King Of Promoters Is Clever Like A Fox With Free TV Bout

The No. 1 way for Don King to make the world better would be to leave his bountiful, plentiful, great, grand, wide, vast and huge personal fortune at the doorstep of an orphanage and then disappear forever. No. 2 would be to put a Mike Tyson fight on free TV.

Not surprising, that’s the option King went with Thursday, announcing that Tyson vs. Buster Mathis will be shown Nov. 4 on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Network for no charge.

Question King’s motives? Rivals suggest questioning his sanity would be more productive.

“This is like a guy blowing up the world before he leaves,” promoter Bob Arum, King’s most bitter rival, told the New York Daily News.

In a very literal sense, King said, that was true. At a news conference in New York, he explained how he and Tyson hatched the idea while riding on the Concorde not long ago.

“We were flying up there at 35,000 feet,” he said. “No telephones, and the spirit just came upon us.”

Though King would sooner admit the cotton-candy look to his hair requires hours plugged into an electric socket, the truth is the spirit wasn’t the only thing that moved him. Neither was it thin air or a handful of those airplane-sized liquor bottles. No. Something more pedestrian - economic reality - had more than a little to do with it, too.

As part of his master plan to dictate how the heavyweight division is run, King planned to have Tyson fight Mathis at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas the same night former champions Riddick Bowe and Evander Holyfield did battle for the third time, across town at Caesars Palace.

King’s idea was to steal their thunder, but not just at the gate. Just like Tyson’s forgettable first post-prison bout - now available on videocassette from your neighborhood Blockbuster under the title, “My 89 Seconds Wrapped in Peter McNeeley’s Cocoon of Horrors” - this fight was supposed to be televised by Showtime’s pay-per-view outlet, known as SET. That would have put it head-to-head or mano-a-mano or $39.95 vs. $39.95, against the Bowe-Holyfield fight on rival Time-Warner’s pay-per-view arm, TVKO.

That plan got tossed onto the scrapheap the second McNeeley manager Vinny Vecchione climbed between the ropes and threw in the towel, exposing the match for the sham it was. After that, the closest Tyson could come to justifying even a $9.95 pay-per-view ticket was by singing a duet with Johnny Mathis, not fighting the unknown and unrelated Buster Mathis, Jr.

Less enterprising men than King would have gotten caught up brooding. Angrier men would have gone ahead with a flawed plan. Not Don. He started ruminatin’ and calculatin’ and in no time at all, came up with a new plan that won’t lose him a dime:

Sell this one fight to Murdoch for an undisclosed amount, cut a side deal to show the next five fights on Murdoch’s SkySport network outside the United States, and then call it, as King did at the his news conference, “Mike’s way of saying thanks to the American people.”

Of course, what King is really thanking the American people for is being stupid enough to make 1.53 million pay-per-view buys (generating a record $63 million) the last time some schmo volunteered to hit Tyson’s right hand with his face.

By making this fight free, the first time a major fight has been shown on prime time broadcast television in more than a decade, King is gambling the same people will have forgotten McNeeley ever existed when the time to sell Tyson’s third fight comes around.

It’s a gamble that could backfire. Boxing’s golden rule says never give suckers nothin’ for nothin’. Promoters know that no one wants to pay for something they got even once for free, and that pay-per-view is what made King and his ilk rich in the first place. It’s also the reason overweight, owe-me-a-living champions only fight once every six months.

Now, they might all have to actually work for their money.

“This is humiliating,” said Rock Newman, another rival promoter. “On the street, we would say, ‘You just chumped yourself.”’

Maybe so. But enjoy it while you can. The next time Don King gives anybody anything for free will be the first time.