Back in the Eighties when I had a radio sports talk show, I actually had the chance to have both boxing promoters Bob Arum and Don King as my guests on the program at different times. Arum was on by phone and King was in the studio, and they took very different approaches to their jobs - just as you'd expect. Arum was straight-forward and factual, while King was entertaining and full of bluster. I have friends who still remember the time King got so caught up in his work that he could only yell, "Excitement! Excitement! Excitement!"
They were both promoting in their own ways, and you could see why they were very successful in attracting attention for their fights. Sometimes they were at war with each other, sometimes they had forced truces for a while. But when they were at the top of their games, mostly from the 1970s through the 2000s, they were never boring.
When a book landed in front of me by the only person who was a department head of both organizations, well, I knew it had to be read and reviewed. Unfortunately, "Arum and King" doesn't live up to most expectations that a reader might carry into it.
Marty Corwin is the author in question here. He headed up the television production departments for both King and Arum's companies, in that order. You wouldn't think anyone had the personality to survive working for such different bosses, but somehow Corwin made it work.
Let's pretend that one of the promoters was the editor of the book, and the reader had to guess which one. You'd definitely say King was in charge. The volume is rather scattershot in its approach. The chapters seem like a mere jumping-off point as the story goes in all sorts of directions in its less than 200 pages of type. In other words, it feels like a Don King news conference - and perhaps an overpriced ($32 admission) at that. While the chapters give something of an outline to where things are going, the table of contents isn't exactly a road map into what's inside. In other words, there are all sorts of odd turns along the way. It's rather confusing in spots.
Meanwhile, there are obvious mistakes that come up along the way. There are some factual errors in the form of misspellings that pop up, and there are quite a few redundancies here. You should know that every Kindle book comes with a disclaimer saying that the text isn't final, and shouldn't be quoted until a final edition is put out. We'll have to see how much cleaning is done before the final product comes out, but quite a bit is needed.
This also isn't a particular long book, at less than 200 pages. At times it feels rather padded, when descriptions of fights and fighters and listed at length. Reading it makes one think "I get the idea." The two promoters both come quite well here, even though both of them had some, um, issues along the ways in the form of legal issues and charges along the way. This is an affectionate recounting rather than a tell-all.
"Arum and King" does have some value. The sport of boxing is nothing if not unpredictable, and Corwin certainly had some adventures. When Mike Tyson first got out of prison, Corwin was on the private plane that took King, Tyson and a few others back to a home in Ohio. Closer to the job, Corwin was responsible for the trains arriving on time when it came to massive television broadcasts of bouts that were beamed around the world. He had to do a lot of juggling along the way, and he seems to have made it all work for the most part. That's a quality that made him very valuable in the day; no wonder both promoters hired him.
Both Arum and King have cut down on the workload way back in recent years as they are well into senior citizen status. Corwin essentially writes that one of the reasons boxing mattered so much in the days of their promoting primes was that they were geniuses in calling attention to their bouts. There are a number of reasons why "big fights" have gotten rare these days, and the loss of influence from Arum and King certainly is on that list.
It feels like there's a decent book roaming around in the middle of "Arum and King." Corwin probably needed a better editor to draw out and highlight the good stories and make them flow much smoother. Barring some good-sized surgery before publication, most boxing fans probably will want to pass on this one.
Two stars
Learn more about this book from Amazon.com. (As an Amazon affiliate, I earn money from qualified purchases.)
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