Was Don King good for boxing?

In some respects he did enable the big fights to happen.A more pertinent question might be was he good for boxers ? To which I would answer no.

 

that's my view as well: a parasitic ****roach

most of the elite fighters who he promoted have sued him for massive sums of money: Lennox Lewis, Tyson, Ali, Holmes, Witherspoon--nearly all of these were settled out of court by King writing large checks to the boxers in exchange for withdrawing the lawsuit

but the question you posed is a more difficult one, particularly because--well, sure King is complete slime, but that doesn't prove he didn't advance the sport; for instance, King continues to argue to this day that he was a magnificent influence on the sport and it's difficult to rebut that.

I think the answer mcvev gave is actually the best answer: Don King was bad for boxing because he was bad for boxers

Don King's influence on the sport of boxing can't be positive because of his treatment of boxers was so uniformly negative--he took money out of their pockets in ever nasty way imagineable

look what he did to Tim Witherspoon for instance, whose take-home from fights promoted by King averaged about $50,000 (that's what King paid TW based on TW's total purse usually exceeding $1M!)

under those circumstance, Witherspoon was unable to earn a living from boxing; he took King to court and as usual Don King had more money and knew how to play the game, so Witherspoon settled out of court for $1M; that result took several years to get and during that time Witherspoon's career was mostly dormant.

 

He put on some great cards when Tyson, his meal ticket. was behind bars.

But, overall - no, he was not good for boxing.

He is a scumbag sociopath.

 

I think he was.. yes.. Arum was when it came to the fab 4 Hearns, Hagler, Leonard and Duran, but with other guys he was mediocre

 

Yes, he was good for boxing.
He made some massive fights.
He robbed a lot of boxers, finding ways to take more from them than he was entitled to, or giving less than he promised ... but several boxers have pointed out that he was often robbing from a far bigger pot than there would have been without him. For example, other promoters might promise $3 million and you'd get the $3 million. King would promise $6 million and you'd end up with "only" $4 million.

 

Professional boxing was never supposed to be the wellfare state. There are a lot of street characters looking after themselves and Most of them are in the position of providing the opportunities. The guy who breaks into the top usually breaks a monopoly or two, makes a deal with the devil to get there and then sets about recreating another monopoly of his own.

Don king, I don't think, has ever pretended to be anything other than what he is. He was not the first or the last of his ilk. It's not really personal, its business. That's who he is. If he is the one in position to provide the opportunity then a fighter has to make business sense to him. Boxing is not a tournament sport.

So the way I see it a guy who provides no opportunities is bad for boxing. and like him or not, the guy on top who can deliver opportunities is good. Some might call it a necessary evil, or some just see it as "necessary".

So long as everyone has their eyes wide open, sees things for what they are, that it is a business and everybody needs to make a profit, then I really don't see how one promoter or boxing Czar can really be that much different from another.

 

I don't think you can deny he could sell a fight and he did put some decent cards on over the years. But good for boxing? No not for me.

In an already largely corrupt sport HE was the biggest crook in it. How can that make a man good for a sport? He abused boxing and the fighters he promoted.

 

That's true but it also has to be measured with a lot of other factors. I won't defend the indefensible. The nature of the business side of professional boxing allows this sort of thing. Look at the way so called (self governing) governing bodies leach off of every promotion and invent extra titles.


King is who he says he is. A huckster. He invented the word trickeration to describe himself. What you see is what you get. And he worked harder than anyone to promote his own image.

Everyone talks about how Witherspoon received such a small percentage of his purse for the stadium fight with Frank Bruno but nobody ever talks about the 60 or so people he had traveling with him to London. Or the many irresponsible things so called victims of any promoter have also actually done to themselves. I am not saying there has ever been a kind and generous boxing promoter. Not at all. but there are a lot of people in boxing who can't help themselves and those who don't help themselves. And some of them are boxers too.

In an ideal world nobody should be getting exploited but boxing exploits itself and it attracts outlandish characters that are ruthless, shrewd and wild in equal measures.

For all of that many sensible and well represented fighters who can accept all of this still have done well from the sport even with the likes of Don King and the rest of them pulling strokes left right and centre. They might not be in the majority but Boxing is not a team sport where everyone is on a wage and catered for like in professional team sports.

