Other sports no. 3: Don King and the 45 minute answer

It was the week before the Mike Tyson versus Evander Holyfield rematch at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

I'd been at the first fight when Holyfield had pulled off a major upset by stopping Tyson in the eleventh round, even though beforehand there was a concern that Evander might actually die in the ring. He had been diagnosed with a heart condition that he now claimed had been cured by a faith healer.

As a piece of sporting theatre it was the most exciting thing I'd seen. Afterwards both fighters came to a press conference in a big white tent that had been erected behind the casino and was the locus of media activities. Holyfield had been there almost every day in the run-up and would happily talk to anybody. Now he sat at a table with Mike Tyson, explaining how it was God's plan that he would win. Mike Tyson had angry red welts on his forehead where the fighters' heads had clashed, and he kept pressing them with a white towel. Between them sat Don King, beaming with delight.

A British journalist called Jeff Powell stood up and said, 'Mike, do you think that after that defeat you should consider retiring, and Evander, now that you've achieved everything in the sport, would you think about retiring again too?'

The look on Don King's face was priceless, which I suspect Jeff Powell knew it would be. One of his great talents as a promoter was to be up on both sides of the deal. A Holyfield victory meant not just a rematch but a potential trilogy of big-money fights - from which the one guaranteed winner would be Don King.

I needed a commission to get to the second fight and managed to sell the idea of a piece about Don to Punch, the humour magazine that was undergoing one of its many revamps. I went over intending to try and get an interview in the big white tent during fight week.

As usual, it was an interesting moment for Don. He was facing a trial for wire fraud that carried a prison sentence of 45 years. The accusation was that he'd profited from a false insurance claim to Lloyds of London after the cancellation of a fight involving Julio Cesar Chavez. He'd already been tried once, but the jury had failed to reach a verdict.

There were lots of things that a piece about Don King was duty bound to mention, from the fact he'd killed two men, to his rise from prison to promoting fights like the Thrilla in Manila and the Rumble in the Jungle, and then listing the many fighters, promoters and officials he'd duped, bilked and baffled with his brilliance and his bullshit. When he'd been acquitted on tax evasion charges in the mid-80s, the US Government's lead prosecutor said that Don King was the cleverest man he'd ever cross-examined. 

It was an extraordinary life, an American life ('only in America' was one of the stock phrases Don loved to bellow at people), and in the flesh King was just as monumental, six feet four or five tall with the famous hair standing way above that. He dwarfed both Tyson and Holyfield whenever he stood next to them.

Although he sued anyone in boxing at the drop of hat, he never sued the media because he knew the value of his reputation. Instead he talked and talked, a verbal steamroller that simpy couldn't be stopped, not matter what was thrown at him.

I was a genuinely lightweight opponent, but after a couple of days I got my chance. He was standing by himself in the media tent, so I crept over, turned on my tape recorder and said, 'Don, could I just ask you about the insurance case...'

Without blinking, he was off. I can't recall much of what he said, but back then, a dictaphone ran on physical cassettes that had 45 minutes of tape before you had to flip them over, and by the time he'd finished speaking, the thing had turned off in my hand.

It was vintage Don, exactly what I'd hoped for. He called the wire fraud 'a victimless crime,' and 'insinuendo'. A 45-minute answer... Only in America. I wrote the piece, which was very much like every other Don King piece, but I was quite in thrall to boxing at the time. A few months later, he was acquitted after a trial in New York. As the New York Times reported, "the fight promoter laughed boisterously, soliloquised his jubilation in religious and hyperbolic terms and signed autographs."

Being in thrall to boxing changed, slowly. Two years later I was working at an Australian newspaper. I liked to get in early and read the wire reports. One morning I saw one that began: 'Rick Parker wanted to be Don King. Rich. Intimidating. Powerful...'

It was from a paper in Florida, only a few paragraphs about this Parker guy, who, it transpired, had been advised by King to try and find a white heavyweight boxer who could win the world title - at the time there hadn't been a white champion since Marciano. So Rick Parker did. Well sort of, he tried at least, and left behind him a wild and sad story of fixed fights, mayhem, money and ultimately murder - his own, at the hands of one of his fighters, Tim 'Doc' Anderson.

