Don Elbaum is a boxing guy with every fiber that's in him. He was born on June 16, 1931, and grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania. When he was young, his uncle took him to see Willie Pep fight.

"His name was Danny Greenstein," Elbaum said of his uncle. "He was an amateur boxer. Great fighter. Forty-two wins and no losses as an amateur with forty-one knockouts. He was also a legendary street-fighter in New Bedford and Fall River [towns in Massachusetts]. Al Weil, who managed Rocky Marciano, begged my uncle to turn pro but he refused. He fought for fun."

"Anyway, Uncle Danny was my hero and he took me to my first fight. Willie Pep against Paulie Jackson at Sargeant Field in New Bedford. It was outdoors; a great summer night. Pep was featherweight champion of the world and he'd beaten Jackson twice before. He won this one, too. He boxed Jackson's ears off. He was incredible; a virtuoso artist in total control. At one point, Jackson got him in a corner, threw 20 punches and missed with every one of them. Each judge gave Willie all 10 rounds. I was eight years old and I was totally mesmerized, in awe. I went home that night and told my mother that I wanted to be a fighter. Everybody laughed at me, but I was hooked. Ever since then, all I’ve wanted out of life is to be in boxing. That night either made my life or it destroyed my life. It depends on how you look at it."

“I had my first amateur fight when I was 13,” Elbaum continued. “I weighed 126 pounds. The opponent was sixteen and weighed 140, but a lot of his weight was in his stomach. He was out of shape and had a huge belly. I got in the ring and I was terrified. The other guy kept coming forward, throwing punches. And I ran. I didn’t dance. It wasn’t side-to-side movement. I ran backwards as fast as I could to get as far away from him as I could. The entire first round, I didn’t throw a punch. Second round, same thing. My cornerman, a guy named Frankie Schwartz, was screaming at me. ‘Throw the right hand.’ So finally, I stopped, closed my eyes, and threw a right hand as hard as I could. It hit him flush in the belly. There was a loud ‘Oooooh.’ The other guy doubled over and threw up. So they stopped the fight and gave me a knockout.”

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Elbaum's version of events continues.

“I won my first 15 fights. I could box. I had a good chin. I was beating tough guys. And I had my dreams. All fighters do. Fight No. 16 was in Erie, Pennsylvania. I was fighting a guy who was just out of the Marines and on the verge of beating the crap out of me. I was doing all right until he stunned me with a left hook and followed with a right hand that landed on the top of my head. Then he screamed. He’d broken his hand on my head, so they stopped it. That was my second knockout. And I got my third knockout when I cut a guy and they stopped the fight. I had a great chin and I was a good boxer, but I couldn’t break an egg.”

“So now I’m 16-0,” Elbaum reminisced. “And I’m more sure than ever that, someday, I’ll be a world champion. I didn’t think it. I knew it. My next fight, I lost a decision at a tournament in Chicago. I felt bad. But hey, it happens. By the time I was 19, my record was 40-7. But the fights I’d lost were to fighters who were bigger than me, older than me, more experienced than me. There was always a reason for losing.”

Then something bad happened.

“I lost three fights in a row,” Elbaum recounted. “And I realized I’d never be a world champion. It was like a death sentence. I was devastated. I’d thought my destiny was to be like Willie Pep. Now my dream was dead and it was like the world had come to an end.”

Elbaum is always pursuing a dream. When he was 15, he left home to join a carnival.

"It was summer vacation," he recalled. "School was out and a carnival was passing through town. It had throwing balls through a hoop, popping balloons, everything you can think of. One of the games was, you chose a number and they spun a wheel and, if your number came up, you won a doll. The girl spinning the wheel was the daughter of the guy who owned the carnival and she was drop-dead gorgeous beautiful. I spent eight hours talking with her. I went home that night and told my parents that I was leaving home to join the carnival. My father understood. My mother had a different view. But I did it and ran a penny-pitching game with the carnival for a month. The owner's daughter and I really hit it off. I had a ball."

The following summer Elbaum left home again. This time, it was to play an Indian in a Wild West show. "The owner of the show was named Wild Bill," he remembers. "I can't remember his last name. He had a beautiful daughter, too, but I was less successful with her than with the carnival owner's daughter."

