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Don King interview: ‘Trump never surrenders – I love the man and hope he wins’

Don King
Now 92, Don King remains one of sport's most famous faces - Mary Beth Koeth

How you doing, my man?’ Don King booms in an empty diner in Boca Raton, South Florida. King is now a solid 92 but still promoting fights, albeit these days mostly in and around Miami. For a man who spent a lifetime crisscrossing the world putting on major boxing and entertainment events at the invitation of presidents and dictators, the restrictions of his age must feel frustrating. Wistfully he talks about an invitation to the Bahamas, ‘but my doctor has told me not to fly’.

I suggest he take a yacht but he has never been out to sea, ‘as you can have an “accident” out there’, he says, making a tipping movement and laughing raucously. A reasonable response perhaps to the realities of the world he has operated in.

These days, King remains in his beloved South Florida, where he took up residence and set up his office over 30 years ago. His neighbours are the mind-blowingly wealthy. For more than two decades he lived on the Palm Beach shoreline, a five-minute cruise in his Rolls-Royce Ghost from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, the exclusive hangout for American captains of industry, where they network to add to their considerable piles.

Mar-a-Lago membership may be exclusive but King never needed to sign up; Trump would often invite him personally. On one occasion, about 15 years ago, I went with King. Trump was there with his wife Melania, his guest the businessman Phil Ruffin, who had just purchased a Las Vegas casino for $755 million cash, and Ruffin’s young wife, a former Miss Odessa. As we paused at the top of the stairs so Trump could make a dramatic entrance, he turned to King and said, ‘You see all these people Don, they are richer than us but what they don’t have is fame.’ Over dinner, talking incessantly, Trump floated the idea of running for the presidency again (at that point, he’d already tried). Melania and Miss Odessa compared diamond rings. I sat quietly bemused, dwarfed by two beauty queens. King didn’t utter a word throughout the entire evening. ‘Sometimes it’s better to listen,’ he said.

‘I like Trump,’ he says now. ‘He revolutionised bankruptcy… Remarkable man. Other people shoot themselves and jump off the bridge. Not Trump. He has resilience and tenacity and a never-say-die attitude. He never surrenders. I love the man and hope he wins. The press kick him in the ass but he’s exposing the corrupt and rigged system.’

In the late 1980s King staged several Mike Tyson fights in Atlantic City, the boxer then at the height of his pugilistic fame; the same metropolis where the young Donald Trump was investing in hotels and casinos. King would bring Tyson, and Trump would stump up millions of dollars in site fees, and bring in the high rollers. Today all that is long gone. Trump’s Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City was demolished in 2021. ‘When Don King came into town it was good for business for everyone. Atlantic City was buzzing,’ a former car-parking valet, now unemployed, tells me.

Life has changed for King, too. After his beloved wife Henrietta died in 2010 following a long illness, he sold his two adjacent South Florida mansions. The estate was complete with a replica of the Statue of Liberty overlooking the ocean. Henrietta had been on to climate change before it became a hot topic, and according to King ‘she would say all these mansions will be washed into the sea one day’. When locals tried to have the statue removed, King called the press. ‘Come and take down Lady Liberty,’ he told the authorities, ‘right in front of the TV cameras.’ The statue remained.

With Henrietta at the White House in 1977
With Henrietta at the White House in 1977 - Guy DeLort/WWD/Penske Media via Getty

King has been on one hand a friend to the powerful and an unapologetic cheerleader for the greenback dollar, and on the other for those who strive. He signed a Cuban fighter, Angelo Santana, who turned up on his doorstep in 2007 after a perilous four-day journey across the choppy waters from Cuba to Florida. ‘Angelo represents the spirit of freedom,’ King later said.

‘I think he’s going to be a world champion, but more importantly he’s a champion of the people.’

While he has homes in Nevada, and vast tracts of land in Amish Country in Ohio, where he grew up, these days his world is getting smaller. A father of three – Eric, Carl and Debbie – he has several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His doting niece Jean, who nursed Henrietta through her illness, now looks out for ‘Uncle Don’. But since the pandemic he has become more cautious. King likes coming to this always-empty diner in Boca Raton so he doesn’t have to be as public-facing.

