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Joe Mesi can't start training for his next fight, tentatively scheduled for July at the Niagara Falls Convention and Civic Center against Donovan "Razor" Ruddock, quite yet.
The unbeaten Tonawanda heavyweight just had stitches removed from a cut under his right eye induced by a Jorge Luis Gonzalez head butt (the only damaging blow landed by the passive giant before suffering a fourth-round technical knockout on April 27). Mesi is also resting the cracked right thumb he suffered while sparring for his Niagara Falls debut.
While he waits to start running and sparring again, Mesi might want to pick up a copy of Jack Newfield's brilliant cautionary tale Only In America: The Life and Crimes of Don King.
Newfield's account of King's rise from Cleveland numbers runner to the most powerful man in boxing was published in 1995, but hasn't lost a bit of relevance. And while Mesi's climb through the heavyweight ranks has been carefully orchestrated to avoid long-term commitments to King or any other major promoter, the deepest, most dangerous waters are still ahead.
Last week, King signed new heavyweight champion Hasim Rahman to a promotional deal, effectively seizing control of the division. Again. According to a column by former New York Daily News boxing writer Michael Katz published on Houseofboxing.com, King sealed the deal by presenting Rahman, who holds the World Boxing Council and International Boxing Federation belts, with a duffel bag filled with 5,000 $100 bills. Flashing cash is an old trick of King's, well documented in Newfield's book.
"King always operated on the premise that any fighter would be more impressed with $10,000 in cash than with a bank check for $1 million," Newfield wrote. King used his bag of money to sign up-and-coming fighters and established champions alike away from rival promoters. He even persuaded Muhammad Ali to drop a $1.1 million lawsuit by sending an intermediary to offer the sickly former champion $50,000 in 1982. Ali, who was owed the money for absorbing a horrifying beating by Larry Holmes two years earlier but already in failing health, accepted.
Until stealing Rahman away from his former promoter, Cedrick Kushner, King's hold on the heavyweights had weakened. Mike Tyson walked away from, then sued, King several years ago. King replaced Tyson with the man who beat him, Evander Holyfield. The Real Deal is shot, though, and lost his share of the title (the World Boxing Association belt) to the extremely ordinary John Ruiz.
Once upon a time -- and for most of the sport's history -- there was just one heavyweight champion. Thanks to King, there have been up to three titlists at a time for more than 20 years. In 1978, Leon Spinks upset Ali, the undisputed champion. King persuaded the WBC to strip Spinks of his belt for the crime of giving one of history's greatest fighters an immediate rematch. Holmes won the vacant title a few months later, while Ali beat Spinks for the WBA version and briefly retired. O
ver the next decade, a parade of non-entities like Big John Tate, Gerrie Coetzee, Tony Tubbs and Trevor Berbick won pieces of the title. And almost immediately lost them. The few truly talented heavyweights to grab a belt, like Greg Page and Tim Witherspoon, realized King was taking far more than his share of their paycheck (Witherspoon got just $90,094 of a $900,000 purse for beating Frank Bruno in 1986). They stopped training and quickly lost their titles.
Tyson unified the crown in 1988. So King engineered what Newfield called "a hostile takeover" of the new champion, luring him away from the management team that took him to the top with cash, cars and suggestions of racism.
After Buster Douglas upset Tyson, King first tried to get Douglas's knockout overturned, then seized promotional control of the new champion. A fat, demoralized Douglas lost to Holyfield, who wasn't under King's control at the time. Not until last week did King regain promotional power over the three biggest (WBC, WBA and IBF) heavyweight belts.
Shady characters and predatory business practices are part of boxing lore -- champions from Joe Louis to Sonny Liston were owned by promoters and managers with deep Mob ties -- and boxers getting fleeced is as much a part of the game as the left hook. But even in the chaos that is boxing, King stands out like his hairstyle.
Newfield chronicles King's 1966 killing of a smaller, sickly man on a Cleveland street in front of a crowd of witnesses. The judge, for whom King later campaigned, cut his conviction from murder to manslaughter. King (who was exonerated in a 1953 shooting death on grounds of self-defense) was out of prison after three years. Within three more, he was promoting Ali's legendary bout with George Foreman in Zaire.
Then King alienated Ali by trying to turn him against his Muslim managers. Then he ran a televised tournament so rife with fraud, including fighters with heavily padded records, that ABC scrapped it midway through. Then he survived investigations and indictments by the FBI and the IRS. After each acquittal, he flew the forgiving jurors to his next big promotion, all expenses paid. Newfield's book ends with yet another indictment against King, this time on nine counts of wire fraud. In the final scene, boxing writer Thomas Hauser is sharing a beer with Joseph Maffia, King's former business manager and the supplier of most of the incriminating documents involved. For once, it seemed there was no escape.
The celebration proved premature. After the book's publication, King beat the rap.
Somehow, the endless scandals seem to have immunized King. His gravity-defying hair and carefully crafted abuse of the English language have made him something of a cult figure. He's certainly more recognizable than most of the forgettable parade of titleholders he helped create.
A win over Ruddock would boost Mesi tremendously in the rankings of boxing's various alphabet organizations, likely to the brink of the top 10. But he'll have to beat at least one member of that semi-elite group in order to rate serious consideration for a title shot. While there have been times King hasn't controlled the crown, he almost always has most of the contenders under contract. So getting a fight with one of them means dealing with King.
For now, King plans to match Rahman, who stunned Lennox Lewis with a fifth-round knockout last month, with Danish stiff Brian Nielsen on Aug. 4. That fight would share a card with Holyfield-Ruiz III, the rematch no one is waiting for. The two winners would then meet to unify the title. Unless, of course, Tyson or Lewis is willing to sign up with King in the meantime.
As he has for most of the last quarter-century, King has a stranglehold on the heavyweight championship. And anyone, be it Tyson, Lewis or Mesi, who wants a shot at one of them can only get it by going through Don King.