Becoming Holyfield (15 page)

Don King is a hard guy to figure. There are so many layers, so many different personalities he can adopt at a moment's notice depending on the situation at hand, that there's no easy way to tell who the real Don King is.

He's definitely one of the shrewdest businessmen I've ever dealt with, and one of the toughest. He's happy to negotiate all day long but if you try to call what you think is a bluff, the odds are pretty high it wasn't a bluff at all. He's walked away from some pretty big deals when they didn't go his way. Part of the reason he's willing to let a deal go is that he's intensely competitive, to the point where winning is as important as landing the best deal. That makes it difficult for him to back down from a position once he's dug his heels in, even if it's the right thing to do from a business standpoint. While it's generally a good negotiating tactic never to back your adversary into a corner he can't gracefully get out of, with Don it's absolutely critical.

Main Events was very good at doing deals, but they were by the book, using fairly standard contracts and terms. Don King never did anything by the book and was enormously creative. He had a great vocabulary but if the right word wasn't at hand, he'd make one up, and if you couldn't understand it, he was ready with a definition so convincing you'd swear it came right out of a dictionary.

I understand Don King because we grew up in similar circumstances and learned a lot of the same lessons about getting things done. Don's motto is “Fake it till you make it.” To be successful, act like you already are. Don always shot very high, so even when he had to scale back his expectations, he still ended up with more than anybody else would have. He inspired others to do the same, too, making people more willing to shoot for the moon. To do it he'd put on a great show: “This will be the greatest fight in history!” or “You've made me madder than anybody ever has!” People knew he was showboating but there was still the feeling that at least some of it had to be true. And he did the same with his fighters, playing up how much one hated the other, to throw some anger and malice and excitement into the battle.

But I never played that game, for two reasons. The first is that I never hated any of my opponents, any more than two chess players had to hate each other in order to have a good match. The second is that there's no going back from a public stance like that. If I glare at an upcoming opponent and bad-mouth him, how do I then turn around and say he's really a nice guy and we're actually friends? How do I pretend to be stupid and then expect people to react to me any other way? So I tried not to get into that game, and King thought I was hurting myself because of it. “You can't draw flies to a picnic!” he told me over and over. It's not enough to be a good fighter, he warned. You have to be an attraction, a personality, somebody who somebody else wants to kill and you want to do the same to him. He loved fighters who hollered and pounded their chests and carried on for the cameras. Mike Tyson was especially good at that, and King always pointed to Mike when he was trying to get me to do the same kinds of things, like intimidating opponents weeks before the fight even started.

That kind of thing could ruin a fighter's reputation, making him a clown or a fool in the eyes of the public, but for Don, it was money in the pocket. Nobody wanted to see two nameless men fight each other. One of the things that makes sporting events so much fun is rooting for one side. There aren't that many fans, of any sport, who are so into the science and technique that they don't care who wins. Millions of people who watched Muhammad Ali fight didn't know a left hook from a right jab but they sure knew who Ali was, and it wasn't just that he was a great fighter. He was a personality, a rare combination of talent, attitude and show business, the kind of champion who created new fight fans and put fortunes into the pockets of his promoters.

I wasn't like Tyson or Ali, so Don didn't think much of me early on. But the public did, and I won fights, so he had to deal with me but wanted to do so on his own terms. I wasn't buying it. He even went so far as to call me an “Uncle Tom” on national television, in an effort to light me up and get some cheap publicity. I knew what he was doing and I didn't rise to the bait. It wasn't me, wasn't my way, and I was having none of it. When the media reacted as he knew they would, and confronted me about it, I told them I didn't believe King meant what he said. He was probably insulted that I didn't take it more personally but, as far as I was concerned, it was strictly business.

Besides, getting into it with King on a personal level is a bad strategy because there's no backing away from it. He'll look you in the eye and tell you how badly he wants it to work, that he wants everyone to get a fair deal, and on and on. If you give in he'll keep taking and taking, but if you resist he'll make you out to be the bad guy, the stumbling block who blocked the deal while he was the one who'd do almost anything to make it happen.

None of that made him a crook. No matter what he pulled, it was always my choice how to respond, or whether to respond at all. He never out-and-out tricked me or lied about factual matters, so as far as I'm concerned, the best way to negotiate with Don King is to keep your ego out of it and stick to the numbers.

You can imagine how it galled Don when the guy who couldn't draw flies to a picnic became undisputed heavyweight champion of the world and started earning the biggest paydays in history for himself and his promoter, Main Events. He switched gears and now started saying I couldn't fight anyone who wasn't “over forty-two or had drug problems.”

On April 19, 1991, I did fight someone over forty-two. It was George Foreman, in Atlantic City. That “over the hill” former world champion had knocked out twenty-three of his last twenty-four opponents and was the hardest puncher I'd ever faced. It was the first time since fighting Muhammad Qawi five years before that I didn't win by knockout, but I did win. It was a great fight, a great night, and my twenty-fifth straight victory since turning pro, but when all the celebrations were over, I stepped back through the looking glass to deal with Don King and Mike Tyson.

One thing you can rely on about Don: He's a businessman to the core. Here he was knee deep in this lawsuit against us but did that stop him from trying to set up a fight between Mike and me? Of course not. Business is business. And if that was good enough for Don, it was good enough for me. I had no problem negotiating the deal. Besides, my lawyers told me that it was likely the suit would be dropped if we came to terms on the fight.

As it turned out, there would be more money if I fought Foreman again instead of Mike, because Don would demand too much for his side. But after banking the proceeds from the Foreman fight, the difference didn't seem very important. I wanted to meet Mike in the ring, so I told my guys to strike the best deal they could and get it set up.

