Without Don Kings influence, would Tyson have been greater?

I would say that king definitely encouraged everything that was weak in Tyson, in order to get him into his stable.

He would say things like:

"Why is that conditioning coach ordering you around, you are the champion of the world, he should be doing what you tell him."

The irony is that in order to gain control of the prize cash cow, he ultimately destroyed him!

 

There was a black supremacist book, which was highly racist in nature, and King kept multiple copies at his house to give to black fighters.

 

Yes.

 

Maybe you're the biggest Don King asslicker.But i think Don King destroyed several fighters' carrier (including Tyson's).

 

King didn't destroy Tyson's career. He promoted Tyson's greatest wins!

King promoted all Tyson's title fights except the Lewis fight.

The only Tyson fights King didn't promote were against the nobodies at the start and the embarrassing fights at the end - like Nielsen, Norris, Williams, McBride, Lewis, etc. But nobody seems to be bashing the promoters of those.

The history-making wins were all with King.

Tyson won titles without Cus, without Jacobs, without Cayton, without Rooney and without Lott.

But he didn't win any without King.

Genius.

 

Yeah so what that King got the big fights? He had all the power, influence, connections.
And massive corruption some judges in his pocket, infamous decisions any boxing fan should know about...

He even literally took a jury that acquitted him to a carribean vacation.
He did destroy careers. He ripped off even the most celebrated boxing legends & used them like toilet paper until they were no longer useful then discarded them.
Ali was ripped off big time by King, fuhgettibout Tyson.
He warned Holmes about how he would be left when King got through with him.

King is a sociopath-at best. He would murder or destroy anyone if it benefited him.
The gaslighting & manipulation was endless.

 

As Howard Cosell said, "What's right isn't always popular, and what's popular isn't always right."

 

Nobody gave it to him. (LOL)

Nobody said, 'Here, you can have all the power, influence and connections. We don't want it." Just like King never happily handed it off to the next guys.

None of the top boxing promoters in history have EVER been saints. Neither are the current ones. Don't kid yourself.

Don King made 100 boxers millionaires. There are Fortune 500 companies that don't make 100 employees millionaires. Bill Cayton never made 100 boxers millionaires. Did he get sued? Yes. They all get sued. Could he be threatening, yes. They could all be threatening in their own ways. It's a tough business with tough people. You don't get to the top being soft. King was the top promoter of his time. Mike Tyson wouldn't have been nearly as great without King. Tyson wouldn't have had the fights. The unification tournaments. The multi-million-dollar casino deals. No one else offered him those things. There were other networks. Other casinos. Other promoters. Where were they? Why didn't they step in and outbid and outwork King?

If there was no HBO tournament or if Don King, who had all the heavyweight champs, wanted them to fight guys other than Tyson and Tyson went the WBO route and fought guys like Damiani for the WBO belt - and fell in with the Italian Mob (see the story about a possible Snipes-Damiani title fight by Sammy 'the Bull' Gravano) ... or if Tyson had to wait and was just another top contender when Bowe, Lewis, Mercer, etc. came around in the early 90s, whose to say Tyson ever even wins a title.

 

It's true. You can "ew" all you like.

 

Don King intuitively grasped the old saying from Vladimir Lenin about the Russian Revolution: “Power was just lying in the street waiting for someone to pick it up.”

He picked up the power in boxing. Others failed to do so.

Boxing isn’t for sissies. He had a mean and nasty side, and if he didn’t then someone meaner and nastier would have taken that power from him.

 

Where did I indicate other promoters were saints? Who cares if many others were more or less vicious or corrupt?
In some corrupt fields there are a few who are not or much less so-but regardless if some or most are doing something malicious or evil-whether violence, discrimination or robbing people: it is terrible, deeply immoral & criminal.

Maybe you are right that Tyson would not have gotten as far without King.
However given his marketability, style & talent I am not at all convinced that if there was no King others would not have been able to amass much more power & influence & successfully give him what he deserved due to hiw capacity & accomplishments-progressively more difficult & frequent fights until he could challenge for the HW title & unify it.

And maybe get him huge deals without exploiting & stealing from him, lol!
Let alone the racial demagoguery & gaslighting & puffing up his ego & encouraging him to not listen to well intentioned trainers & lose his discipline...

There is a bit you can find on youtube where David Letterman is describing the HW title fight in Jamaica.
King arrives with his man Joe Frazier. Sidles ever closer to Foreman as he begins his destruction of Foreman.
At the end he is in the ring with Foreman hogging the spotlight.
Letterman called in "weasel behavior". That is putting it mildly compared to the crimes & sins of this 2 time murderer.
I do not believe it was ever self-defense. But fighters who actually did all the work had to defend themselves against King.

Don't minimize his crimes because he often was able to get or steal the lion's share of the resources.
He repeatedly brought a bag of money to fighters so they-often growing up poor-were impressed & accepted it at a small fracton of what they could & should have gotten & like Ali might have then forfeited their right to sue.

If Don King could murder your whole family without consequences because it profited him he would.
The man is a Stone Cold Psychopath.