Juan Villoro
Donald Trump and Don King have amassed fortunes, exercised leadership based on demagogy, and have turned their hair disorder into a trademark.
It’s no accident that the boxing promoter enthusiastically endorses the Republican politician. According to AP VoteCast, Trump became president thanks to the white vote and the growing support of certain minorities: three out of ten African Americans under 45 voted for him in 2024, almost twice as many as in 2020. Don King contributed to this subtle but significant shift.
I met the iconic promoter on two occasions. On February 20, 1993, the Azteca Stadium was the scene of the most attended fight in history: Greg Haugen vs. Julio César Chávez, in front of 132,247 spectators. I covered the fight for Macrópolis magazine and participated in the after-party in honor of Chávez. With the ostentation of someone who dominates a parallel economy, King presented the super lightweight champion with a roll of dollar bills tied with a rubber band.
A year later, I was teaching at Yale, and King gave a lecture on civil rights. Numerous students came to the auditorium with their hair combed up, alluding to the figure who had turned boxing into a planetary spectacle. King spoke with his usual rhetorical chaos, with no shortage of quotations from Camus or Schopenhauer, but he clearly supported disadvantaged minorities.
These scenes show King’s two faces: the promoter who settles scores behind the scenes and the proselytizer of egalitarian causes.
In his paradoxical career, King came to boxing after killing two people. The first was Hillary Brown, who in 1954 tried to rob the place where he promoted gambling games; the second was Sam Garret, who owed him 600 dollars. Arrested in 1966, he spent four years in prison. He came out of there reconverted and organized a charity event with Muhammad Ali. The boxer was impressed with his charisma and proposed him to be his manager.
King’s ambivalent dealings came to a climax in 1974 with Rumble in the Jungle, the bout between Foreman and Ali in Kinshasa, Zaire, which was promoted as the “return to roots” of two great African-American athletes under the less publicized patronage of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Norman Mailer covered the event in his book The Combat, a classic piece of narrative journalism. There, he describes the theatricality unleashed by King: “The champions were great liars…. Hence, their personalities became masterpieces of concealment.”
The promoter dominated the entertainment society by misleading advertising and using shady charges and payments. In 2018, he reviewed his career in Der Spiegel magazine: “Our main business was lying,” he confessed. “The promoter had to be like St. John the Baptist.” He announced someone superhuman. ”I turned Mike Tyson into the ‘worst man in the world’!”
When German interviewer Malte Müller-Michaelis asked if he saw in Trump faculties like his own, he retorted, “You had a better one: Joseph Goebbels.”
Always contradictory and always mediatic, King was a friend of Nelson Mandela and forged a slogan that anticipated Trump: Only in America. He would arrive at foreign fights with a U.S. flag and another flag representing his occasional love of the host country.
Thanks to Ramón Márquez, a legend of sports journalism, I met José Sulaimán, president of the World Boxing Council. When asked about his dealings with King, José said revealingly, “I was a boxing referee. The promoter gave low blows but could not be disqualified.
At 93, King lives in Florida and still runs an office where three Rolls Royce gather dust. No longer the sultan of punches, he refers to his decline as “Now you have to tell the truth.” Boxing operates under tighter controls.
The greatest ringside legend praises Trump as if he were a pugilist: “He’s uncontrollable, you can’t buy him.” For his part, civil rights supporter Reverend Al Sharpton comments, “If Trump were black, he’d be Don King.”
In a way, the president-elect of the United States is Don King. The narrative that once served to promote the Titans of the Ring has shifted to politics, an unsupervised arena where deception is more powerful than a jab to the liver.
This was published in Spanish by Reforma on December 13, 2024
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