Marty Corwin didn’t even realize Don King had hired him until it was too late.
Corwin is almost certainly the most experienced producer and director of live boxing events in the world, following a combined 32 years working with King and Bob Arum. But in 1993 he was an executive producer for the Washington, DC-area Paramount station, overseeing broadcasts of the then-Bullets (now the Wizards) of the NBA, the NHL's Capitals and the Baltimore Orioles of Major League Baseball (DC itself at that point not having an MLB team), when he was asked to fly to Florida and interview for a position with a company called TVP Productions.
When he arrived at the address he had been given, however, not only was there no signage for TVP, the office receptionist had never heard of it. The building was, in fact, the headquarters of Don King Productions; the staff member who had reached out to Corwin confessed she had been afraid that if she mentioned either King or boxing, Corwin wouldn’t have made the journey.
King, however, was not around for the interview, having been called away unexpectedly on business; Corwin spent several hours with others at the company, explained he knew nothing about boxing, and thought that was the end of it.
The very next day, however, he received a call at his home in Maryland; King was deeply sorry to have missed him and could he return to Florida immediately? Corwin, deciding to keep an open mind and flew back down, only for King to be absent again.
Then King asked Corwin to meet him in London, only to change that to Las Vegas. Again, he flew home without meeting the man himself.
Finally, at the fourth time of asking, Corwin met King in Florida, and this time the promoter lavished attention and praise on his visitor. Flattered and intrigued, Corwin nonetheless had little interest in broadcasting boxing; the episode had been fun, but now that he had finally met King, he was ready to fly home. But before he did, King asked him to name his price.
Corwin responded with a figure he assumed would be unacceptable; King laughed and shook his hand, and just like that, instead of flying home, Corwin was being booked on a 6am flight to Mexico City in his new role as vice president of television production for Don King Productions.
Corwin would spend eight years with King before moving on to King’s arch-rival Bob Arum, which is where he’s been for the past 25 years. And now he has written a book, Arum and King: Six Decades of Boxing Gold, in which he recounts his experiences working with the two most prominent boxing promoters of the past half-century and change.
(Full disclosure: this reporter counts Corwin as a friend, and has worked for him on a few occasions.)
The book is an insight into both Arum and King, as well as the various other personalities who populate the sport – notably Bob Sheridan, “The Colonel”, with whom Corwin broadcast literally hundreds of fights. It also pulls back the curtain on the plate-spinning, stress-inducing high wire act that is producing and directing a live boxing show, all of which is magnified when managing not just one broadcaster’s programming but juggling the international feed with the wants and needs of any number of national broadcast outlets.
“When [Mike] Tyson fought [Evander] Holyfield, for example, I had 14 trucks in the TV compound, because I had various countries who had their own trucks and I had to take care of all those people in addition to doing my telecast,” he explained recently to BoxingScene. “I had a truck for Japan; a truck for the UK. I had a truck for France, another truck for Germany. They all had their own trucks, and I’m taking care of all of them. It really looked like a mini Super Bowl, and I had 88 announcers ringside speaking seven or eight languages. It was amazing.”
As the person responsible for the international feed – the view of a fight that is shown around the world – his production responsibilities are more expansive than for those putting together the broadcast seen by, for example, viewers on ESPN.
“When I go on the air with the world feed, it’s a complete show from beginning to end,” he explains. “What that means is, when ESPN goes to its desk for a segment, I’m producing my own eight minutes or so with feeds and clips and video that I’ve put together.”
In a sense, a TV producer is like a referee, in that both know the night has gone well when nobody is talking about them afterwards. What few fans ever realize is what goes into making a live broadcast pass without an obvious hitch.
“I talk in the book about what it’s like to walk into a control room for the first time in a live production and see the wall of monitors,” he says. “At home you only watch one monitor. You don’t realize how many decisions are being made to change what’s on that screen, so that you see what you see, and the audio cues and the graphics cues and the talking to announcers. There is a lot to it.”