I tried to find out more about Rick Parker. When I got back to England, I began writing to Tim Anderson, who was serving life without parole in a Florida prison. As the story became clear - the story of how a good man came to kill another (deeply flawed) human being - I realised that I no longer loved boxing.

It was an emotional rather than a logical thing. Lots of sports, maybe every sport, was corrupt in some way or another, some, like FIFA or the IOC, to a much higher level than boxing was, too. But boxing seemed more personally ruinous, and there was a divide between the men that got in the ring and those outside of it. After wading through the wreckage of Tim's once blessed life, I didn't find Don King's stories about ripping off fighters and being up on both sides of the deal funny any more.

The corruption in boxing was mostly low-level, in then-unregulated states like Oklahoma, where Rick Parker had poisoned Tim Anderson so that he would lose a fight with Mark Gastineau, the former NFL defensive end. Where men fought under assumed names that they took from the local cemetary. Where fighters were smuggled over borders, given fake social security numbers, made to fight outside their weight class, and lots of other shit that no-one cared about. 

But it stretched upwards, too. Everyone was connected. Tim Anderson had fought George Foreman at Rick Parker's behest. Rick had a piece of Big George's comeback at the start, but Bob Arum took that. Nonetheless Rick found himself hanging over the top rope of the ring at the Omni Coliseum in Atlanta as 'Smokin' Bert Cooper, who he managed and promoted, was one more clean punch away from knocking out Evander Holyfield to become the heavyweight champion of the world.

One punch away.

Bert Cooper is dead now, and so is Rick Parker, and Tim Anderson is still in jail. Bob Arum is 88 years old and promotes Tyson Fury. Don King is also 88 years old, and much diminished.

Don's on the outside, and no-one is getting 45-minute answers any more.

Other sports no. 2: Gazza and the train that never left

'May you live in interesting times,' goes the old Chinese curse, and as we seem to be... thought I'd break the Old Batsman Fourth Wall and for this (hopefully briefish) interregnum until the crimson rambler is once again singing across the cricket fields of England, put up a few yarns about other sports that have occurred along the way... This time, a brief meeting with Gazza...

During Italia 90, the Juventus president Gianni Agnelli called Paul Gascoigne 'a dog of war with the face of a child,' which remains an unbeatable and beautiful description of him as a footballer.

If you want to imagine how far away 1990 seems now, how distant that vanished England is, imagine Harry Kane returning from the World Cup wearing a shellsuit and a pair of fake plastic tits. Imagine Gazza's other great almost-triumph, Euro 96, all of the present England squad flying to Hong Kong and lying in a leather dentist's chair while a barman poured Drambuie and tequila down their throats before smashing up the plane on the way home and then nearly winning the tournament.

By the time France 98 rolled around, Gazza had been transferred to Middlesbrough and any residual genius was spasmodic at best, but he still was still playing well for England and tournament football had always been his arena: he seemed to feed on its intensity. And as usual, England weren't overburdened with errant geniusus, so he continued to feel like their best bet.

England's manager at the time was Glenn Hoddle, who taken over from Terry Venables after Euro 96. Venables was a shrewd man who hid it behind a bluff wide-boy exterior. Hoddle was almost the opposite. He was given to gnomic pronouncements and, it would transpire, had a belief in hokey spiritualism that later on cost him the job. He was a brilliant coach, though, and after Euro '96, surely England were a chance...

That was the view at the football magazine where I was freelancing, anyway. With great fanfare Hoddle had selected an initial squad that he was about to trim to the final number. A day or so before the announcement, a team sponsor booked a Eurostar train and put an England player in each carriage for the football press to interview. The train was parked at Waterloo station and wasn't going anywhere, a clunking metaphor that seemed to be lost on the organisers.

I can't remember exactly which players were there now. Michael Owen was one, I think. The star attraction though was Gascoigne, as usual. Even in his faded state he was a magnet for headlines and attention, the legacy of not just his magnificence as a player, but of the chaos of his life. Within a few months he would be in rehab.

The writers were divided into groups and sent along the train. We only got about five minutes with each player, so it was a useless exercise really. We must have been one of the last groups to arrive in Gazza's carriage, but unlike some of the others, he remained cheerful. He waved us in.

"Sit down lads, sit down..."

