|
Happy Birthday Don King: And Many Happy Meltdowns
|
By FIONA MANNING
In honor of Don "Only In America" King's birthday, I am going to recount my best, most fabulous Don King story that could have happened, well…only in America.
|
 |
It was February 2, 2003, the tail end of the most boring fight weigh-in of the century. I had a good spot in the media center at Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas for a world boxing title showdown and nothing was going on.
Kostya Tszyu, the defending undisputed junior middleweight champion at that time, is, unfortunately, the nicest guy
you'll ever meet. The Russian emigre who now calls Australia home was facing mouthy Sharmba Mitchell.
Yet, despite whispers of a personal grudge and lots of bad blood between them, they
couldn't even manage a single unscripted punch.
Nobody bit anyone's thighs or ears, or unzipped their flies. Where is Mike Tyson when you need a hot
story' |
|
One of the fighters could have failed weight the first time out, but, oh no, not even harsh words were exchanged.
Nevada State Athletic Commission’s Executive Director Mark Ratner
wasn't even threatened with decapitation if he
didn't calibrate the scales one more time. Each and every fighter made weight.
And now the room was empty, except I was perched in front of my laptop, cursing the day I took a job on a web site in England. Owing to the time difference, I had to file my weigh-in report immediately.
I typed out the weights for the entire card's line-up, wondering who really reads this stuff anyway (actually, everyone in boxing,) and feeling sorry - very, very sorry - that I
couldn't give the lads across the pond something spicier. They love a good punch-up, especially when
nobody's getting paid to take those well-aimed shots.
Sitting beside me was my friend Graham Houston of the British magazine
Boxing Monthly. He was leafing through an ice cream encrusted copy of the
Las Vegas Review Journal somebody had abandoned. The media room fare was long gone. A few remaining chips, pretzels and half-eaten cookies looked unappetizing.
Graham was patiently waiting for me so we could have dinner. I was about to hit the SEND button and ask him where he wanted to eat, when it happened.
The gods and goddesses of boxing writers pushed Don King into the room.
|
Don King. They call him,
"Only In America," because nowhere else on earth could a guy like King exist and thrive. I had my back to him, but I knew it was King because he is like a tsunami: An angry, screeching, swearing tsunami.
He crashed into the room, bellowing a string of four-letter words, all starting with F and ending with K.
Glancing over my shoulder, I noticed that King,
the most notorious promoter in the business, was
brandishing his ubiquitous American flags and
chomping on the biggest cigar I have ever seen in
my life. |
|
Behind him was his obsequious flunky, Bruce Siddon, prematurely gray, permanently frazzled, pushing his wire rimmed specs further up his face.
King, he of the fright night hair, was in the middle of a genuine tirade.
"FUCK YOU!" he was shrieking, "and your motherfucking ideas. Pontificating at me! Who the fuck do you think you fucking think you
are"”
There were now about six men in the room, but I realized quickly that the source of
King's ire was the tiny, Jewish white boy attorney, Jeff Fried, manager of Sharmba Mitchell.
Hoping and praying nobody had noticed me, I turned back to my laptop. What a story! Opening up the file I’d just been about to send, I thanked my lucky stars
for being a woman. Up until this point being a woman in boxing had been nothing but a pain for me. Nobody noticed me or took me seriously.
I stole a glance at Graham who was scrutinizing an ad
over and over.
I quickly started rewriting my story from the top.
Briefly wondering if my website would print the
"F" word, I decided to go with it and let the lads back in England do with it what they would.
I don't know how many times I typed it because King said it often and viciously.
I typed verbatim the entire exchange in which King was berating the diminutive Fried, who showed more courage than the average heavyweight by going toe to toe with the man who instills fear in even his admirers.
"Fuck you!" he railed. I copied it and kept hitting the paste button.
King had murdered a guy before. He did time for it. The guy owed him money.
His last words before King killed him were, "Don, I'll get it." He was now enraged with Fried who, I was swiftly learning, was battling King to keep his commitment to pay Sharmba Mitchell his guaranteed purse of $350,000.
|
Ticket sales had been slow. King wanted the fight and won it on a purse bid, but the fans
weren't spending money to come to Sin City to watch it live. King wanted to strip Mitchell of $150,000 to compensate him for his losses. Not only was this not fair, but a contract is a contract.
