At his first Las Vegas show in years, there was Don King, promoting the person he promotes best, himself. His headliner lost, but a fan in the crowd struck his own jackpot by winning a side promotion to determine the best King look-alike – and when he directly touches the people, King often wins big himself.

King is back, sort of, if not exactly in his once-ubiquitous way. What happened to his once-vast boxing business this decade isn’t so much different than the many tales of woe that have struck other empires, big and small, at the same time. Too little discretionary income for his consumers, a lost lawsuit here, downsizing at his corporate office there, a few too many lost clients, a bit too much new competition.

The basis for King slipping down the promotional rung from the heights he once shared only with his archrival, Bob Arum, has many tentacles – and so does the basis for his strategy for rebuilding the business.

He says Las Vegas lost its direction, and because of that, opportunity exists. The down economy, he says, is the perfect climate for an entrepreneurial mind to step into a void and create industry from dreams and faith, the same two attributes he cites as the foundation for Las Vegas’ creation in the first place.

King still has a number of titleholders under contract, although he could put them all on one card and not have a decent pay-per-view show. Yet King envisions himself using the same personal elements for his renaissance he did in the 1970s, when an unknown former numbers runner from Ohio signed Muhammad Ali for an exhibition match, then two years later played a key role in the Ali-George Foreman epic in Zaire, which vaulted him into promotional prominence.

“I used my wit and grit and intellect, because that’s all I had,” King said. “I had to go to Africa, even though I had the best two athletes in the world signed, because no one in America would touch me, not because I didn’t have the athletes, but because I was black. They couldn’t have that. So it became reverse globalization. It was a portend of the future. It was a precursor.”

When King spoke to THE RING, he had just returned from a spurious heavyweight championship fight between David Haye and Nicolay Valuev in Germany that underscored the sorry state of that division. But it fed his own television network, which is one of the methods the 78 year old hopes will fuel his effort to rise back to the top of the promotional pile.

“We took a show that absolutely was nothing to the extent of a heavyweight championship fight between Ali and Foreman in Zaire,” he said. “But I took it and made it one on a lower scale, and it was tremendous, we took it to 201 countries. When you promote people, you promote the event and you promote to the public.”

In his heyday, King’s marathon cards were the envy of all promoters. Four title bouts on the same show were commonplace. But so was the subjugation of some of the best fighters on his roster, most notably Julio Cesar Chavez, who spent too many nights playing second fiddle to Mike Tyson until the latter went to prison, and Chavez began carrying pay-per-view shows on his own.

“Julio Cesar Chavez,” said Arum, “was the most under-promoted fighter in the history of boxing.”

Arum was to King what Joe Frazier was to Ali, what Wilt Chamberlain was to Bill Russell, what the Red Sox are to the Yankees, what brunettes are to blondes. They promoted different people and in far different fashions. And they kept each other honest with heated competition in their actions and hatred in their hearts. With the disputed result of their Felix Trinidad-Oscar De La Hoya co-promotion a decade ago, Arum’s distaste for their relationship grew, and they did not co-promote again until the Floyd Mayweather-Zab Judah fight in 2006.

Arum usurped King for many reasons this decade, and his distaste for his longtime rival faded as they creep closer to becoming octogenarians.

“We’re too old to worry about it anymore,” Arum said.

The reasons King’s promotional star dimmed are multi-faceted. A lack of depth in his roster came on quickly, hastened by an over-reliance on heavyweights. When Tyson’s career fizzled out, and the heavyweight division collapsed, Arum’s strength in the lighter-weight divisions allowed Top Rank to easily surpass Don King Promotions. King was forced to downsize his Florida base of operations. And, finally, a new competitor emerged in Golden Boy Promotions.

“In the promotional field, I don’t have any competition,” King said. “But what you have is dealsmanship, where they utilize the benefits of the attraction to the betterment of their deals, which I respect. That’s what Richard Schaefer did with Golden Boy. Golden Boy became like the donkey and the carrot. The carrot was that he was the only one who could make a pay-per-view profitable for HBO and it kept HBO in the spotlight. Then, he said ‘I’m going to take this away from you unless you come and do A, B, C.’ So through negotiation and compromise, he ended up getting all the dates on HBO, and once they got them all, they fell back into the corporate world and now they’ve got to live up to the agreements that they made. Five stars to them.

“They don’t really have anything they can promote, but they’ve gotten name recognition for their fighters, and because of that, the network has to bring them back, even after they lose. I understand what’s going on, but you can’t complain. You have to deal with what is real. You have to create and initiate.”

