He’s Shrewd, and You’re Glued

Great man.

--Mike Tyson praising Don King Wednesday night on CNN’s “Larry King Live”

HBO’s new funny/tough biography of tenaciously flimflamming boxing promoter Don King is the most entertaining TV movie in years.

Where fact and dramatic license or interpretation intersect here is not always easy to spot, but a true gas it is, with Ving Rhames affirming, as King, that he’s as able a scene-stealer as the one he’s playing. The Don King look comes from makeup artistry, but Rhames alone gets credit for capturing the charisma.

In florid Kingspeak, this movie smacks of “historical ramafiliations,” sending to America--whose flag King loves to wrap himself in--two hours’ buzz on one of the shrewdest and most successful, controversial and hot-button boxing figures of his time.

Also, except for Muhammad Ali, the most colorful and the most adored by sports reporters--the vast swooning bulk of whom have always been easily seduced by him and ready to ignore his nastier side and let him expound and self-promote endlessly because he’s so outrageously quotable and lens-friendly.

Besides rhetoric, he’s got the Hair, you know. As “Don King: Only in America” notes, one day the “do” was a generic Afro, the next a picturesque skyscraper, a stratagem said to have been urged by his friend, rhythm and blues singer Lloyd Price, to elevate him above other slippery pickpockets working the crowd.

And fun? Like the earlier Ali himself, King is sound-bite heaven and dull-proof, so media-cunning you’d think he’s been born in a satellite dish, inventing six-syllable words the way he’s constantly reinventing himself, and double-talking and triple-talking his foes to the canvas, his tongue swifter than the unseen Ali punch that dropped Sonny Liston in 1965.

You could have banked on this movie being no worshipful fan letter. It comes mostly from “Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King” by Jack Newfield, known to be a good reporter but, as his book title indicates, no friend of King. Nor is HBO, which has been bitterly feuding with King since 1990, after their acrimonious split ended a long history of collaborating on big-fight telecasts.

No haymakers come immediately, though. Through the first two-thirds of HBO’s “Only in America,” you enjoyably settle into a story that speaks as glibly of the former hoodlum King as he does himself, with director John Herzfeld and Kario Salem’s teleplay successfully employing the device of having today’s King periodically inject himself into his past by making amusingly bloated comments to the camera.

Yes, we meet him in 1954 as a mob-controlled Cleveland numbers runner shooting it out with other thugs who are after his loot. Yes, we see him 12 years later savagely beat to death a man who owes him $600, earning a murder conviction that is reduced to manslaughter by a judge who, today’s King observes, “understood the frustrations of the ghetto expressing itself.” Yes, we see him emerge from his four-year prison term after hearing a radio broadcast of Ali’s famous first fight with Joe Frazier that, today’s King informs us, was “an epiphinous experience of pure religiosity.”

And on we go, with King devoting the coming years to ingratiating, exploiting, manipulating, double-dealing, fast talking and sucker-punching his way to the top of the food chain of fight promoters, ultimately overtaking even his arch rival, Bob Arum, with assistance from Price (Vondie Curtis-Hall) and Hank Schwartz (Jeremy Piven), a provider of satellite technology for closed-circuit fights.

This King is definitely no model citizen. Like an adoring sportscaster with 30 seconds to fill, though, you’re under his spell. He’s larcenous, but likably so. He’s a liar, but his bull is benign. He’s a grifter, but one of such gusto that you can’t help admiring his ingenuity and determination. And he’s so very, very funny--today’s King, for example, arguing in the movie about a scene showing him back-stabbing Price in the 1970s: “I won’t even dignify such flagrant slanderosity.”

Magnificently comical, moreover, is the way King works his magic to get the great Ali (Darius McCrary) in the ring with that punching bag, Chuck Wepner. Today’s King speaks to us from in front of a freeze-frame of the hapless Wepner being punished by Ali, his doughy face bloodied and pushed in. King: “God bless ya, Chuck.” Bam! Chuck goes down. King: “He was the great white hope.”

King’s moon is eclipsed, though, when “Only in America” begins darkening. Calling himself a victim of prejudice, he cynically plays not only the race card but the entire deck in answering his critics, and his paranoia, hypocrisy and viciousness grow along with his fame.

The lovable clown act is clearly wearing thin as King is shown using fighters, then shedding them like empty containers. He takes advantage of an aging, diminished Ali. He warns a rebellious Larry Holmes: “I’ll have your legs broken in so many pieces, you’re gonna crawl back into the ring.” And he gains control of the seemingly invincible Mike Tyson’s career. Although this period includes Tyson’s rape conviction, a loss to Buster Douglas and two losses to Evander Holyfield--the latter for biting--the movie touches on it only glancingly.

Have HBO and “Only in America” dealt fairly with King? In at least one instance, surely not. When it comes to that manslaughter case, they clobber King below the belt by omitting that Ohio Gov. James Rhodes pardoned him in 1983. Talk about your flagrant slanderosity.

In a case of art and reality overlapping, though, today’s King is allowed here to express his contempt for HBO and boast tauntingly that if he were not so entertaining, this movie would not have been made: “You ain’t making no movie about Bob Arum, are ya?”

Wouldn’t you know it? Even in a story that ultimately sees him through a glass darkly, Don King gets the last word.

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* “Don King: Only in America” airs at 8 p.m. Saturday and again at 8 p.m. Tuesday on HBO. It has been rated TV-M-LV (may not be suitable for children under the age of 17 because of violence and coarse language).

* TWO CRIME FAMILIES: Howard Rosenberg will review “Oliver Twist” and “Bella Mafia” in Saturday’s Calendar.