The first big fight I ever saw was Ali-Frazier at the Garden

The first big fight I ever saw was Ali-Frazier at the Garden. I saved my pocket money and sat in the cinema all night, open-mouthed. While Warren is due in court this month for a costly and potentially ruinous legal battle with King, Maloney will be helping to prepare Lennox Lewis to become the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world beneath the great chandelier in Madison Square Garden.His own involvement in such a momentous sporting occasion still requires the odd pinch “The Garden, that was a masterstroke by Don. There was a time when Maloney made the tea for Mickey Duff and was happy to be seen in the company of such movers and shakers as Frank Warren “Now I’m their equal,” he says. And Coventry won 13-12, an apt metaphor for the shifting alliances on the ring apron. Maloney did some publicity before the game against Bedford and the club had its biggest gate of the season.

Mere coincidence, of course, that Bedford happens to be Frank Warren’s club. Recently, he persuaded King to become US patron of Coventry rugby club. His name is there on the programme masthead, plus a little fanfare by King, all bombast and Churchill quotes (penned by Maloney himself, as it happens). Some are potentially brilliant (hiring the first woman MC through an ad in The Stage), some crackpot (persuading the Euro-sceptics to sponsor one of his shows), others plainly mischievious. I read the first page and got someone else to check it for me Then, I rang him back. I said, ‘Don, the offer you made was fantastic, but you told me slavery died over 200 years ago and you also told me only black guys were sold into slavery.

I’m a little white guy and we’re moving into the next Millennium and you’re still trying to put me back into slavery’.”But Maloney knew that years of haggling and evasion were over the moment King arrived in London to do business. “Before then we had always had to go to the States,” Maloney said. Lewis-Holyfield was made.Conversation with Maloney hovers dangerously close to the edge of the absurd Ideas swirl around and then vanish like smoke. People still ask me how I can keep talking to him, but this is a business built on hype and propaganda and showmanship I’ve got quite close to Don over the last few months He sent me a contract recently, pages of it. They moved me from being a 5ft 3in boxing manager into the world’s spotlight. A Don King doll now holds pride of place on the windowsill in Maloney’s office and a deal on a permanent partnership is close to completion.”He’s the ultimate,” Maloney grins “All those insults were great for me.