WHERE ARE YOU, DON KING?
There's a big fight coming up, and something is missing.
August 19, 1995. MGM Grand Arena, Las Vegas, NV. It was Mike Tyson’s comeback fight, against Peter McNeely. Promoted by Don King. At a time where Don King essentially was boxing, in the way that Rockefeller was oil or Bill Gates was word processors, or PT Barnum with circuses.
It was a big event, to say the least. I went to the house of my best friend’s brother to watch, with probably a dozen people. If there were any other fights on the card that night, I do not remember them. We were there to see one fight, or really, one man. One man who decided that Don King was going to his man, his promoter, despite the rest of the world deciding that King, who wrested the promotional rights to Tyson’s fights in 1988, had led Tyson down the path of bad intentions.
Did the fight deliver? Well, not as a boxing match, obviously. It was entertaining for sure, even if it lasted for about 90 seconds before McNeeley’s corner threw in the towel. But that is not what I remember.
The introductions were complete, the celebrities introduced (including real estate developer Donald Trump and his then wife Marla Maples), Mills Lane gave his customary “Let’s Get it On!”, the fighters went to their corners … and it happened. At that moment, I had a moment where my entire body tensed, and only one thought was in my mind:
What in the name of hell was going to happen?
I mean, this was years before biting Evander Holyfield’s ear, face tattoos, conversations on Zoloft, brawls with Lennox Lewis at the podium and cursing out every reporter in the building. But even at this moment, I had no idea what might happen. Tyson might go insane, McNeeley might go insane, the fight might end in ten seconds, it might go the distance, the entire arena may devolve into a riot.
That was all Don King wanted. He was promoting nothing else but that feeling. That feeling that you had no idea what was going to happen. There was not that much else to promote: this was not the Rumble in the Jungle, where Don King made mud initial mark in the business, which had George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. This was not even Tyson-Douglas, the first crack in Din’s veneer. But Don King had it here; promoting the unknown, the unexpected, the insane. It would the mark the rest of Don King’s tenure as Tyson’s promoter. Nobody ever did it better, before or since.
It could be said that was the peak of Don King’s career. By the end of the decade. He would be sued by Tyson. Once he no longer could promote Tyson, he seemed to fad from the spotlight. Fighters such as Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather would become promoters for themselves and for other boxers. Jake Paul’s promotion company is handling his fight with Tyson. The heavyweight title would be owned by the Klitscho brothers, and it seemed like all of its major bouts would be held in Europe. By the end of the 2010s, UFC was the sport of the people. Wrestlemania was selling out football stadiums. The only fights that seemed to matter involved celebrities, or people deemed to be celebrities. And Dong King was not at the table anymore.
Twenty nine years after his comeback against McNeely, Mike Tyson is fighting again. It is one of the most talked about fights in a long time, which shows you the place of boxing in the sphere of sports. It is unknown if Donald Trump will be at the fight, but he would not be out of place. Don King would not be out of place either, but he will probably not be there.
If you had asked me at the end of the Tyson-Spinjs fight in 1988, or even the Tyson-McNeeley fight, who would have had a better chance of being the president of the United States, Donald Trump or Don King, I may very well have said Don King. Heck, by 1995, Trump’s star had fallen. This fight was in Vegas, not Atlantic City, where most of Tyson’s fights in his first reign as champion took place. And here was Don King, with the biggest act in professional sports, putting me at the edge of my seat, wondering what was going to happen next.
Now, I have that feeling again. With Mike Tyson, with Donald Trump, with America. It is not a feeling of expectation, as it was that night, when a man earned his money by making my hairs stand on end. It is more a feeling of dread, which Don King tried to avoid his entire life. That was not his American Dream, for sure.
Donald Trump is the President-Elect of the United States. Mike Tyson is fighting again. I do not know where Don King is. He recently battled a serious illness. He is 93 years old. He is an American success story, but it seems on the wayside now, pushed aside for a different American Dream, which began on an escalator ride at Trump Tower, and now includes celebrity fights.
Only in America.