Golden Boy’s favored arrangement with HBO gnaws at rival promoters, although King enjoyed the same treatment for several years. Thirty years ago, he became the first promoter to sell HBO a heavyweight title telecast with the Larry Holmes-Mike Weaver fight, when King declined an $800,000 license fee from ABC to take HBO’s $125,000. The idea, he said, was to drive competition with a new television entity. After several years, the ultimate result was network television’s complete withdrawal from the boxing business.

Today, King’s tepid roster of fighters makes a major HBO date a difficult sell. All he needs, he said, is to secure the right headliners, and the rest will take care of itself.

“You’re always one fighter away, one attraction away,” he said. “One attraction can open the doors for people to come in. Things are rough but it’s like anything else. I’m watching businesses around the world go belly up. Change is in the air. You can’t holler about persecution and oppression, and then when you get to the affluent line, call that same persecution ‘exclusivity.’”

While his Don King Network is viewed by most as a bridge to the day when he can find that major attraction and regain footing with the subscription networks, King said that isn’t the case.

“If you had Ali in Ali’s time, and technology in technology’s time, and if you had that all together, man, what are you talking about?” he said. “Then, you have globalization. That’s what I envisioned when I created my own network, and it’s a very difficult task because, naturally, if people don’t understand something, they’re apprehensive of it. I’ve found all sorts of stumbling blocks. But I’ve worked very hard to get this thing onto the air, and I own most of my own content, so I’ve got programming. It’s a matter of having attractions and bringing them to the people.

“You’ve got packagers with HBO, you’ve got packagers with Showtime. They don’t promote. They provide license fees. Where they find fault with me is that I can’t be controlled, I can’t be intimidated, and I know that the attraction is the promotion, not the network. They’ve flipped it. The networks got to be important by having the best attractions. Then, they grabbed that power and they started dictating who, what, how, where, when it should be done. You don’t play the game where you can be judge, jury, and executioner. You play the game so the people can identify with what you’re doing and can be a part of it, and you have to have the attraction to do that.”

King went back to Las Vegas with a Halloween show at the casino boxing outpost of Treasure Island. His headliner, bantamweight Joseph “King Kong” Agbeko, lost to Yonnhy Perez. But the relationship he struck with casino owner Phil Ruffin encouraged King, and he has joined forces with a new player in Las Vegas boxing at a time when the city is prime for resurgence on many levels.

“It’s always a great time to gamble on Las Vegas, but they lost their way because they became more interested in the corporate mentality than in the people mentality,” King said. “The guys who created Las Vegas and made it a gambling oasis made it like a red-light district, and the decadence came along with it, then they started to bring in sophistication with it. But the people were the most important. They had the guy who would go out and get the players and the high rollers. They built that whole city on dreams and faith. Then, they got to rolling real good, and had all these buildings, and they forgot about what they built it for. They built it for the people. You had to be able to seduce them, to treat them, to identify with them, to make them feel special, because they are. When I came in there, I gave them a stimulus program.

“I went there because of Phil Ruffin. We made an agreement and shook hands, on his word, and he fulfilled every obligation of that commitment and handshake. That was how I started. I started on faith and the reliance on a word, a handshake. I have to say, Phil Ruffin’s handshake is better than most people you deal with under a contract. That’s how Vegas used to operate, and I found that in Phil Ruffin. He’s the chairman of the board. He doesn’t have any board he has to go get approval from, and he was a pleasure and a delight to work with.”

King still has the savvy of a man who promoted or co-promoted seven of the 10 most-purchased pay-per-view cards in history, and 12 of the top 20 highest-grossing live gates in Nevada history, all of them in the 1990s, and views his job as not that much different than that of the fighters he promotes.

“Boxing is life,” King said. “It’s as close to life as any sport can be. Man to man, you can’t send in a substitute when somebody gets hurt, if you run out of gas there’s no gas station in sight. You have to be able to deal with the ups and the downs, the problems and the joys. It’s the same with promoting boxing. You have to be able to deal with whatever comes. That’s what trailblazers do.”

King has been often criticized for his promotional techniques, which often focus less on the fighters than the promoter. His first publicist, Bill Caplan, who now is a publicist for Arum, said “some promoters, and I mean great promoters, don’t get it when it comes to publicity.

“I always told Arum, and not just because he signs my checks now, that if he didn’t want to become a rich attorney and rich promoter, he would have been a great publicist because he has great ideas,” Caplan said. “King was always more interested in publicizing himself. He was always a great competitor for Arum. But at some point, I think he just lost his passion for it, for whatever reason.”

King’s current publicist, Alan Hopper, said that passion has been fanned lately, and an impassioned King is a formidable one.

“I’ve learned never to underestimate the man,” Hopper said, “because he can do things by the sheer force of his will.”


David Mayo covers boxing for the Grand Rapids (Michigan) Press and is a regular contributor to THE RING.