King knows this better than anyone, but he was trying to get away with something less than murder. |
 |
"Fuck you!" he screamed again. Paste. Check.
The argument was brewing to a category 7 and the headline came to me in that instant.
"King Has Meltdown At Weigh-In."
"It’s on you," Fried repeatedly said.
"It's on you, Don. Don't think we won't fight this, because we
will."
The quieter Fried became, the more out of control King got. It was very embarrassing to witness in a bizarre car wreck kind of way.
King is notorious for making his own rules. He's notorious for his unique, creatively funny dialogue. But he
wasn't being very funny or very creative in this moment. He
couldn't believe he'd encountered a guy who not only was not intimidated, but also clearly enjoyed the idea of a really good fight.
Stealing one more look over my shoulder, I was shocked to see King, taller by a foot or more, nose to nose with Fried, screeching at him. The tension was unbearable.
Would I need a new headline: Lawyer Dies In Media
Room'
Turning back to my laptop, I recorded that King was so out of control he was spitting. Fried looked like
he'd been caught in a rainstorm.
"Fuck you, fuck your fighter and every fucking person you ever met! You
don't know who you're dealing with!" King hollered.
"I'm the fucking promoter and if I wanna pay fucking less, I will pay fucking less and no little pasty-assed fucking attorney from Brooklyn -- fucking, fucking Brooklyn -- is going to tell me how to fucking run my goddamn fucking
show!"
"Don, the room," Siddon quietly said, apparently aware now that Graham and I were present.
Oh joy. Would the new headline be Writer Dies At
Weigh-In' I immediately stopped typing, examined my notebook, pretending to be focused on that.
Had I been one of the boxing writer heavyweights, say Mike Katz, Tim Dahlberg
or Tim Smith, I'd be toast. If I were the Internet's wackiest scribe, Pedro Fernandez,
I'd be rolling up my sleeves to join the melee.
King went mad at the attempted intervention.
"Fuck the room!"
"Fuck the room!" I typed.
"It's on you, Don," Fried said. I could have predicted that.
King let loose a roar that would have made a lion proud. Fried quickly left the room – I watched him leave from the reflection in my
laptop's screen.
Siddon and the others ushered King out of the room. He was still enraged, still insistent that Fried needed to do some uncomfortable (and unlikely) things to himself. I hit the send button, feeling beatific and proud.
Thank God I work for a British web site and I'm always the last to leave the room.
"Goodbye!" said the happy, cheery, man-voice on my AOL account.
"I cannot believe you missed all of
that," Graham said, flinging his paper onto the table.
"What do you mean'" I asked.
"That whole confrontation! You were so busy typing, you missed the whole thing.”
"Get real," I said. "If I know my guys,
it's already up on the Internet."
Graham's jaw dropped "You had me
fooled," he said. "Well done. You got the scoop of the
decade."
We packed our things, debated the merits of various casino buffets and, as I passed the heavyweight boxing writers playing at the craps tables (boxing
people only ever play craps because it has the fairest odds), I smiled smugly at them.
I could afford to feel giddy with joy. I had a scoop.
They'd all have egg on their faces when their various editors learned
they'd missed the real main event.
In the distance, I saw King posing for pictures, enveloping a pair of fans in a
gauzy haze of cigar smoke. Despite the fact they couldn't breathe, they were touching fame. He was touching his flags. He was smiling.
"Only In America."
The next day, all hell broke loose with my story. Journalists confronted me all
day about my story's validity, only to discover with dismay that all of it was true.
At the first bell that night, Bruce Siddon approached my ringside table and
asked me to come with him.
"If I never see you again," I joked to my pals,
"It's been nice knowing you."
Siddon walked me for about a mile to a quiet corner away from the ring.
"I don't know where you got your information, but your story is factually
incorrect," he said. "Never
happened."
"Really'" I said. "Well, that's interesting, because I was there and heard the
whole thing myself. Matter of fact, I have it all on tape." I whipped out my little tape recorder.
"Wanna hear it'"
"Oh," said Siddon, pushing on his eyeglasses.
"Oh, I didn't realize. Okay."
He backed away and I was allowed to return to my seat. But I never got a great seat at a Don King fight again.
That's okay though. I'm apparently invisible, which means they will never know if and when I am waiting for the next tirade. Cut and paste. Cut and paste.
And when there's a nuclear war, Jeff Fried, I'm going with you. |
|
|
