Some Very Wrong Numbers

Fight promoter Don King says if he were still in the numbers game in Cleveland, he would be betting heavily on 962 these days. In the numbers, 962 means trouble, deep trouble, and that's what King was in right up to the tippy-tip tips of his electrified hair last week. ABC had just suspended the telecasts of his United States Championship boxing tournament, and King, in turn, had "suspended" boxing consultants Al Braverman and Paddy Flood, an odd couple of cornerwise managers, and PR man Gordon Peterson from his staff.

The reasons for all the suspensions were charges that fighters had to pay kickbacks to get into King's ballyhooed tournament, which ABC had underwritten to the tune of $1.5 million; that the records of at least 11 of the 60-odd boxers had been phonied in the 1977 Ring Record Book (the so-called Bible of boxing); and that ratings supplied by Associate Editor John Ort of The Ring magazine had been rigged. One boxer, Ike Fluellen of Houston, who has not fought in more than a year, was credited with two 1976 wins in Mexico by the Record Book and rated 10th, then third in the U.S. junior middleweight class in recent issues of Ring. In the March issue of Ring, Ort even gave idle Ike an honorable mention for the 1976 Progress Award of the Year. If he had had help like this, Harold Stassen would have become President in a landslide.

And if those problems were not enough to make King lay all his stash on 962, a federal grand jury in Baltimore was checking into the tournament, which at its inception had been praised as a way to create American champions, to build names and continuity. There were also persistent reports of FBI and IRS investigations into the affairs of boxing figures. Meanwhile in New York, Governor Hugh Carey had put the heat on James A. Farley Jr., his $35,000-a-year State Athletic Commission chairman, for being either a dupe or a dope in working with King on the tournament. Speculation even had it that Roone Arledge, president of ABC Sports, had muffed his chances of becoming president of ABC News because of the brouhaha. This was later denied by Frederick S. Pierce, the network president. And ABC announced that it had retained the services of Michael Armstrong, the highly regarded New York lawyer who broke open the Serpico case, to conduct an independent investigation. It will take months, for there are all sorts of intertwining connections for Armstrong and the other investigators to probe, ranging from the sudden elevation of tomato-can fighters to the status of U.S. title contenders to the role of the press. There have been allegations that King had two prominent New York newspapermen and a staff member of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED "on the take." SI is investigating the allegations against its staffer.

Amid all the turmoil last week, King maintained he was on the up-and-up ("I'm a nut on the truth bit," he says) and took solace in his eastside Manhattan townhouse by reciting passages from Demosthenes, Thoreau and Shakespeare ("Sweet are the uses of adversity,/Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,/Wears yet a precious jewel in his head"). King did not deny that some shenanigans might have occurred: "With all these rumors, there's smoke, and where there's smoke there's usually fire," he said. But he saw the contretemps as an attempt "to fry this coon." Muhammad Ali agreed. "There's only one thing wrong," said the heavyweight champ. "They got a spook running the tournament."

Matters are not so black and white. Soon after King made his tournament deal with ABC last year, Malcolm (Flash) Gordon, a 27-year-old boxing freak—"freak is very accurate," he says—who publishes a newsletter for boxing cognoscenti, wrote about insiders feasting on the money ABC was putting up. Though Gordon has a reputation for accuracy, his style can be extremely abrasive—he has referred to Ort of Ring as "Johnny Bought"—and he was, in turn, attacked in a recent photocopied sheet called Boxing Beat True Facts, which described him as a "sewer mongrel" and "beatnik pothead with body odor to boot."

Whatever the merits of Gordon's allegations, King's contract with ABC called for Don King Productions to stage the tournament from January through June of 1977. King himself was to get nothing but production costs, because, as he says, "It was a thing to me that I was contributing to me." Indeed it was. Had the tournament reached an unsullied conclusion, King would have wound up in complete control, thanks to ABC's naive largess, of all 11 U.S. champions, in addition to at least three fighters, including fourth-ranked Heavyweight Larry Holmes and No. 1-ranked Lightweight Esteban DeJesus, whom he and his son Carl already have in their pockets. For a promoter to control—or be in a position to gain control of—fighters in his own tournament is at best unethical. In some jurisdictions, it would be illegal.

To obtain credibility for his tournament, King took two unusual steps. First, he agreed to pay Ring for rating the fighters to be used in the tournament and for allowing the use of Ring's good name as the sanctioning body. As of last week King had paid Ring $30,000 of the $70,000 promised. No one had ever paid Ring for anything like this before, but as King says, "This was the heart of the tournament. I needed their reputation and their ratings and their sanction to give validity and authority to the tournament." King also brought in Farley, whom he describes as having an "impeccable reputation," but who is regarded as merely a political hack by many others in boxing. Farley was named chairman of the tournament committee, where, says King, "There can't be no hanky-panky." Besides Farley, who accepted expenses from King without checking with Governor Carey, the committee members were Kenneth Sherwood and Manuel A. Gonzales, both former New York boxing commissioners; Nat Loubet, the editor and publisher of Ring; and the omnipresent Ort.

Farley's committee technically had control over the selection of referees and judges, but it was hardly the independent body such a committee should be. It was formed by the promoter and had no legal standing whatever. Indeed, no boxing commission anywhere had jurisdiction over the tournament, because King and his associates had seen fit to stage the bouts in such unusual venues as the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier Lexington anchored off Pensacola, Fla., the U.S. Naval Academy and the Marion ( Ohio) Correctional Institution, often referred to as King's alma mater because he once served four years there for manslaughter.

Despite all the window dressing, ABC began to get twitchy even before the first round of bouts was shown from the Lexington on Jan. 16. The network's 32-year-old associate producer for the tournament telecasts, Alex Wallau, who is a knowledgeable boxing man, had meticulously researched the tournament field that King and Ring had lined up and figured that at least a dozen of the entrants were bums who had no business fighting for a championship of the United States. Concerned about what Wallau had uncovered, ABC invited King, Ort and Farley to an area near the davits of the carrier and took the most unusual step of getting affidavits from each of them. In their statements, they said that the tournament was on the level and that the ratings needed to determine who qualified for it were dead honest.

Thereafter all went well—at least on the surface—until the Annapolis program on Feb. 13, when Heavyweight Johnny Boudreaux of Houston won an atrocious decision over Scott LeDoux of Minneapolis. LeDoux and his manager, Joe Daszkiewicz, shouted, " Don King, Paddy Flood of New York and Al Braverman, also of New York, control all the fighters in this tournament. We're the only outsiders." LeDoux then jumped from the ring and tried to mix it up with Boudreaux, who was being interviewed by ABC's Howard Cosell. In the melee, Cosell's toupee was knocked askew. Later Cosell interviewed LeDoux, who apologized for his behavior but repeated his charge that most of the fighters were controlled by King. LeDoux and his manager were angry in part because Flood, who worked Boudreaux's corner, gets 10% of Boudreaux's purses as a "booking agent." The fact is that for more than a year LeDoux has been paying Braverman 10% of his winnings to act as a booker, and if Boudreaux was controlled by one of King's entourage, then so was LeDoux.