Don King
The spark remains, but the famous hair is not as big now as it was in his heyday - Mary Beth Koeth | Wright, Nigel/Mirrorpix/Getty Images

The waiters bustle to set up the table, knowing his routine well. He carries his no-salt hot pepper sauce in his bag but still orders ‘a stack of pancakes, butter, grits, eggs and bacon’. I point out that the butter has salt in it, as does the bacon. ‘I’ll have to start bringing my own butter now. I can’t give up bacon. Muhammad Ali tried to convert me to Islam but I said, “Champ, I just can’t give up the pig. It’s what keeps us strong. From the rooter to the tooter.”’

These days King’s pace is slower, his hair is not quite the signature it used to be, and his gait is stooped. But in other ways, not much has changed with Don King. His mind and wit are still the sharpest in the room. His voice is still strong and clear. For more than 20 years I followed him with my camera, documenting the behind-the-scenes of his world. He never once told me to stop filming – from the front lines of the Iraq War, where he was invited by the commander of the allied forces General David Petraeus on a USO tour, to President Bush’s ranch in Texas.

We went to Nigeria, Nicaragua, Mexico, all over Europe, China three times (well four, actually, as he once did a 48-hour commute to sign an agreement with Lennox Lewis), and South Africa to meet with Nelson Mandela, who wanted to thank him for years of financial support for the ANC when he was in prison on Robben Island. Mandela gave King a T-shirt with his prison number on it, the name of a charity he was launching. King replied, ‘Is this your prison number? You know I have one, too.’

All that has been documented by my camera, an eyewitness to King’s life.

The boxing promoter, who burst on to the scene in 1974 with Muhammad Ali vs George Foreman in the legendary ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, in what was then Zaire, and then Muhammad Ali vs Joe Frazier in the ‘Thrilla in Manila’ the following year, has lived a full life.

King and Ali giving a press conference in the build up to Thrilla in Manilla
King and Ali giving a press conference in the build up to Thrilla in Manilla - Nik Wheeler/Corbis via Getty Images

King was born in 1931 in Cleveland, Ohio, and his story is one of America through a black perspective, via segregation, legalised discrimination, the civil rights movement and an emerging defiance by African Americans. ‘Martin Luther King took us to the mountaintops,’ he said to me once. ‘I want to take us to the bank.’

‘I started out from sub-zero,’ he says now. ‘The world of hustlers and boosters, pimps and hoes. You could either be a preacher, a teacher, in jail or dead on the streets. I got into college but I made an irrational rational choice. I realised I was making money. So why would I go to college to learn to earn when I was already earning?’

King was only 10 years old when his father died in a steel factory accident in Cleveland. He started selling peanuts on the streets to make a contribution to the household. Even at that age, he showed entrepreneurial flair by putting a lucky number in his peanut bags: ‘Everybody wanted to buy my peanuts.’

Don King
Don King

He came to the attention of the mafia bosses who were running the ‘numbers’ rackets at the time in the black communities. ‘Numbers was really what they call the lottery today. Back then it was illegal gambling, controlled by the mafia, who couldn’t operate in our neighbourhoods, so we ran around collecting bets and paying out.’ When an oversight meant that he couldn’t otherwise pay out somebody’s winnings, King had to use the money he’d saved up for college to settle his debt.

Soon, he couldn’t count all his money, he says, and ‘I didn’t trust anyone to count it for me. Anyway, if you can count your money it means you ain’t got none. I had this money but it was illegitimate money. It had no mother and no father.’

With the encouragement of his friend Lloyd Price, a rock ’n’ roll pioneer and singer-songwriter, he opened a nightclub. ‘I brought in black waiters from the white country clubs. We had ropes and a red carpet and we served steak tartare.’

Lloyd Price, centre, joins Muhammed Ali – or, as he was then, Cassius Clay – for post-fight celebrations
Lloyd Price, centre, joins Muhammed Ali – or, as he was then, Cassius Clay – for post-fight celebrations - Stanley Weston/Getty Images

Artists such as BB King and Aretha Franklin would perform at the Corner Tavern, and it became a pillar of the ‘Chitlin Circuit’, a group of black-owned nightclubs where, during the segregation years, black artists could go through the front door instead of the back.

