Four years ago, Don King was inmate No. 6178 at the Marion (Ohio) Correctional Institution. He spent his days in the prison work gang hauling hog manure as he served a one-to-20-year manslaughter sentence for having killed a numbers racketeer who had doublecrossed him. Released in September 1971 after four years in jail, he now rides to work in a chauffeured 21-ft. Cadillac limousine. For that work he rents a choice office suite: the $85,000-a-year, eight-room penthouse atop the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. That eyrie high above Manhattan is symbolic of King's position as the most audacious and suddenly the most powerful promoter in sport—and one of the most successful black businessmen in America.
His business is boxing. In less than two years, King has put together four heavyweight championship bouts, including the $10 million George Foreman v. Muhammad Ali extravaganza in Zaïre last fall. Next Monday he will add a fifth when Ali fights European Champion Joe Bugner in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the climax of a closed-circuit tripleheader that will also include light-heavyweight and middleweight title fights in New York City. In the fall King hopes to cap his promotions with a $12 million Ali-Joe Frazier rematch, probably in the Philippines. That would bring the total take of King ring deals to more than $30 million. "He's done impossible things," says Ali. Adds King in his booming baritone: "Right now my success is phenomenal."
King, 43, is also a phenomenon. An almost larger than life figure at 6 ft. 2 in., with a barrel chest and an Afro that leaps from his temples as if galvanized, he works at a pace that would exhaust most men. His 18-hour days and hundreds of phone calls a week have helped him outflank such established matchmakers as Madison Square Garden and Top Rank, Inc., a longtime promoter and closed-circuit telecaster of Ali fights. Of course he has not been hurt by the cooperation of Ali and his manager, Black Muslim Executive Herbert Muhammad, who are happy to break old traditions and deal with a black promoter.
Jet Lag. King's greatest asset is a flair for thinking—and acting—big. With Ali demanding prize money beyond the means of individuals or even corporations, King has made his deals with governments. Shrewd enough to realize that championship bouts featuring Ali are the kind of promotion that developing nations like to stage, King has courted heads of state in Cairo, Tehran, Lusaka (Zambia), Manila and Kuala Lumpur. "The jet lag is so bad," he says, "I eat breakfast 24 hours a day."
Wherever he is and whatever he is eating, King comes on like a force of nature. With a mixture of grandiloquent rhetoric ("I cannot be castigated by accusation and invective") and jive ("I like to make deals that give me my money and my honey at the same time"), King loves to hold forth on anything from capitalism to existentialism. Over his desk he keeps an incongruous pair of portraits: an original of Ali by LeRoy Neiman and a print of Rembrandt's Aristotle contemplating the Bust of Homer.