Elbaum has spent his entire adult life in boxing as a promoter, matchmaker, manager and jack-of-all-trades. Over one five-year stretch in the 1980s, he promoted 196 fights at Tropicana Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

He also claims to have had 10 pro fights of his own from 1960-71, going 6-3-1 with no knockouts either way. Four of these bouts were on cards that he himself promoted and were necessitated because a fighter fell out at the last minute and no other substitute was available.

At any given time, Elbaum seems to be juggling 10 balls in the air. Often, he drops nine of them. Sometimes he drops all 10. But he personifies Robert Browning's immortal words, "A man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for."

Elbaum has been referred to as "a low-grade hustler who's too low to grade" and "a charming rogue without the charm." That's by people who like him. He has also been described by critics as a lowlife, a hustler, pond scum and a character.

"Don't call me a character," Elbaum says. "I hate that word."

I think that Elbaum is fantastic. He's a quintessential boxing guy. His 2019 induction into the International Boxing Hall of Fame was richly deserved. The sweet science is in his soul. As far as he’s concerned, nothing transcends boxing because boxing is everything. He's part of an ever-dwindling group of men — Bruce Trampler, Don Majeski, Ron Katz, and Russell Peltz — who got into boxing young, loved it, understood it, stayed with it and have helped keep its traditions alive.

Elbaum gave Don King his start in boxing (more on that later). He has connived with referees and judges and once planned to promote fights in Nevada at an upscale brothel called Sherry's Ranch. "Bordello Boxing" (as the venture was known) failed to get off the ground when the state legislature put its foot down.

"It's a shame, really," Elbaum said, acknowledging defeat. "Boxing and prostitution is a marriage made in heaven, or wherever. The greatest thing anyone ever said about boxing is that it’s the red-light district of professional sports. Red-light districts intrigue people."

Jerry Izenberg recalls going into a shoe repair stop in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and listening to Elbaum haggle with the cobbler over the price of shoelaces that he needed for boxing gloves that would be used in fights that night.

"Elbaum," Izenberg later wrote, "lives on nerve and hustle and dreams he will never realize."

Elbaum has dreamed of enticing Oprah Winfrey to serve as the ring announcer for one of his fight cards ("It would introduce her to a whole new audience"), convincing Mick Jagger to sing the national anthem at one of his events (“I know it’s a longshot") and getting Sharon Stone to serve as a roundcard girl ("I think Sharon Stone is hot. I don’t suppose you have a telephone number for her?”).

The most famous tale involving Elbaum dates to 1965. Sugar Ray Robinson was nearing the end of his glorious ring career and readying to fight Peter Schmidt in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Elbaum, who was promoting the bout, invited media to a publicity dinner.

"I looked around for the two most battered boxing gloves I could find," Elbaum later recalled. "The highlight of the dinner was when I got up and said, 'Ray, don’t ask me how I got these. But 25 years ago, you made your professional debut at Madison Square Garden, and these are the gloves you wore in that fight.’ Ray’s eyes actually teared up. He was genuinely moved by the moment. He took the gloves and cradled them in his arms like he was holding a newborn babe.”

Then someone suggested that Robinson put the gloves on for a photo op. That was when the world discovered that Don Elbaum had given Sugar Ray Robinson two left gloves.

Trampler, a Hall of Fame matchmaker, recently declared, "There are no bad stories about Don Elbaum." Herewith a selection of anecdotes, quotes and other offerings.

Let's start with Elbaum and women. Don was married once.

"I was 19," he recalled years ago. "She was 29, a great dancer, on her way to Paris when she met me. And then she made the biggest mistake of her life. She married me."

The marriage lasted on paper for 14 years.

“I’m dating this dynamite woman who I think is 38,” Elbaum confided when he was in his 70s. “The only problem is, she keeps asking me how old I am. So I told her, ‘I’m 40, but I look like crap.’”

Other notable Elbaum quotes include — drumroll, please — “The way I was brought up, you open doors for women and treat them right. Even if the woman I’m with is a hooker, I’ll open the door for her . . . If you put a pair of boxing gloves on a good-looking woman, she immediately looks sexier."

Legend has it that Elbaum once went to the finals of the Olympic boxing trials and complained that there weren’t any roundcard girls. Be that as it may, there was a time when Don promoted fights in Steubenville, Ohio.

"It was a wild town with some of the best-run whorehouses in the country," he reminisced years later. "The guys who ran them gave me professional hookers to use as roundcard girls for free. From my point of view, it was great. I didn't have to pay the girls and I sold extra tickets because the people who ran the whorehouses bought seats for their customers in order to display their wares."