The club suited King’s showmanship well. His vernacular is the banter of the streets, from ‘Don’t p—s in my face and call it rain’ (to a lawyer trying to negotiate a deal), to ‘No one can ride your back if it ain’t bent’, which is one of my favourites. He also has an unfailing Christian faith, and later, prior to any event, he would sit reading a passage from the Bible before putting on his bling and combing up his hair.

When Muhammad Ali had his boxing licence suspended because of his refusal to be inducted into the army during the Vietnam War – famously saying, ‘Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam,’ and, ‘No Viet Cong ever called me n—r’ – he would hang out at the Corner Tavern, even getting up on stage to sing Ben E King’s Stand By Me.

King has worked with many of boxing's biggest names, most notably Muhammed Ali
King has worked with many of boxing's biggest names, most notably Muhammed Ali - Harry Siskind/Penske Media via Getty Images

Ali, Price and a host of movers and shakers were drawn to Cleveland, which was a hub for the expression of the political frustrations of the African American community. What became known as the ‘Muhammad Ali summit’ – the moment when a group of famous black athletes made a show of support for the fighter – was held in the city in 1967.

And as a rich black man, even more of a rarity then, Don King gave a lot of money to the civil rights cause, a fact that Reverend Jesse Jackson and Reverend Al Sharpton always acknowledged. ‘Without Don King bankrolling some of that work, we wouldn’t have got far. We needed money for our cause,’ Sharpton once told me at his HQ in Harlem.

Ali with American football player Jim Brown at the 'Cleveland Summit'
Ali with American football player Jim Brown at the 'Cleveland Summit' - UPI/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

But that was also the year King was convicted of the voluntary manslaughter of Sam Garrett over a debt of $600. (It wasn’t King’s first brush with the law. Back in 1954, he shot a man during an armed robbery of his premises. But that was found to be justifiable homicide.) ‘[Garrett] owed me money and kept avoiding repayment,’ King tells me. That sort of thing couldn’t be tolerated on the streets. ‘He called me a Mickey Mouse motherf—ker. When I saw him we had a fight and he hit the ground hard.’ Garrett died days later in hospital. The first police officer on the scene described it as a brutal beating in his court testimony. King has never shied away from questions about Garrett’s killing; nor has he ever been able to forget it. Despite everything in between, his life seems crystallised in that moment.

Hanging on the wall of his conference room in Deerfield Beach, South Florida, is a huge photo of him with Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr. She is smiling broadly with her head resting on Don’s shoulder. He looks resplendent in his tuxedo and diamond chains. Along with many other prominent people, Scott King wrote a letter of support for the parole board, and the Governor of Ohio pardoned King in 1983; he had previously served three years and 11 months in prison, being released in 1971. ‘I didn’t serve time. I made time serve me,’ he has said. In the prison library, he read Shakespeare, philosophy and history, works which over his subsequent career he quoted to bewildered boxing reporters.

Don King
King spends hours on the phone in his office making deals and, shortly before the interview, making deals for an upcoming fight, admonishing a fighter's manager - Mary Beth Koeth

King’s prison record proved useful for swimming in the shark-infested waters of boxing. ‘I really love the boxers,’ he says. ‘They didn’t go to Yale or Harvard. They can hardly eat and yet they use their physical prowess to make something of themselves. Yesterday’s nobody is tomorrow’s somebody. I respect all who are prepared to fight. And the streets always respected me and protected me. The only time I got robbed was at the red lights in Mexico City. They took my watch and stuff and when they found out it was me, they took it all to the police station and gave it back. That is real respect. I’m one of the masses who has the opportunity to be of the classes.’

Recently out of jail, King entered the boxing world in 1972, persuading Ali to take part in a charity match to benefit a black hospital in Cleveland. ‘Ali said to me, man you’re great at this.’ By 1974 King had signed an almost impossible deal: the showdown between Foreman, the champion, and Ali, the people’s champion. ‘I realised no one was going to give a black man in America £10 million to put on a fight. So I had to go abroad to get it done.’ And so it was that the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ launched Don King, dressed in his dashiki and with his signature zinged-up hair, on to the global stage.

Don King poses with Muhammad Ali
King burst onto the scene promoting Muhammad Ali vs George Foreman in the legendary 'Rumble in the Jungle' - The Ring Magazine via Getty Images

King would go on to dominate boxing, putting on the biggest live gates and purses, paying athletes millions, which trickled out to other sports. ‘I made the athlete the star of the show. I don’t look for the money. The money comes in accordance with what you are doing. Nowadays the people who are so-called promoters of boxing, just want to make money off it. They don’t work for the people. I am the promoter of the people by the people and for the people, and my magic lies in my people ties.

