King Takes Act on the Road : Boxing: Promoter is not at a loss for words in Mexico City, where he is trying to sell Saturday’s “Grand Slam of Boxing” to anyone who will listen.

Here in this mountain-bound metropolis of 20 million people and five million cars, where the sky is brown on a clear day and the mere act of breathing has been likened to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, Don King has arrived to add his own brand of exhaust to the environment.

“Absolutamente, si!” a grinning King bellows into a microphone. “This is a thrill beyond depiction and description, being here in Estadio Azteca, drinking cervezas frias, frosty Coronas. . . “

King and Co. are in town to sell “Poker de Ases”--translation: “The Grand Slam of Boxing”--his multi-fight extravaganza that takes place Saturday night at the cavernous Estadio Azteca. Not that he is having any trouble selling the 132,000 seats in the stadium that hosted the 1968 Olympic Games and the 1988 World Cup (he expects them to be gone by fight time, thanks to Mexican idol Julio Cesar Chavez, who defends his world junior-welterweight title against Greg Haugen in the main event).

King’s real mission is to convince American fight fans that it is worth their 75,000 pesos--that’s $24.95--to buy a pay-per-view show featuring four

world title fights that could all turn out to be mismatches. Chavez is a 26-1 favorite over Haugen--the highest odds ever for a title fight on pay TV. King also is selling world junior-middleweight champion Terry Norris vs. Maurice Blocker, world junior-lightweight champ Azumah Nelson vs. Gabriel Ruelas in the most competitive match of the night and a hastily added super-middleweight title bout between Michael Nunn and (Irish) Dan Morgan.

On Tuesday, King spent four hours doing some 60 TV interviews, 15 with each featured fighter, mainly with Spanish-language TV stations airing in the States. “You got cuatro, cuatro, cuatro world campeons del mundo right here,” King howls into the camera, with Chavez sitting beside him on a platform in the stands. “This is history, history in the making, man. The biggest crowd in the history of boxing will be here to see these great fights.”

He might be right about the crowd, although some disclaimers are in order. The stadium is set up to accommodate 132,000, far surpassing the record 120,420 who saw the first Dempsey-Tunney fight at Philadelphia’s Sesquicentennial stadium in 1926. But only 107,000 seats are for public sale--25,000 are in private boxes, sold when the stadium was opened in 1964 for a term of 99 years. Of the 107,000 available seats, thousands are selling for as little as $1.65--the same price as a can of “frosty Corona,” as King refers to one of his main sponsors.

Still, a sellout would gross some $9 million at the gate, a windfall for Chavez, King and Televisa, which owns the TV network of the same name, the stadium and the soccer team Amerika that calls Azteca its home.

Azteca itself is an appalling marvel, a vast, semi-domed stadium with a hole in the roof not unlike Texas Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys. But there are some unique security measures taken here. For one thing, each section is separated from the next by high chain-link fences topped with barbed wire. And the entire grandstand is separated from the playing field by a 6-foot-deep, 6-foot-wide moat also ringed with barbed wire. When the World Cup was here in 1988, the moat was further reinforced by La Policia toting machine guns.

To reach King and the boxers, four U.S. journalists were forced to negotiate several pitch-black flights of steps into the bowels of Azteca, past a religious shrine adorned with Christmas lights set up in a remote corner, up a series of steep ramps to the playing field and then across a wooden plank that spanned the moat and was held in place by two rugged-looking security guards. After the board survived the Richie Giachetti test--that is, the rotund former trainer of Mike Tyson and Larry Holmes made it across without plunging to his doom--it was deemed safe for passage.

In the middle of the soccer field, a group of workers was digging an 8-foot-deep hole, the site of one of the four support poles for the canopy over the ring.

“I personally guarantee there will be no rain Saturday night,” Chavez told a children’s group he and King gave free tickets to last week. Chavez pretty much gets what he wants around here; while the rest of the contingent was mired in the horrendous Mexico City rush-hour traffic Tuesday morning, Chavez cruised comfortably in a large Mercedes-Benz, escorted by a police motorcycle.

He seemed happy and relaxed despite the presence of Haugen, whom Chavez says he “hates,” which is not hard to understand considering Haugen, who calls himself “Mutt,” has gone out of his way to antagonize an entire country. “There ain’t 130,000 Mexicans who can afford $1.65 to see this fight,” Haugen has said. He also said Chavez fattened up his 84-0 record by fighting “about 50 Tijuana taxi drivers.”

“He turns my stomach, he makes me sick,” Chavez said. “When I look at him, I feel like vomiting.”

Meanwhile, King was praising Haugen to a TV station in Las Vegas, where Haugen lives. “This shows the fabric, the intestinal fortitude of the man, coming into Julio’s hometown,” King said. “You can’t call for gas when there is no gas, you can’t call timeout, 130,000 Mexicans screaming for his blood . . . “

King’s payroll for the show is immense--Haugen, Norris and Nelson are being paid more than $1 million apiece, and Chavez is getting at least $3 million. The money is coming from Televisa and a variety of other Mexican sponsors, to whom King began giving their money’s worth after his Jan. 30 show in Memphis when he announced Nunn would be added to this card in place of a Julian Jackson-Gerald McClellan fight. But Nunn had absorbed numerous blows in his fight that night against Victor Cordoba and did not appear ready to fight again in three weeks.

At a news conference last week, King outdid himself, plugging two of his bankrollers simultaneously. “While you’re sitting back enjoying your frosty Corona,” he said, “You can rest assured your money is safe at Banco Atlantico.”

If you think the featured bouts are mismatches, consider that Morgan, a punching bag, submitted publicity photos of himself that were deemed unusable by the promotion because they showed him with a black eye.

While the fighters waiting their turns lounged uncomfortably in the stands--the seats are approximately 16 inches of concrete--King prattled on, his lungs apparently unaffected by the pollution or the altitude.

“Adios, my amigos in the Windy City,” he said, wrapping up an interview for Chicago. Then, he moved on to his amigos in Los Angeles.

Fifty feet away, Haugen looked at his wrist and frowned. “Don stopped my watch with all his (bleeping) babbling,” he said. “He just doesn’t quit.”

Then he and his retinue left the stadium, perhaps to enjoy a frosty Corona and then to make sure their dinero was safe at Banco Atlantico.