Another time, a roundcard girl saved one of Elbaum's fighters from defeat.

"I had a light heavyweight named Tom Girardi, a prospect, a good kid. Another fighter pulled out and Tom took the fight on short notice against some guy whose record was 2-6. I figured it was safe, but Tom got tired. It was a six-rounder, and after Round 3, Tom came back to the corner and said he didn't think he could go six. Anyway, the referee had been staring at the roundcard girl all night. She was a doll. After Round 4, I handed the girl a card that said '6' instead of '5.' Then I started shouting, ‘Last round, Tommy. You can do it.' Well, of course, the referee is staring at the girl. He thinks it's Round 6, makes the fighters touch gloves and says the fight is over after what's really only Round 5. I cut the gloves off real quick, and Tom, who was completely out of gas, won a split decision."

More recently, Elbaum's appeal to the fairer sex was evidenced by a telephone call that I received.

"I gotta tell you this," he proclaimed. "It's a classic. I was on a train yesterday going from Philadelphia to Providence. I was reading the New York Times magazine section. It had a big article about Glenda Jackson playing King Lear. King Lear is a great play. I think Shakespeare wrote it. And Glenda Jackson was on the magazine cover."

"Anyway," Elbaum continued, "there was this woman sitting across the aisle from me. I'm guessing she was in her 60s. I glanced over at her. We made eye contact. And then she said to me, 'It's so nice to be sitting across the aisle from an intellectual.'"

And then there was Elbaum's interaction with the man who became a symbol of wrongdoing as the #MeToo movement evolved.

"It was in the early 1970s," Elbaum recounted. “I was promoting fight cards in Buffalo and living in the Statler Hotel or The Sheraton, I forget which. There was a fantastic deli called Harvey’s attached to the hotel that had great corned beef sandwiches. One day, the deli owner said to me, ‘Don, let me sell tickets for your fights.’ I told him OK, and he did it for four or five shows. He could sell. He was good. And once he started selling tickets for me, I never had to pay for a corned beef sandwich.

“Anyway, time goes by. I move to New York. And one day, there’s a story in the newspaper that Harvey is now in Manhattan and has started a film company. I called his office and left a message congratulating him. His secretary called me back and said Harvey was thrilled to hear from me and would be in touch shortly. And that was it. I never heard from him again.”

Harvey, of course, was Harvey Weinstein, the Academy-Award-winning film producer who was subsequently outed and criminally convicted as a bullying sexual predator.

“I liked Harvey,” Elbaum noted. “The guy I’m reading about now isn’t the guy I thought I knew. But I guess I was wrong. What he did disgusts me.”

Chicanery is part of boxing. And Elbaum is part of boxing. Boxing commissions virtually never weigh the gloves that fighters wear in a fight. Hence ...

"There were times when I manipulated a situation so my guy wore six-ounce gloves and the opponent wore eights," Elbaum admitted. "I've done it with eights and 10s, too. But I haven't done it in this century. Whatever I did, the statute of limitations has run on it."

More notably ...

"I had a fighter named Lou Bizzarro. Good chin, no punch. In 1976, I got him a title fight against Roberto Duran in Erie, Pennsylvania. I tell people that I had a 30-foot ring specially built for the fight. But the truth is, it was only 28 feet inside. Anyway, the timekeeper was Bernie Blacher. Bernie was a dynamite friend of mine. Before the fight, I told him, 'Bernie, whatever you do, if my kid gets Duran hurt, keep the round going. And if Lou is hurt, please, ring the bell.' So the fight starts. Lou is running like crazy, and Duran can't catch him because the ring is as big as a parking lot. Finally, in the seventh or eighth round, Duran nails him. And the bell rings to end the round, which was maybe two minutes and 10 seconds long. Then there's an extra 15 seconds between rounds which gives Lou a bit more time to recover. Next round, Duran nails him again. Ding. There's the bell. That round was maybe 40 seconds short, and now there's a 90-second rest period between rounds. Round 10, it happens again. And all of a sudden, there's a huge commotion at ringside because some girl from the TV truck has come into the arena and is screaming at Bernie, 'Goddamn it. You're killing our commercials.' She actually fought Bernie for the hammer he was using to ring the bell. But God bless him, he didn't give it up. There were five short rounds and five long rest periods before Duran stopped Lou in the 14th round."

