The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (25 page)

His mother went to the sheriff's office in tears the next day to tell Cuddie that her son was indeed alive. She said she was afraid he'd robbed Guns and Stuff and hit old man Robinette.

That night, Rowan said, he went to Saginaw, where he gave Gomez six of the stolen guns to pay down his debt, worth $1,000 per handgun. Gomez later told the authorities that he bought only one pistol from Rowan, according to a police report. Gomez was arrested soon after on charges of possessing weapons as a felon.

Rowan and his girlfriend were still hiding out. They booked a room at the Knights Inn in Saginaw, where a bed cost $50. “I was on edge all night, me and Rosa,” Rowan said. “I knew I was fighting a losing battle.”

 

Betrayal and Regret

 

They stayed on the run for about 48 hours, moving from one spot to another. The scrambling didn't throw off Cuddie and his colleagues.

On March 20, two days after the robbery, they tracked Rowan and his girlfriend to a friend's apartment in Unionville. The couple were arrested about 7:15
A.M.

It was all over—and Cuddie had a definitive answer. Charlie Rowan was not dead. But he would be going away for a long, long time.

He told Cuddie that he didn't mean for it to happen this way. He walked the officers through the robbery and told them where they could find the guns, the Batman mask, the stolen wallet.

The news was out. A front-page headline in the
Traverse City Record-Eagle
read, “Fighter Accused of Faking Death.”

The cage fighters felt betrayed, furious that Rowan had sullied their sport's name.

“He's lucky the cops got him before the fighters did,” Big John Yeubanks, the promoter, said. Organizers of the Fight for Charlie recently filed a police report in Traverse City accusing Rowan of fraud.

After the hoax was exposed, the cage fighting promoters decided to hold another benefit, this time to raise money for the Robinettes, the owners of Guns and Stuff. They have collected more than $15,000.

“We got sick of hearing about Charles Rowan and we thought,
What about the Robinettes?
” Yeubanks said. “Everybody was looking at this guy like he was an MMA fighter from Michigan, but in fact he was a small-time tough guy who got in a cage a couple of times.”

Today, Richard Robinette is back home after a recovery that's surprised even his family and his doctors. He started playing his banjo again. He recently fixed the bathroom sink.

He doesn't remember much of the robbery, but he showed off a horseshoe of stitches on the left side of his head.

“You can't sit and cry about it,” he said. “They thought I was going to die.”

A few miles away, Rowan sits inside another cage, in the Gladwin County Jail. He pleaded guilty last month to armed robbery. He'll be sentenced in October.

In jail, Rowan wrote letters to his mother, trying to atone. “I did not mean to hurt that man and his family,” one letter read. “I hope to see you at my visit.”

Rowan's mother usually goes to see him once a week. On a recent afternoon, the two put their hands against the clear divider that separated them.

“I'm sorry you did this too,” his mother said. Rowan, wearing an orange jumpsuit, told her he figured he'd be locked up for the rest of her life.

He reads mysteries in jail. During his first few weeks behind bars, he tried to catch glimpses of his girlfriend, who was being held nearby. She recently pleaded guilty to armed robbery charges.

He goes over the whole strange story, step by step. He finds himself returning to the fake memorial, and the sounds of people sobbing for him.

“I didn't realize how I impacted other people's lives,” he said. “I don't hold myself in high regard. I'm not a good person, I'm not a good dad, and most of the time I'm not a good son.”

He thinks about his girlfriend, Rosa, and wonders whether they'll ever be together again.

“It's like . . .” He struggled to get the words out. “It's like we just died.”

FROM
GRANTLAND.COM

 

I
N THE BACK ROOM
of Manhattan's Carnegie Deli, Don King picked at a pastrami sandwich with his fingers. He had just been asked a question about his electric hair and, for the first time in a day filled with radio and television interviews, King paused before he spoke. A cautious look crept over his graying eyes. As he silently deliberated between several well-worn origin myths about the height of that hair, King tweezed a scrap of pastrami between two well-manicured fingernails and dragged the meat through a puddle of deli mustard. “My hair is God's aura,” King explained while chewing. “Everything went up when I got home from the penitentiary. One night I went to lie down next to my wife and my hair started popping and uncurling all on its own—ping, ping, ping, ping! I knew that it was God telling me to stay on the righteous path so he could one day pull me up to be there with him.”

