KING, Don(ald)

(b. 20 August 1931 in Cleveland, Ohio), wild, wily sports impresario of unprecedented charisma who came to prominence in the 1970s, and for more than two decades was the unchallenged ruler of professional boxing.

King was the son of Clarence and Hattie King. After his father, a steelworker, died in an industrial accident, King lived with his mother and six siblings in a modest middle-class neighborhood where the family sold peanuts and homemade pies to make ends meet. King, who failed physical education at Audubon Junior High School, fared no better at John Adams High School, where he competed at 108 pounds as a flyweight fighter during his volatile academic career. Ironically he attained an imposing stature in adulthood, weighing 240 pounds.

From his earliest profession in the 1950s, as the kingpin of an illegal Cleveland-based numbers racket, King capitalized on an innate sales ability and a flair for persuasion. Within fifteen years he was grossing an estimated $15,000 per day from illicit street operations while working under the cover of a second, legitimate organization as the proprietor of the New Corner Tavern. King, who boasted a lengthy rap sheet, was the trigger man in a 1954 shooting, but escaped a murder indictment on the grounds of justifiable homicide. On a separate occasion he took a bullet in the head and survived.

King's luck ran out in 1966 when he was arrested for aggravated assault. Unlike the 1954 affair, he was convicted this time for manslaughter in the first degree after the victim died. A subsequent stint in Ohio's Marion Correctional Institute led King to a new appreciation of his own civil liberties and, amid rumors that he had paid off witnesses and otherwise obstructed justice, he served what critics have described as an inappropriately brief incarceration totaling three years and eleven months. He later received a full pardon from Governor James Rhodes of Ohio in 1983.

After his release from prison in 1971, King embarked on a lucrative career in the fight promotion game and was associated for a time with Video Technologies, a satellite broadcaster of boxing events. In 1973 he appeared at a heavyweight title match in Kingston, Jamaica, with the contingency for titleholder Joe Frazier. After that fight, in which the challenger George Foreman emerged as the new champion, King neatly switched sides and became Foreman's confidant. King then contracted Foreman to fight the contender Ken Norton before securing rights for Video Technologies to broadcast a title match between Foreman and the former champion Muhammad Ali. King reportedly obtained Foreman's signature for the Ali match on a blank sheet of paper and added the contract specifics after the fact.

The Foreman-Ali fight, billed as the "Rumble in the Jungle," became a springboard for King's career. It was the first of seven title contests involving Ali that his organization, Don King Productions, would promote. King negotiated an historic $11 million payoff for the bout, which was held on 30 October 1974 in Kinshasa, Zaire (later the Democratic Republic of the Congo). He also cofounded the Festival in Zaire (FIZ) corporation to organize several days of prefight festivities, turning the event into a media extravaganza.

In 1975 King organized a spectacular title bout between Ali and Frazier, the "Thrilla in Manila"—one of the most famous fights of all time—for which Ali was paid $6 million. Other fighters who competed in bouts promoted by King during the late twentieth century include Ernie Shavers, Jeff "Candy Slim" Merritt, Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, and Mike Tyson. King also took over management of the heavyweight Larry Holmes after Holmes took the title from Ali.

King married Luvenia Mitchell in 1950; they had one daughter, born in 1955. King also had a son born out of wedlock. After his first marriage ended in divorce, he married Henrietta Renwick, the widow of one of his associates, in 1962 and adopted her young son, John Carl Renwick. While still a prison inmate, King finagled the purchase of a forty-acre farm on 26 March 1971, giving the title to his adopted son, who was fourteen years old at the time. The boy, later known as Carl King, became a boxing manager who reportedly collaborated with his stepfather to keep as much as 50 percent of each prize purse for the fights they handled.

Because of his larger-than-life audacity, King was suspected of numerous irregularities in his professional dealings. As a matter of record, his colleagues filed more than 100 lawsuits against him between 1974 and 1994. Beginning in 1977 the federal government targeted him for income tax transgressions and racketeering. Accusations aside, in 1999 a London court gave King a $12 million judgment against the promoter Frank Warren during a dispute over ending their business partnership.

King was elected to the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1997 and received an honorary doctorate of human letters from North Carolina's Shaw University in 1998. A crafty and flamboyant publicist, King was one of the more colorful and intriguing personalities in modern sports history. Easily recognizable by his trademark outrageous hair, which stood almost straight up, he was known for both his ruthless tactics and his powers of persuasion. When he entered professional boxing in the 1970s the United States was smoldering in the wake of the civil rights movement, and African-American fighters dominated the lucrative heavyweight boxing division following the retirement of the Caucasian heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano in 1956. King capitalized not only on his identity as an African American but also on the unregulated boxing business to wield his clout and increase his influence. By 2001 he had promoted more than 300 fights in a career that spanned over a quarter of a century.

For an informative biography of King, see Jack Newfield, Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King (1995). Essay-length pieces on King appear in Newsmakers (1989), Contemporary Black Biography, vol. 14 (1997), and Jet (17 Nov. 1997).

Gloria Cooksey