 

he did put on some cracking cards now and again, but the way he treated the fighters was disgraceful. 1 good point cannot outweight the numerous bad points so im saying no, he wasnt good for boxing

 

Thats all true what you say and hard to disagree with, however the purse he got Witherspoon as champ travelling across the pond, was waaaaay lower than it should have been in comparison with Brunos. Even more so after taxes, HIS cut, Carls cut (for doing absolutely nothing. He couldnt even tell Tim how much they were getting when he was asked by him) and the other bull**** like using towels and over-the-top training camp expenses.

 

Yes. Don King was good for boxing.

People harp on the same five or six boxers who claim King screwed them over, but King made more than 100 boxers millionaires.

Fortune 500 companies don't often make more than 100 people who work for them millionaires. Certainly not employees who often don't have more than a high school education.

He staged some of the greatest cards in boxing history. He opened the door to huge purses for fighters by getting leaders of foreign countries to bankroll bouts.

He was among the first to regularly focus on putting together amazing undercard bouts to go along with a great main event. Most great main events in history have pretty nondescript undercards. With King, many of his undercards featured three, four or five fights that would've been main events on other shows.

He visited U.S. troops stationed around the world and brought many of his top fighters with him. He staged cards for troops. I believe, to this day, if you wear your uniform to a Don King boxing show you get in for free and are offered seats in a special section near the ring. (I've witnessed this myself.)

Most of the boxers who complained or filed suits against King did so because they said he'd promise them when they signed deals with him that he could pay them $500,000 for each fight but he ended up saying he could only pay them $250,000 or $300,000 because the demand for their fights wasn't there. And they'd threaten to sue for the extra money, when they were making like $20 grand a fight before that, and went back to making $20 grand a fight when they left him. (And when they left him, most wanted to come back to him because they found nobody else was interested in them.)

There were boxers like Simon Brown, who was a champion and was only making $50,000 for some of his initial title defenses ... and he couldn't wait for his contract with his old promoter to end so he could sign with Don King and make 10 times that. Which he did.

When Gerald McClellan suffered brain damage against Nigel Benn, Don King initially paid for hundreds of thousands of dollars of McClellan's medical expenses out of his own pocket to keep Gerald alive. While King was paying McClellan's bills, people like Emanuel Steward (Gerald's former manager/trainer) was suing to get his cut of Gerald's purse from the fight. McClellan's family ended up with roughly $50,000 of the $250,000 purse Gerald earned for that fight because of vultures who did NOT contribute to McClellan's medical fund but instead tried to get THEIR CUT of a then dying man's purse.

Go back and see how many other promoters paid the medical expenses of boxers out of their own pockets when one of their boxers suffered injuries like McClellan did. When Magomed suffered brain damage against Mike Perez, the promoters asked for the boxing community to contribute money. They didn't step up and take on the burden themselves.

Finally, promoters are not a fighters' manager, or dad or big brother or caregiver. A promoter "promotes" a boxer's fights. That's it.

And there are many boxers who had a great relationship with King. Earnie Shavers was managed by King before King became a promoter. When King became the biggest promoter in the game, he promoted Shavers and paid Earnie well. When Earnie's eyesight became an issue, Shavers worked for Don King's wife. Shavers collected paychecks from the Kings nearly his entire adult life. While Earnie will comment now and then about disagreements he had with King, he also acknowledges all the support he received from King.

 

Sure Don took a liberty there because It was proven Tim was robbed. However, Witherspoon should have made sure he'd been better represented than he was and he should have thought more about what he was signing. I've heard him say he accepted a purse without really knowing how big that fight was going to be. Wembley Stadium? Why wasn't he asking what Frank was getting? I remember seeing his entourage walking all over London all dressed in the same expensive track suits. I am sorry but every professional sportsman knows they are only going to be active a certain number of years and unless they are entirely deluded to think they will mature like fine wine and progress indefinitely they need to know and ask what is going on. It's not like these guys are shy.