Over the next few weeks there was a tidal wave of posturing, grandstanding, bluffing and threatening. Don tried to stall things so we would begin to panic as the best pay-per-view dates started to disappear. He also knew that the drop-dead date for a Foreman rematch was approaching, and tried to use that as leverage. People were flying around on airplanes, pulling each other into private meetings in hotel rooms, playing one side against the other, making promises left and right and using some amazingly creative accounting to try to justify various splits in revenue.

Don had pulled out all the stops trying to intimidate me in the court of public opinion, too. Nobody did that kind of thing better, and this was when he called me an “Uncle Tom.” After my second-round knockout of Adilson Rodrigues in Las Vegas, back when King was doing everything he could to prevent me from fighting Mike, ABC had Ken and me linked up by satellite to Don and Tyson. (This was the year before the Douglas fight so Ken was still with me.) There was all kinds of the usual nonsensical baloney that nobody really buys, and then all of a sudden Don pulled something new out of his bag. He said that everybody thought I was such a nice guy but that I was really just an Uncle Tom. He said I'd always had white people helping me and working for me, and what kind of a proud black man does that? With Tyson snickering “Yeah, yeah” into the camera, Don asked how come I wasn't like other black fighters who had black managers and promoters?

I knew exactly what he was doing, and it had nothing to do with racial politics. He just wanted me in his own stable and thought that he could humiliate me into leaving Ken by making it look like I was a traitor to the race, and the only way to redeem myself would be to join up with a black man, namely Don King. It wasn't the only time he pulled something like that on me. He once referred to a decision I'd made as “bearing the wounds and scars of slavery.” I didn't fall for any of it. I didn't even get angry, or let him draw me into trying to defend myself. He was right about one thing: White people had helped me all my life, starting with Carter Morgan and the businessmen who supported the Boys Club. I decide what people to deal with based on their skills and integrity, with never a thought to color or ethnicity or what God they believe in or if they believe at all. I've had a white coach, black trainers, Muslim promoters, a Jewish manager and a Mormon real estate consultant, and I wasn't going to let Don King use racial politics as an excuse to not let me fight Tyson.

Ken wasn't quite as cool about it, though. You could practically see steam shooting out of his ears as Don lit into me, and while I patiently waited for the tirade to pass, Ken jumped in and said, “Fine! Winner take all!” It was the only time I'd ever seen Don King speechless, before or since. He finally managed to go “Huh?” and Ken said it again. “You heard me! Tyson versus Holyfield, winner take all!”

I was speechless, too. After the show I grabbed Ken and said, “Why'd you do that!” He shrugged and replied, “Well, you can beat him, can't you?” I said something like, “Uh—um—yeah, sure, I can beat him,” but I wasn't prepared to bet $15 million or $20 million on a winner-take-all arrangement.

Ken let me fidget for a few seconds, then he laughed and threw his arm across my shoulders. “Don't worry about it,” he assured me. “There's no way Don King takes a chance like that. He'd work things so the loser still makes a ton of money, believe me.”

Eventually, cooler business heads won out, and an agreement was crafted for Holyfield versus Tyson to take place November 23, 1991. The payouts would be the biggest ever: $30 million for me, $15 million for Mike, with the two of us splitting the gate profits sixty-forty. Sportswriters all over the country had declared that whoever won this fight would be crowned heavyweight of the decade. Everybody was happy, there was a lot of handshaking and backslapping all around, and things were looking rosy again.

Three days later George Foreman's people filed suit against all of us to stop the fight. They claimed that Lou Duva had made an oral agreement for me to fight George and then we breached it by signing the deal to fight Mike.

The suit was filed in Houston, where I lived while training, so everybody scrambled to fly down there and figure out what to do about it. We had to hire local lawyers to represent us, and the judge in the case put us on a “fast track” to get it resolved. We all agreed to half a day of mediation as well, to see if we could resolve things on our own and avoid a drawn-out legal battle that was in nobody's best interest. The half day wasn't enough, so with the judge's permission everybody agreed to keep trying. After a few days—and nights—of hard work and good faith all around, we worked it out and got it settled.

That was the last barrier. There was nobody left to come after us and get in the way. We had the contracts in place, the releases signed, approvals from all three governing organizations, and the venue all set up. In the immortal words of the builder of the
Titanic
—what could possibly go wrong?

As it turns out, plenty. On September 9, 1991, Mike was indicted on a charge of rape, and that changed everything.

Only two people know exactly what happened in Mike's hotel room in Indianapolis on July 18, but the rest of the facts were not in dispute. Mike had met a Miss Black America contestant at a pageant rehearsal and they'd gone out afterward, stopping at Mike's hotel late at night and going up to his room. Three days later she filed a complaint with the police alleging that Mike had raped her, and two weeks later a special grand jury handed down an indictment. A trial was scheduled for the following February.

Our fight was set for November. There was a lot of talk about whether it should go on, but all the lawyers were united on one point: An accusation is not a conviction, and Mike was innocent until proven guilty. He insisted that he'd done nothing wrong, and whether he had or not was up to a jury and nobody else. Bottom line, no matter what anybody's personal feelings might be about what had happened, we had a signed contract, and not to follow through would leave a lot of people open to lawsuits for breach of contract. So the fight was on.

Or so we thought. A few weeks later—I remember the date because it was my birthday, October 19—we got a message that Mike had injured his ribs while training and the bout would have to be postponed. For how long? Nobody knew. He wouldn't be able to train while he was healing. How much time would he need to get himself back into shape? That would depend on how long a layoff he'd had, which nobody could predict. So there was no way to begin doing any rescheduling yet. Because of lead times for things like promotion and arranging for facilities and television coverage, even under the best of circumstances the fight couldn't take place before March or April.