His Success Story Is Hair-Raising, Mouth-Opening
That he told her all his heart and said unto her, “There hath not come a razor upon mine head; for I have been a Nazarite unto God from my mother’s womb: if I be shaven, then my strength will go from me, and I shall be weak, and be like any other man.” --Judges, 16:17 It’s hard for most people to think of the fight promoter Don King as a Biblical character. Most people, if they think of him at all, think of him as a guy who has either just seen a ghost or survived the electric chair.
The hair soars into the air like a haystack in a high wind, a kink-out gone berserk, giving the wearer a perpetually astonished expression of a guy who has just seen a unicorn or escaped a flying saucer. It seems to pull the eyes up and the mouth open, except that, with Don King, the mouth would be open anyway.
But, for King, it is more than just a trademark, a unique characteristic. His hair is a sign from God. It is Don King’s burning bush.
It all happened on a night a dozen years ago when King, newly out of prison for an episode that had gotten so far out of hand that a business rival--in the Cleveland numbers business--ended up dead on the sidewalk, was trying to sleep in his own bed at home.
Some people use prison to commune with burglars, car thieves, safecrackers, racketeers, associates who will refine their anti-social skills. King’s cell mates were poets and authors, philosophers and playwrights.
King didn’t spend his time with yeggs and hit men, strong-arm robbers and boosters, he spent it with Homer and Shakespeare, Pushkin and Rostand. He didn’t read Playboy, he read “Cyrano de Bergerac.”
One night shortly after his release, he had an experience that he relates to Paul’s on the road to Damascus.
“I was trying to go to sleep,” he said. “I didn’t know which way I was gonna go in my life, what I was gonna do.
“All of a sudden, there was this rumbling in my head, it was just like a volcanic eruption. My hair began to pop up!
“Ping! Ping! Ping! Ping! Each hair, each strand, pristine and beautiful, each standing up beautifully.
“Now, you must remember before this happened, my head was as kinky and burry as any other black man’s.
“I didn’t know what was happening to me. My wife, Henrietta, looked at me and says, ‘Look at your hair! What have you been doing to it?’
“I was frightened. I went to the barber shop and the guy put the scissors next my head and electric shocks start to popping out! Then, he put the clippers in there and I start to get migraine headaches. I had to get out the barber shop. I had to run.
“For 10 years, Jim, I ain’t had my hair cut or touched! It’s ah natural, no mousse, no artificial preparation.
“I figured it was a sign from God--I’m a very religious man, you know. God had put this head on me like he did Samson and Delilah!
“I thought, Whadda you know, I’m chosen by God! And as long as I remain godlike and took God’s blessing He sent me from on high, I would continue to succeed, and, sure enough, God did for me what He did for Jonah, extricating him from the belly of the whale, and He took Daniel out the lion’s den. I was part of a miracle!”
What God took Don King out of was the clutches of the Justice Department, which, oblivious of Don’s divine status, had filed some 28 federal charges against him.
“They went down the list of every known charge conceivable to man--racketeering, skimming, kickback, ticket scalping, fixing fights, preordaining fights, vitiating officials, corrupting judges, all the way down to laundering money,” King said. “Everything but the Lindbergh baby. Instead of using me as the true attestation of the American dream, they threw the book at me!”
God--and defense attorney Edward Bennett Williams--didn’t let this force of evil prevail, and King was acquitted of all counts, although his secretary was sentenced on an income tax charge.
“Spite,” King said. “They couldn’t lay a glove on me so they took it out on her.”
The original Samson slew his enemies with the jawbone of an ass. King relies on his own jawbone. His perorations come down to us with the force of Holy Writ or the Sermon on the Mount and his conversation is so sprinkled with allusions to Shakespeare, Virgil, Caesar, that you have the feeling you’ve stumbled into a literary tea.
Deliverance begets obligation. God doesn’t spare us just to fritter away our time in idleness and pleasures of the flesh. So, King is going to set his sights on serving the public weal in the best way he knows how. He’s going to unify the heavyweight boxing division, which, everyone knows, is a societal reform long overdue and a boon to mankind.
He is staging the Michael Spinks-Larry Holmes fight in Las Vegas Saturday night as a step toward repayment for his deliverance. After that, it will be feature pictures for MGM.
“I will make films that uplift,” he said. “I do not deal in negativism.”
And then the premier of Communist China is counting on him for cultural tours for his dance and theater troupes.
Ambitious? Debilitating? Not so long as his hair stands up.
What if he goes bald?
King just looked hurt. Not even the Philistines could bring that about. Neither could the Justice Department.