 

Don was the manager in everything but name of Holmes ,Witherspooon, Bey,Page Tyson and many more.Sticking his puppet son up there fooled nobody.King visited Ali in hospital and offered his a suitcase filled with cash if he would drop his claims for a lot more ,and he did .He robbed Witherspoon and lots of others. The US Tournament is just one of his shameful scams.He started doing a charity gig for a hospital after the show they received only a fraction of the net proceeds.

 

First, Don King's son never managed Larry Holmes or Mike Tyson.

Second, there was a law in the U.S. at the time that a promoter couldn't be a manager of record. Throughout England and the rest of the world, it was legal. In the U.S., it wasn't.

That said, by the time 2000 rolled around, boxers like Oscar De La Hoya and Bernard Hopkins not only served as the promoter of many of their fights (thru Golden Boy, which they own), and served as their own managers, they also paid the fighters they fought against, paid the officials (referees and judges) who staged the fights, and they owned RING magazine, which provided the ratings.

Can you imagine if Don King decided to become a boxer himself back in the day, and he promoted the fights, paid the officials, paid his opponents and OWNED the magazine that provided the ratings??? (LOL)

People would've been demanding King go to jail for such corrupt practices.

But what was cosidered "corrupt" in King's day is considered standard operating procedure today and nobody blinks an eye.

Yet people today still harp on the US boxing tournament, which only lasted a couple months and didn't impact the title picture at all.

Not like later when actual world champs were promoting their own fights, paying officials scoring the bouts they were competing in, paying their opponents they faced and employing the people who produce ratings.

No conflict of interest there?

Third, Muhammad Ali took what he thought were PEDs to cut weight and maintain his strength in his fight with Holmes. And he had an adverse reaction, like many young football players do who take the same types of pills today and die on the practice field. If the Nevada commission actually performed Drug testing for the Ali-Holmes fight, which they didn't, Ali wouldn't have received ANY of his purse.

Hell, if the commission had actually performed any basic medical exams on Ali before that fight, he wouldn't have fought at all.

On top of that, when Audley Harrison fought David Haye for the WBA belt and threw three punches, people demanded he not receive his purse - based on "non peformance' - and the British Boxing Board of Control met to determine what his fine would be.

Muhammad Ali received $7 million ... about a million dollars for every punch he landed in that bout. If he had been anyone else on the planet, the Nevada commission would've met to determine if he should be fined or his purse withheld for that performance. But they didn't. If they tested him for PEDs, he'd have failed, too.

Fourth, King never visited Ali in the hospital and asked him to sign anything.

Don King asked one member of Ali's camp - Jeremiah Shabazz - to take a suitcase of money to Ali (who wasn't in the hospital) in exchange for Ali's signature that he wouldn't request the final $1 million. Shabazz was one of the most dangerous members of Ali's entourage. Shabazz led the Philadelphia mosque where the muscle of the Nation of Islam (known as the Black Mafia) was based. Ali and Shabazz were friends. (As Alex Wallau once said, if you judged Ali by the people he had around him, you'd think Ali was real scum.) Ali didn't have to take it, but the people around him told him to, so he did.

Frankly, Shabazz could've taken Don King's money and never given it to Ali, and King couldn't have done a damn thing about it. When Ali fought Berbick, and King showed up because he wanted a cut of the fight because he was Ali's promoter of record, the Muslims promoting the fight had some of Shabazz's guys beat up Don King and put him back on a plane to the U.S.

In other words, if the commission had done it's job, Ali wouldn't have gotten paid anything. And if the people around Ali had told him not to sign, Ali could've kept the suitcase money and gotten paid his full amount.

I never understood why people blamed King for anything that went on with Ali-Holmes. King promoted the fight. That's it. The commission passed Ali medically (when he was clearly unfit), they never performed drug testing, Ali's camp accepted the fight, Dundee totally failed as a trainer in that match ... in every way ... and still he was standing in line to collect his money along with Ali's manager and the rest of the hangers on. Larry Holmes accepted the fight and was the one punching Ali in the head.

Ali agreed to change the terms of their deal and accept cash (did he pay taxes on that?). So nobody should be mad at King for anything around that bout.

I never saw King at fault in any of that.