THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 25, 1995 TAG: 9510250045
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL ANFT
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
DESPITE OBVIOUSLY knowing better, Jack Newfield loves boxing. The New York Post columnist enjoys the mythology of the champion and the elegance of the old one-two. He even knows the brand name (Enswell) of the chilled iron bar that ringside trainers use to unpuff a pummeled fighter's swollen eyes.
Newfield saves his rancor, though, for the sport's top promoter, Don King. In ``Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King'' (William Morrow, 342 pp., $23), the resourceful Newfield pulls no reportorial punches. He labels King a murderer, a Mob buddy, a thief and a liar, drawing on a landfill of evidence, not weigh-in style hyperbole.
Newfield demonstrates that there's more to the man that nobody doesn't hate than electrified hair, Cuban cigars and convoluted rhetorical flourishes. Calling King ``a street Machiavelli, a ghetto Einstein,'' Newfield is both entranced and disgusted by King's destructive intelligence.
Starting in the early 1950s, ``Donald the Kid,'' Newfield writes, ``was already a force of nature. He possessed the alchemy of a brilliant strategic mind, working-class ambition and anger - and no conscience.'' King had become a numbers banker of note in the destitute East Side of his native Cleveland by the time he was 25. He needed no introduction to violence; he had already shot and killed a ``robber'' who, he reported, was after his receipts.
By 1966, King was a shady figure well-known to cops and judges (some of whom he had bought off), as well as the Mafia and rock 'n' roll legend Lloyd Price, who sang frequently at a King-owned tavern.
The leading numbers man in town - he grossed $15,000 each day - still had time to engage in some mismatched sparring of his own, however. He stomped and punched 134-pound Sam Garrett to death outside a bar. (King then weighed 240.) Garrett's street crime was owing King $500.
Despite bribing or scaring off the state's key witnesses against him, King was found guilty by a jury of second-degree murder. But Judge High Corrigan lessened the felony to involuntary manslaughter after, Newfield alleges, being paid off by organized crime. (In 1976, Muhammad Ali campaigned for Corrigan, endorsing him for what he did to help ``my good friend Don King.'')
Four years after the conviction, King was back on the street in search of a new gambit. Aided by a suspicious ``gift'' of a farm from a connected Cleveland city councilman, King holed up with Lloyd Price and others and admonished them, ``Make me big.''
Price, a longtime friend of Ali, helped steer King to boxing promotion as a ``second career,'' but King was hardly going legit. The fight game's seediness matched his long-held street-smart ethos. To say that boxing fit King like a glove is to do more than indulge in a bad joke.
At King's premiere, a 1972 benefit for a down-at-the heels black hospital in Cleveland, the hatred and disdain for boxers that have defined his career were immediately evident. He cheated them, including Ali, out of contracted money, while the hospital in question received only a few thousand dollars.
By chapter 3 of Newfield's exhaustive narrative, King's modus operandi is well-established: King woos promising young fighters, mostly heavyweights. He rips them off. He dumps them when they lose, often courting their opponents immediately after a KO.
Meanwhile, King's creative accounting methods routinely result (yes, the present tense - despite a recent wire fraud indictment, King is still in the game, managing Mike Tyson) in boxers being charged for expenses instead of being reimbursed. King's stepson, Carl King, frequently receives up to 50 percent of a fighter's take despite performing little work. In Newfield's hands, the evidence mounts as readily as the 100-plus lawsuits filed by boxers against King.
When Newfield isn't beating up on the morally hapless King, he fills his book with the kind of gritty detail that ring aficionados love. There's the trenchant insider commentary on some of the most dissected fights of our times - the Ali-Forman ``Rumble in the Jungle,'' Ali-Frazier II, Tyson-Holmes and Tyson-Douglas, among them.
The author's interviews with articulate pugilists (especially Larry Holmes and Tim Witherspoon) flesh out boxing's time immemorial story: Kids with desire, guts and talent are almost invariably led to ruin by the likes of Don King.
One can't help but feel that the sport Newfield cherishes brings out the worst in everybody. MEMO: Michael Anft is a Baltimore-based writer and critic. by CNB