In his book, Corwin recounts a few occasions when broadcasts came perilously close to either not making it to air or having the feed rudely interrupted, such as the time in Tijuana, Mexico when the generator caught fire during a broadcast, with a technician reassuring Corwin that everything would be fine because “the fight is almost over”.
And then there was the occasion, on the evening before what would become known as the Bite Fight, when Corwin realized his blow-by-blow commentator was missing.
Sheridan, who had had two heart attacks at that point in his life, felt chest pains and, recognizing the tell-tale signs of a third, commandeered a cab outside the MGM Grand and headed for a hospital. By the time Corwin found him, he had already had an angioplasty and would need two more procedures over the next several days, but even as Corwin lined up a replacement, Sheridan refused to countenance missing the show. So he discharged himself, and as Tyson snapped and bit Holyfield’s ear in the third round, Sheridan was calling the action for the world feed, his cardiologist and a defibrillator perched next to him.
Sheridan looms large in Corwin’s book, as befitting a truly larger-than-life character.
“The Colonel was the best announcer I've ever worked with, and remember, I did NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball for a dozen years before boxing,” Corwin says. “He was the best for making a lousy fight watchable, making a good fight great and making a great fight unforgettable. He was the best at filling in spaces. He would keep it interesting. He had stories. One time, in Thackerville, Oklahoma, the ring rope broke. Took them an hour and 10 minutes to fix it. The Colonel filled for that whole time. Who else can do that?”
Naturally also prominent in the book’s pages are Arum and King, of whom Corwin is frequently defensive. While acknowledging their flaws and their mistakes, he is also keen to underline the talent and application that carried them to the top of their chosen business.
“Being a promoter is one of the hardest jobs in the world because of the amount of time it takes, the negotiating round the clock for all of sorts of things,” he says. “I came up with what I thought was a good analogy, and I talk about boxing promotion being like setting up a shaky card table with four legs. One leg is the fighter, one leg is the venue. One leg is the broadcaster. One leg is the public, and if any of those shaky legs goes the whole table goes over. What a difficult thing to do. So both of those guys have an incredibly different, difficult job. They're sniped at by everybody, even if they're really good at what they do. The public snipes at them. The reporters snipe at them. Their own fighters. So, it's such a hard job, and I don't ignore the things that people call controversies related to these two guys, but the point of the book is to acknowledge their accomplishments, that no matter what you think of them as human beings, they both managed to accomplish amazing things and put out some amazing fights.”
That Arum has outlasted his old rival is, Corwin suspects, down to one particular personality trait.
“Don King did everything himself,” he explains. “He had to be on top of every detail. Not only did he know what was in every contract, he was the only one who did. In contrast, Bob Arum put good people in positions to do what they needed to do and trusted them with authority – guys like Carl Moretti, Brad Jacobs, Brad Goodman, and Bruce Trampler. Bob trusted the right people. Don never handed the reins to anyone else.”
As Corwin and I talked, news leaked that ESPN would be allowing its contract with Arum’s Top Rank to expire in the summer, leaving boxing without a linear TV outlet in the United States, and arguably the sport’s biggest promoter looking for a new platform for its fights. It is all part of the change that is sweeping the media industry generally, and boxing specifically, in recent years. And while Corwin has no idea what lies ahead, he is sanguine about what the future might hold. After all, he never expected to be here in the first place.
“I personally don’t know anything – it’s not that I’m being cagey,” he says. “They certainly don’t confide in me. But let’s just say ESPN doesn’t renew. What will happen to Top Rank products? Who will they go with? Most likely, one of the streaming services. If they go to that streaming service, will they still need me to do a world feed? I don’t know. But if, after 44 years in television, July is my end in boxing, I had a pretty good run.”
Kieran Mulvaney has written, broadcast and podcast about boxing for HBO, Showtime, ESPN and Reuters, among other outlets. He presently co-hosts the “Fighter Health Podcast” with Dr. Margaret Goodman. He also writes regularly for National Geographic, has written several books on the Arctic and Antarctic, and is at his happiest hanging out with wild polar bears. His website is www.kieranmulvaney.com