places. King has 7,000 videotapes of fights, press conferences and other boxing events in his vault, and hopes to create a cable television channel dedicated to boxing and other entertainment.

King and his wife of 40 years, Henrietta, own an 800-hectare ranch near Cleveland. They also spend a lot of time in Florida, where in 1997 King bought a 20-hectare stretch of oceanfront for $8 million. They didn’t want to give King a mortgage for this purchase, but on the last day when the deal could still be concluded, he came to the bank with a check for the missing $5.6 million. “The next day, the guy next door put up a sign saying he was selling his land,” King says. “I bought that too.” Having gotten comfortable, King installed a small copy of the Statue of Liberty on his lawn, facing the ocean.

King likes to have a lot of cash. He says he always keeps at least $70 million in his checking account. He paid $5 million in cash for an airplane and always carries a thick wad of bills in his pocket to pay bills at restaurants and hotels. After the fights, Don King always insists that the casino management cash the multi-million dollar checks given to him. Doing him a favor, the administrators send employees and security to a special room so that the bills can be counted out to King. As a result, he goes out onto the street with heavy bags that are bursting at the seams with banknotes.

...On that January evening, Don King did not yet have bags of money in his hands, but he had three “world champions” in store for the fights at Madison Square Garden. The day before, during the weigh-in of the boxers, King was the center of public attention. Various characters in furs, sequins, baseball caps and tracksuits crowded around. King seemed to know everyone present, from retired boxers to graying journalists. They called him "DK" and he had a nickname for everyone. "Craig Boogie!" - he greeted the young man. Then he turned to another, dressed in a fur jacket and fur hat; Having recently recovered from a gunshot wound, King loudly called him “Bulletproof Zip.”

King's protégé, 33-year-old Jean-Marc Mormeck from France, has two championship belts and only two defeats for thirty-one victories in the heavyweight division. He was expected to make light work of Jamaica's O'Neill Bell. Another of King's favorites, 28-year-old welterweight Zab Judah, a three-time world champion, is renowned for his quick punch. He was supposed to fight the little-known Argentinean Carlos Baldomir. A win would earn Judah a multimillion-dollar offer to fight Floyd Mayweather Jr. - he has a thirty-five to zero win-loss record, twenty-four knockouts and the title of the most unbeaten boxer in the world today. Judah, seemingly forgetting about the upcoming fight with Baldomir, was so bored during the press conference that he answered calls and messages on his mobile phone.

The next evening, just before the fights begin, King crosses the ring in a tuxedo. He holds an unlit cigar in one hand and a small American flag in the other. The host introduces King to the audience, and immediately, as always, disapproving whistles are heard from the crowd, which only causes Don to grin widely.

Mormeck, a boxer with chiseled muscles, a shaved head and an almost white beard and mustache, looks like a menacing character from a science-fiction film. He hammers Bell for several rounds in a row, but cannot bring him down. Finally, when he gets tired of swinging his heavy fists in the 10th round, Bell chooses his moment, delivers a series of crisp blows, and - bam! — Mormeck, one of King’s main hopes, lies motionless in the ring.

Judah enters the ring for his final fight of the night, and the New York crowd is already prepared to watch his hero quickly and effectively work his opponent. But Judah doesn’t even manage to accelerate properly. After 12 boring rounds, he loses on points by unanimous decision and immediately begins to blame King for not giving him enough time to prepare.

“All I did was put on a big show, and it’s not my fault it turned out this way,” King grumbles. - I never lose. The word 'losing' is not in my vocabulary."

[page break]

They don't have shine

Super heavyweight champions who recently performed successfully in the ring, but never became stars

Evander Holyfield

Probably the greatest fighter in the light heavyweight division. He also competed in the heavyweight division, earning millions, but still fell short of that level.

Riddick Bowie

It flashed and went out. A very gifted athlete, but he lacked character. He didn't last long on the podium.

Lennox Lewis

An excellent athlete with a pleasant appearance and speech. But he was afraid to attract too much attention to himself.

Bloodied but unbowed

Boxing clinch weakening

$168 million - revenue from three Mike Tyson fights on pay-per-view in 1996

$31 million - revenue from ticket sales for Mike Tyson's three fights in 1996

$66 million - revenue for showing the three main fights of 2005 on paid channels

$13 million - revenue from ticket sales for the three main fights of 2005

Total number of heavyweight champions

1 in 1975. Muhammad Ali

5 in 2006. Also 2 seats are empty

Boxing leagues and federations

2 in 1975: WBC and WBA still active today

7 in 2006 plus minor organizations

Don King Figures

More than $1 billion is the total revenue received by Don King from organizing fights.
$110 million - King's most profitable fight - Tyson vs. Holyfield, 1997.
113 boxers in the rings are his protégés.
$70 million is King's maximum annual income, which he received in 1996.
$350 million is Don King's net worth, according to Forbes.

The most profitable fights

$130 million - Mike Tyson vs. Lennox Lewis, 2002; promoter – Main Events
$115 million - Evander Holyfield vs. Lennox Lewis, 1999; promoter - Don King
$110 million - Mike Tyson vs. Evander Holyfield, 1997; promoter - Don King

The king of boxing has run out of stars