King smiled, but not the smile you remember. That smile—the screwed-on mask of boundless optimism—had been on full display throughout this week of promotions, but at the Carnegie, King had finally succumbed to exhaustion. “When I'm doing good, the hair goes straight up,” King said, a bit wearily. “Now that things are difficult, the hair has gotten a little flatter.”

I had been trailing Don King for two weeks between Boca Raton, Florida, and now New York City. This was the closest he had come to admitting that things just weren't what they used to be. In three days' time, Tavoris “Thunder” Cloud, King's last fighter of any consequence, would step into the ring against Bernard Hopkins at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The story of the fight should have been about the 48-year-old Hopkins and his quest to become the oldest champion in boxing history. But because Don King was involved, the focus during fight week had been on Don King and his uncertain future. If Cloud lost to Hopkins—especially in a boring way—his short career as an opponent in televised events would be put in serious jeopardy and King would have very little left to promote. In a prefight interview, Hopkins, who, like so many other fighters, had worked with King before an inevitable falling-out, had this to say about his old promoter: “What a way to put the last nail in the coffin. Who thought it would be me that would shut him down?”

At the Carnegie, nobody was talking much about Tavoris Cloud or Bernard Hopkins or the impending end of Don King Promotions. King had come to one of his favorite New York landmarks to enjoy a quiet lunch with three longtime employees. They talked, mostly, about music and old times in Manhattan, the city where King lived and worked during the majority of his reign at the top of boxing. The conversation eventually turned to James Brown. Don King, still digging his fingers into his sandwich, muttered, “James Brown died owing me $50,000. But I loved James Brown.”

 

Don King no longer sits on boxing's throne, but he has nostalgia by the balls. Fights are best enjoyed through old film, which means that if you want to watch Muhammad Ali or Larry Holmes or Mike Tyson or Julio Cesar Chavez or Evander Holyfield raise his arms in triumph at the end of a fight, you're also going to see the big man with the bigger hair climbing in through the ropes. You see him in the Philippines in 1975, hovering over a near-death Muhammad Ali after the Thrilla in Manila. You see him in Japan, 15 years later, looking more or less like the same man, crowding in on a battered and finally defeated Mike Tyson. He has negotiated deals with Mobutu Sese Seko and counted Hugo Chavez as a personal friend. Nobody alive, save some presidents, has taken more photos with world leaders and celebrities. As a boxing fan growing up in the '80s and early '90s, I cannot remember a single fight that didn't end with Don King in the ring, cigar clamped between his teeth. He is one of those big American men who distort our collective memory—I'm sure King's rival Bob Arum promoted some of the fights I watched as a kid, but when I think of the final bell, I still see the menacing hulk of Don King smiling for the cameras.

So it's a little sad to sit across from Don King at the Carnegie Deli and see the tourists line up at our table to take a photo with him, and to overhear them talk about the man in the past tense as if he were already dead. Not because Don King deserves our sympathy, but because it's always jarring to see a once-robust American institution fall into disrepair and decay. The cuffs on King's “Only in America” denim jacket—the same coat he wore to the Thrilla in Manila—are badly frayed. He sometimes stumbles over his words. There's a distinct sag in his once-static face. Don King never thought he would live past 50. He is 81 years old now and has been in the public's eye since the early '70s.

Don King was born in Cleveland in 1931 and grew up in the city's numbers racket, a lottery-style game that King describes as “hope for people who don't have hope.” As a kid he wanted to be Clarence Darrow, and set himself up to study law at Kent State University. The summer before he was to matriculate, King's older brother Connie recruited him to “take numbers,” whereby the younger King would walk around Cleveland's black neighborhoods and record $1 lottery-style bets. Players would submit a three-digit number to King, who was somehow able to keep track of everything in his head. At the end of the business day, if a player's number matched up with the middle three digits in a predetermined market quote, he or she would win somewhere around $600. King's phenomenal memory and his talent for talking made him a natural at the numbers game, and before too long he started his own production.