He was still, then, a superb specimen, built like a boxer, his face surprisingly delicate with its line of wonky teeth and its soulful eyes. Even though we only had five minutes with each man, we had been through a ritual of prefacing the first few questions with "if selected," in recognition that some might not be. With Gazza though, that didn't seem relevant, so we didn't bother.

Two days later, Glenn Hoddle dropped him and when Gazza heard, he smashed up Hoddle's hotel room. He was inconsolable because, as would become obvious while his life unraveled, the football field was his only place of safety.

England got knocked out early on penalties to Argentina, a defeat that some, including Hoddle, tried to spin as a sporting tragedy on the scale of Italia 90 or Euro 96, which it wasn't. The truth was, they'd played four matches and lost two of them.

Hoddle got fired a year later. Gazza never played for England again. Hoddle managed a few more clubs before becoming an idiosyncratic pundit. Gazza tried the punditry once, became unintelligible with nerves and ran up a legendary bar bill. His real tragedy is not the end of his England career but the terribly damaged childhood and subsequent alcoholism that have ravaged his life.

That train seems like a long time ago.


Next time: Don King and the 45 minute answer...

NB: will obv. still post on cricket as often as possible, unless I sell the piece to a mag/website...

Other Sports No. 1: Ronnie and the Normal Shoes

'May you live in interesting times,' goes the old Chinese curse, and as we seem to be... thought I'd break the Old Batsman Fourth Wall and for this (hopefully briefish) interregnum until the crimson rambler is once again singing across the cricket fields of England, put up a few yarns about other sports that have occurred along the way... The first involves the incomparable Ronnie O'Sullivan...


We were working on a magazine for Sky. It had the glorious frequency of six issues per year, which allowed for plenty of downtime (rigorously filled with editorial planning meetings and other good deeds, natch). One of the regular office debates was about what counted as a sport and what didn't.

I had a glib line about it not being one if you could do it your normal shoes, which nonetheless excluded two sports that I've always loved, snooker and darts. Snooker especially, with its langueur, its epic scale, its midnight finishes, that wash of light across the immaculate baize... It seemed to understand something that cricket understood - how and where deep pulses of drama accumulate through hours of play. And it drew its champions from the masses, players that could offer the strange charisma of one tiny quirk amplified by the TV cameras.

Anyhow, the snooker was on its way back from its precipitous 1990s fall. Barry Hearn was in charge again and had Ronnie O'Sullivan, the Rocket, knocking in impossible shots with a wild intensity and threatening to quit every ten minutes.

Now Ronnie was available for a phone interview, which our editor, Ryan, had said he would do.

 "I'm going to ask him about the normal shoes..."

'Oh no... Don't do that..." I said, but people were already laughing at the thought.

"Anyway," he said, "I've got something else for you. Haile Gebreslassie..."

Gebreslassie was a runner, a great one, currently at his palatial home in Ethiopia and also available for a phoner.

Ryan rang Ronnie, and after a while, in a loud voice, said: "there's a bloke in our office says it's not a sport if you can do it in your normal shoes..."

"Tell him he's an idiot," Ronnie said.

"Actually he's about to speak to Haile Gebreslassie..."

Ronnie perked up at this news. He was well known as a good club runner, and had posted some impressive times at various races in the Essex area. He'd even credited it with improving his game.

"Haile likes snooker," he said. "He's seen me play..."

Just before I rang Haile, Ryan said, "Make sure you ask him about Ronnie..."

I was an admirer of Gabreslassie myself, and so placed the call with some trepidation. When I got through, the line to Ethiopia was terrible and I could barely hear anything he said. The only way I could tell he'd finished his answers was because he laughed loudly at the end of each one.

"So Haile," I shouted. "I hear you're a fan of snooker..."

 Silence.

"Snooker?" I yelled again.

Faint laugh.

"And you've seen Ronnie O'Sullivan, the World Champion, play?"

Silence, barely audible laugh.

"Snooker..." I said, more desperately. "Played on a green table..."

Haile laughed faintly and hung up.

Somehow, Ronnie O'Sullivan seemed to have taken his revenge for the normal shoes idea.

Next time: Gazza, Glenn Hoddle and the Eurostar at Waterloo...

NB: will obv. still post on cricket as often as possible, unless I sell the piece to a mag/website...