Was Don King good for boxing?

Tyson got out of prison and on the day he was released resigned with King because King negotiated a deal with the MGM Grand that paid Tyson roughly $30 million a fight. It was an unprecedented deal.

Tyson made more money fighting for Don King than he ever made fighting for Bill Cayton or Jim Jacobs or Shelley Finkel or anyone else.

That's a fact. When Tyson was fighting in the HBO tournament for Jacobs and Cayton, he making like $2 million a fight. King made Tyson filthy rich, and Tyson blew 90 percent of it himself -- buying houses and TIGERS and cr@p.

People can point out incidents where King took $50,000 from Tyson to pay King's daughter to manage his fan club, and King took a bite from Tyson for this or that, and crap like that. And I can't defend it.

But I can understand why King would look at some these idiots he was promoting who had no concept of the value of a dollar (which Tyson and many others didn't)... and why King would look at the situation and say "If they're just going to blow their money, I may as well take some of it, too."

It was wrong, I admit. But he was paying them more than anyone else would. And I'm sure it ate him up the way they just blew it all. (If nothing else, King appreciated the value of a dollar.)

And Carl King was never Tyson's manager.

Also, Ali never had a thyroid condition. Ali took drugs to lose weight for the Holmes fight. Ali admitted repeatedly he was taking them to lose weight. In fact, when he was just supposed to a take a few, he'd take them by the hand fulls because he liked how they were helping him drop weight. (He started early 1980 weighing upwards of 280 pounds ... he was a blob ... and he entered the Holmes fight more than 60 pounds lighter.) He took them to improve his performance, and instead he abused them and they hurt his performance by totally dehydrating him and screwing up his metabolism to the point they said he could've had a stroke.

Glossing over that fact is just being a fanboy. The Nevada Commission didn't do drug testing for that bout, and Ali cheated, and it blew up in Ali's face. If a fighter did that today, he'd not only fail every drug test, he would've had his entire purse held up.

And Don King had nothing to do with Ali trying to cheat or Ali swallowing handfulls of pills or the Commission refusing to test him or for Ali's terrible performance... that was all on Ali, his trainers (including Dundee), and the Nevada Commission.

 

I agree with this.

 

That article says McClellan's "dad" said he "thought" McClellan was supposed to paid this much. The dad wasn't managing McClellan. The sister, who took care of McClellan after he was injured but wasn't involved in his career, said she "thought" his insurance policy was for a million but they "only" received $100,000.

WELL, THE INSURANCE COMPANY PAYS THE MONEY, not King. IF the insurance company paid them $100,000, then the policy was worth $100,000. How the f*ck is it Don King's fault what the insurance company paid?

How is it Don King's fault that Emanuel Steward - even though McClellan was in a coma - still demanded his $119,000 cut? Did McClellan's managers and trainers demand their 30 or 40 percent of their pay, too? The author of the article you so greatly admired didn't mention them as taking a cut of the purse. Why not?

I'm not going to insult McClellan's sisters, because people who have a sick relative and need money do what they can to raise funds.

But that article is just people who are fishing for money. "We heard" he was getting this, but we were only paid this. Families of fallen fighters do that. Magomed Abdusalmov's wife sued the NY Commission for $100 million.

King (and Roy Jones) stepping up and paying many of McClellan's bills and King paying the family's expenses (including flying them over and putting them up and flying McClellan back to the states) ... as well as how upset he was at the hospital and how he stayed with McClellan ... are all well documented by British reporters and Frank Warren who were there.

None of that is mentioned. King didn't have to do any of it. Most promoters don't. Magomed's promoters didn't.

 

Jacobs and Cayton were his managers, they weren't promoting his fights.

 

On this day that we celebrate Ali vs Holmes let us not forget it was another Don King production!

 

He was good and bad. Good because he brought tons of attention to the sport and was the man behind many of its biggest fights. Bad because he shamelessly took advantage of fighters and helped to corrupt the titles to benefit himself.

 

The Mob and shady managers back in the day controlled boxing more than Don King did... It can be argued that boxing was more corrupt back then than Don King era and present.. Look at Aaron Pryor's manager, Buddy La Russa, got Pryor to sign a 50-50 purse split for life. Talk about scum..

 

Don King is the greatest promoter in history, regardless of which field you talk about.

Don King
Vince McMahon
Bob Arum



Everybody else.