Despite his involvement in the mob-controlled rackets, King managed to mostly avoid legal problems during his youth. But on December 2, 1954, King shot and killed Hillary Brown after Brown and two associates tried to rob one of King's gambling houses in Cleveland. The judge in the case decided that King had acted in self-defense and declared the act a justifiable homicide. King was released and continued running numbers.

Over the next 12 years, King continued to grow his empire and took over ownership of several businesses in Cleveland, including the Corner Tavern, a music joint that has since been enshrined into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. The law eventually caught up to him again. On April 20, 1966, King stomped a former employee named Sam Garrett to death over a $600 debt. In a trial overrun with witness tampering and bizarre judicial motions, King was eventually convicted on a reduced first-degree manslaughter charge. “When they sentenced me,” King told me, “they said it was a probationary shock. Like I would go in and come out quickly and they hoped that the experience of the penitentiary would
shock
me into going straight. Turns out they kept me in there for four years.”

King says he divides his life into two categories—Before the Penitentiary and After the Penitentiary. There is no doubt that his time in prison expanded King's ambitions. He read voraciously, and by the time he got out he had built up the lexicon of quotations and malapropisms that would turn him into one of the great talkers of his time.

Within a year of his release, Don King was putting together his first fight. With the help of Lloyd “Mr. Personality” Price, a close musician friend of King's from the Corner Tavern, King convinced Muhammad Ali to come to Cleveland to put on a boxing exhibition to help save a black hospital from going under. As part of the night's festivities, King put on a concert featuring Marvin Gaye, Lou Rawls, and Wilson Pickett. The Don King template for big-time promotions was set—a superstar boxer, some vague social mission, and a whole lot of great music. He also found his cash cow in Ali, and although Ali's camp never fully trusted Don King, the champ was impressed by the new promoter's grand visions. In 1973, King attended the George Foreman–Joe Frazier title bout in Kingston, Jamaica. King, as his own legend goes, rode to the fight in Frazier's limousine, and after Frazier got knocked out in the second round, King jumped into the ring, hugged Foreman, and left Jamaica with the new champ. By 1974, King's ambition and hustle produced the Rumble in the Jungle, arguably the greatest sporting event of the 20th century. Everything else—the notoriety, the Thrilla in Manila, the hundreds of millions of dollars, the multiple investigations by Interpol and the FBI and CIA, the dozens of lawsuits, Larry Holmes, Mike Tyson, Julio Cesar Chavez, Tito Trinidad—came as a direct result of King pulling off the impossible in Zaire. An ex-con numbers runner, three years removed from the penitentiary, somehow brokered deals with Mobutu Sese Seko, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, James Brown, the country of Liberia, Barclays Bank of London, and several other operations that could have killed a fight that was perpetually in danger of being canceled or moved back to the United States.

But none of that—the killings, the jail time, the extraordinary hustle—matters much when it comes to Don King's legacy. In the eyes of the public, Don King is a monster because he stole from his fighters. After Muhammad Ali's brutal loss to Larry Holmes on October 2, 1980, King shortchanged Ali about $1.2 million of an $8 million guaranteed payout. While Ali was laid up in Los Angeles, his career finally dead and buried, King coerced Jeremiah Shabazz, one of Ali's trusted associates, to bring the champ a suitcase filled with $50,000 and a contract that not only released the right to pursue any further punitive damages, but also gave King the option to promote any of Ali's future fights. Ali, wearied and confused, signed the contract and took the briefcase. King repeated this process with nearly every fighter he worked with in the '70s and throughout the '80s. In doing so, he violated Mike Tyson, Larry Holmes, Evander Holyfield, and a long list of other fighters who came up, like King, from impoverished backgrounds to claim glory found “Only in America!”

King speaks of himself as a transformative figure, someone who through sheer intellect, hard work, and determination overcame racism, both overt and institutional, and brought millions of dollars and international adulation to the young black men he promoted. All of this is undeniably true. But Don King's PR problem is that we don't see him as a civil rights pioneer. We see him as a gangster—and as a gangster, he must adhere to the strict ethics of a gangster movie. He stole, without a hint of mercy or contrition, from his own people.