King sells, but does Steele need this pitch?
2006-10-18
Source: Baltimore Sun
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rss feedDon King alighted from Lt. Gov. Michael Steele's campaign bus, smiling broadly, waving two small American flags and sporting his American-flag-Statue-of-Liberty tie. The small crowd of onlookers cheered as King and Steele walked to television microphones set up for the occasion.
"It's great to be a citizen of the United States of America in the great state of Maryland," King, campaigning for Steele's U.S. Senate candidacy, boomed as the crowd applauded. In one brief scene, I got just one example of how King rose from serving time for a manslaughter conviction to become the premier promoter in boxing.
He did it with a combination of charisma, enthusiasm, ebullience and salesmanship. Why this guy wasted the first part of his life running numbers in Cleveland -- a line of work that led to his killing a man in 1966 -- is beyond me. There's a rapper named Cassidy who, in his song "I'm A Hustler," brags that "I can sell salt to a slug."
Trust me: King is better at that than Cassidy. King's the master of it.
King is also a bundle of contradictions, much like Muhammad Ali, the boxer whose fights helped King rise to the top of the world in promoting fights. King spouts down-home, God-bless-America patriotism and laces it with a dash of black nationalism. (One writer pointed out that King is the only guy who has successfully done this. King is probably the only guy who could do it.)
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