For more than three decades, boxing promoters Don King and Donald J. Trump have shared an enduring friendship and some crucial superficial similarities: unmissable hairstyles, a self-centered bravado that became a kind of superpower, a string of beleaguered creditors and an unshakeable belief that more is better.
“I'm putting gas in the tank,” Mr. King, 92, said recently at a South Florida casino bistro, presiding over a 4pm lunch of New York strip steak, three fried eggs, bacon, sausage, pancakes, grits, cranberry juice, coffee (“black like me”), agave syrup and African hot sauce he brought from home.
The waiter asked if he was missing anything. “Yes,” King replied, “we need more butter.”
More than any other figure in Trump's flamboyant and turbulent public life, King epitomized what Trump saw as successful black American men. To the former president, King was both an ally and a role model — a half-generation older, he symbolized the unrepentant self-indulgence and naive bravado of Trump's 1980s New York heyday.
If the celebrated promoter seemed airlifted from another era, a time when the boxing business was king, when King was the business itself and fights were settled outside the ring and the legal system, an era that has solidified much of Trump's world into a global view.
“He was never one for the establishment and proud of it,” Trump said in a statement sent by his campaign, praising King as “a champion and fighter like no other.” “He made money when others lost, and he did it for a long time. I rate him the best!”
During the 90-minute interview, King said the two men have learned a lot from each other and strengthened each other's professional instincts as they promoted the match under the banner of Trump's Atlantic City casinos.
At the height of their handshake, King and Trump made money together, promoted each other together and weathered business lawsuits together.
“Donald Trump was a young man who wanted to be himself,” King said. “In business, hyperbole works, because you know you're not breaking the law. You're just exaggerating, you know what I mean? You're making it more exciting.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton put it more succinctly:
“If Donald Trump had been born black, he would have been Don King,” Sharpton said.
Now, some polls are showing Trump making modest but potentially significant gains among black voters, putting Democrats on guard as President Biden seeks to solidify his position, but King remains a staunch supporter who understands the former president as well as most.
King made little mention of Trump's long history of racist rhetoric, instead praising Trump's transactional approach to politics and business as wisdom he gained from a comrade who showed him the way.
“That's American!” Martin Luther King shouted into the cameras within striking distance, before Trump vowed to “Make America Great Again.”
Before Trump was receiving roof-shaking ovations at sold-out cage fights and endearing himself to his hyper-masculine base, he sat ringside watching Mike Tyson matches with King, who later accused him of cheating him.
Before Trump became a felon who claims the system is rigged, so was King.
“They're treating him like a black man,” said King, who served time in prison more than half a century ago for stamping on a friend to death over a debt, repeating Trump's shaky conspiracy theory about the Manhattan hush money trial. “Guilty until proven innocent.”
Though age has slowed him down, King, like Trump, is much the same as he was when we first met, wearing a sparkly denim jacket with his face printed on it and paying for his lunch with thick, hundreds-of-dollar bills held together by rubber bands.
From his home in Boca Raton, Fla., with offices nearby and a cadre of relatives and associates to help him put on a show, King has been promoting fights in the region, focusing on fading second-rate boxers and earnestly promising that each one will be an unprecedented spectacle.
“The excitement is building!” he said this month ringside at the Seminole Hard Rock in Hollywood, Fla., midway through a middling but entertaining fight card sponsored by a printing company and two strip clubs. “This is a great event!”
For boxing fans who meet King, whether he's pushing a walker across a casino floor or being pushed in a wheelchair by his grandson, he remains a fascinating figure.
“Don King, what's up, baby?”, and “Only Americana!” he poses with well-wishers who playfully pump their fists for the cameras, but they don't really interact with him, and they move along as if they were standing next to a wax figure of Don King.
Once he gets going, King has no qualms about stopping, spiced up his interviews with references to Socrates, Plato, Shakespeare (“The Bard of Avon!”), Muhammad Ali (“The Greatest of All Time!”), Johnnie Cochran (“The gloves didn't fit!”), the O'Jays, Schopenhauer and himself, and he's happy to take issue with his many critics over the years.
Jack Newfield, King's corruption-busting biographer, has long been credited with saying, “Forget death and taxes. The only thing certain is that, win or lose, Don King is counting his money.”
Nonsense, King said.
“I never count money,” he explained. “If you can count money, you don't have money.”
King and Trump have kept in touch, primarily by phone, meeting and exchanging memories.
As they judged each other recently, they discussed their striking similarities: the art of turning nominal losses into wins.
“I've seen him in the middle of his fights, some of them really tough, but he always comes out victorious,” Trump said in a statement. “Don knows the importance of never giving up.” (The former president once testified for King in his fight contract trial.)
King said his own financial woes in the 1990s deepened his respect for Trump.
“What really impressed me was when he started to embrace it,” King said. “He turned bankruptcy into a business.”
The Trump campaign used video clips and boxing glove emojis on social media to highlight King's support for the 2024 presidential bid. Aides also noted King's long association with other black athletes from the 1980s and 1990s, including Tyson and Herschel Walker, a former football player who lost a Senate race in Georgia two years ago.
But Trump and King's friendship has weathered some Republican attempts to distance themselves from each other.
When Trump urged King to speak at the 2016 nominating convention, party officials said the Republican Party could not risk being associated with someone convicted of manslaughter.
Two months later, King ended up taking Trump's place at the microphone, joining the candidate at a church in Ohio.
“We need Donald Trump,” King said at the time, “especially black people.”
King recalled advice he once gave to Michael Jackson and vowed to sanitize the anecdote that day by not using the N-word. And 14 seconds later, he did.
“Yes,” Trump said warmly afterwards amid a mini-media storm, “there is only one Don King.”
The promoter acknowledged that being Don King these days is nothing like it used to be.
“We're still together,” he said at a restaurant table, rubbing the ring given to him by his wife, Henrietta, who died in 2010.
Mr. Ali helped catapult Mr. King's career after the promoter got out of prison, but he died six years later. Mr. King's face lit up for a moment as he recited the heavyweight boxer's “float like a butterfly” line from his seat. (In their zig-zag partnership, Mr. King was accused of unfairly paying Mr. Ali for fights.)
But while the once-dominant sport has fallen out of the national spotlight, King is clearly still drawn to its glamour.
At a recent pre-fight news conference, Mr. King hosted the Hard Rock Ballroom for more than an hour, starting with a digression about Mr. Trump's legal woes and smiling as he watched the chaotic exchanges between the main players. (The eventual winner between the ropes, fighter Blair Cobbs, performed a lengthy prop routine that included a glove puppet and two live birds; another fighter, Adrien Broner, appeared to threaten Mr. Cobbs with a gun.)
By fight night, Mr. King was in a more contemplative mood, pointing out the pins on his jacket: one commemorating Ali's 1974 “Jungle Battle” in Zaire, another the Statue of Liberty and a third the badge of the National Rifle Association.
He posed with a man wearing a “Let's Go Brandon” hat mocking Biden and nodded to greetings shouted nearby.
“Don!”
“A living legend!”
When the featured bout began, King was assisted to stumble up a small flight of stairs, through the ropes and into the ring, where he waited for the boxers to enter, to the delight of his publicists (and arguably the best medical move for a semi-mobile nonagenarian) and the crowd.
“Life is a fight,” King said quietly, without any prompting, as he settled into a cushioned rolling chair at ringside.
Asked what round he was in, he laughed a little, then went quiet.
“We'll know when the count comes,” King said.
Kitty Bennett contributed to the research.
Audio Producer Tully Abecassis.