‘I bring in all sorts of people together and defined working together to promote cultures and respect for co-existence. Nowadays the promoters just chase the money in the Middle East where they get a lot of money but no notoriety. So they pay exorbitantly but they don’t get the super-sensational.’

How King was received by others, and how he has been portrayed, have often been at odds: ‘Mike Tyson told me, if I talk bad about you, they pay me more. I told him to go ahead man. Get paid.’ Despite everything Tyson has said about him, King only says, ‘Mike and I made a lot of money together.’

In the late 1980s King staged several Mike Tyson fights
In the late 1980s King staged several Mike Tyson fights - Eric VANDEVILLE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

For all the millions he made for the boxers, there were millions more for him as the promoter – and the accusations that he stole from fighters. ‘I was the one paying them, I didn’t need to steal, I could’ve just paid them less. I made over 120 people into multimillionaires. I don’t try to fight the negativity because it would take too much time and I don’t have enough time left. But that’s my life. You deal with the cards you’re dealt. I am in it to win it and I can’t give up. But it does bother me.’ He continues, ‘I’m only human.’

As the grits and the pancakes arrive, I’m conscious that he’s eating his breakfast at five in the evening after a morning of physiotherapy and hours on the phone in the office, making deals for an upcoming fight, during which he admonished a fighter’s manager: ‘Loyalty means more to me than anything else man. Keeping your word is everything.’ A photo shoot, and now a final sit-down. King is a man who loves his grits. Offer him lobster and Champagne and he’ll opt for grits, eggs and coffee, ‘black, like me’.

The Don King sitting in this empty diner is still defiant. King – who has lived through segregation, the mafia era, being incarcerated, and the civil rights movement, not an athlete or performer but an African American businessman who opened doors for the billionaires of today, all the while proclaiming loudly, ‘Only in America! The greatest nation in the world’ – always refers to the abhorrent history of slavery.

When Don King came into town it was good for business for everyone. Atlantic City was buzzing,' a former car-parking valet revealed
When Don King came into town it was good for business for everyone. Atlantic City was buzzing,' a former car-parking valet revealed - Heinz Kluetmeier /Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images

‘Slavery has become more sophisticated now. They still consider that we blacks all steal and cheat and we are shiftless and of no account brought here by slavery, well it has just become more sophisticated with mental incarceration making you accept that you are inferior and not an equal human being. And this corrupt, sexist, racist system is so deeply embedded in the psyche of both blacks and whites that we can never become one America until we can atone.

‘I’ve been shot at, bombed, smeared and vilified because of my defiance and refusal to take on psychological slavery. I fight for what is written in our constitution and the Bill of Rights even if the treatment of blacks doesn’t live up to it. Money is just the gasoline. If you have a Rolls-Royce and have no gas you’re still going to be stuck in the desert. We are still just black. The money is irrelevant if you are not free.’

In his lifetime King has become a global celebrity, and a friend to presidents and dictators. I have seen his influence. We went together to the White House several times. On one occasion during the 2004 presidential race, he told George W Bush, ‘You’re a great fighter Mr President, but you need a promoter and that’s me.’ Bush replied, ‘I don’t think I can afford you, Don,’ to which King said, ‘No, this is pro bono. This is for the American people.’

With George W Bush
With George W Bush - Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis via Getty Images

The next day King was convincing Karl Rove, architect of the Bush campaign, that he could swing the black vote in the key state of Ohio. The following January, at a private inauguration breakfast in Washington, DC, Roger Williams, part of the Bush family inner circle, stood and personally thanked King: ‘He helped deliver Ohio, and without Ohio we wouldn’t be here today.’

As we get up to leave the diner, I tell him I’m going to the Philippines in a few days. ‘Look for my girlfriend Imelda Marcos!’ he says, referring to the infamous ‘Thrilla In Manila’ fight, hosted by the dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife back in 1975: ‘Ali said that fight was the closest thing to death.’

Then he offers, ‘I’ll reach out to her to say you’re coming.’ And much to my surprise he gets straight on the phone.