Elbaum spent time with Muhammad Ali in Canada before "The Greatest" fought George Chuvalo in 1966.

“I was running shows in Toronto," Don recounted. "Angelo [Dundee] called and asked if I’d get them a place to train, so I set them up in Sully’s Gym. The deal was, I could charge admission and keep half the money and the other half went to Ali. The gym held 300 people. I charged five dollars a head, which was a lot for those days. And it was unreal. The place was jammed every day. I was pushing people in. Some would leave and then we’d replace them so we were pulling in 2,000 dollars a day. At the end of each session, I gave Ali his money. He was putting a 1,000 dollars a day in his pocket. Then we’d go back to our motel and he’d give it all away. Kids would come and gather around him. There were 30, maybe 40 of them at first, although as word got around the number grew. And what Ali did was set the kids up by size and ability in races. Every kid who was in a race got something. The winners got more but the losers won, too. And the way he worked it, fast kids were racing against other fast kids, and slow fat kids were racing against slow fat ones. The youngest were five or six years old, and the oldest he let participate were around 12. After the second day, I said, ‘Cassius’ — by then he wanted to be called Ali, but I still slipped from time to time — I said, ‘This is a hell of a story. I want to call the Toronto newspapers so they can come down and get a picture of it.’ And he said, ‘Please don’t. I’m having too much fun. If the papers come and write about it, my people are going to get upset and I won’t be able to do it anymore.’"

Elbaum, as noted above, also helped choreograph Don King's start in boxing.

“It began with a boxing exhibition," Elbaum recounted. "King went to [rock-and-roll star] Lloyd Price and asked Lloyd to call Ali to box a charity exhibition for the Forest City Hospital in Cleveland. Ali agreed to it for free, but Don needed someone to orchestrate the show. That’s where I came in. I was doing some fights in Cleveland and had gone to Buffalo for a fight card at the Buffalo Auditorium. Around five in the evening, I got a phone call from a fellow named Clarence Rogers, an assistant district attorney in Cleveland. Clarence told me, ‘Don, there’s someone in my office that I’d like you to meet. His name is Don King and he wants to do something with boxing.’ I’d never heard of King before. But all of a sudden, there’s this voice on the phone shouting, ‘Don Elbaum! Don Elbaum!’ I’m all the way in Buffalo and I can hear him without the telephone. And King says, ‘There’s a Black hospital here in Cleveland that’s going under, and we’ve got to save it. I want to do a boxing show for that Black hospital and bring in Muhammad Ali. But there’s no boxing in Cleveland without Don Elbaum because Don Elbaum is boxing and you’re the only guy who can save this hospital. I’m at Clarence’s office and we’re staying here until you get here.’ I said, ‘Don, I’ll be glad to work with you, but I’m in Buffalo and I’m staying overnight.’ And King said, ‘No, no, no. We’re not moving 'til you come back to Cleveland. I don’t care if it’s two, three, four o’clock in the morning.’ I said, ‘Don, I can’t come. I’ll get there tomorrow.’ And in the course of the conversation, he asked, ‘What do you charge for things like this?’ I said, ‘Five thousand dollars. I’m the matchmaker. I have to cover my phone calls, pay expenses and have a little left over for myself.’ And of course, before the conversation was done, he had me down to a thousand, and I hadn’t even met the guy yet. And sure enough, I wound up leaving Buffalo that night, going to Cleveland and meeting a little after midnight in Clarence’s office."

“That was how I met Don King. And we decided to arrange the show by matching three or four guys who meant something in the Cleveland area and then having Ali’s exhibition as the main event. I set up the whole card, made all the matches and Don King fell in love with boxing. At the fight, he said, ‘Boy, this is fantastic.’ And I gotta tell you, I flipped over Don King. I said to him, ‘You’ve got to get out of the numbers business. You’ve got to get out of Cleveland. You’ve got to come to New York. Boxing needs a Black promoter. It’s about time, and you’re the one.’ I would sit with Don and his wife, Henrietta, and tell her, ‘Let me get him into boxing. I promise you, he’ll make it big.’ And that was the beginning. We were partners for eight months, and after that I walked. I brought him to New York, gave him half of my end of Earnie Shavers and before long he had the whole fighter. He just took what he wanted and ran over everybody. Like the Forest City Hospital exhibit. The show grossed 86,000 thousand dollars. I remember that figure. Later on, someone told me the hospital only got 1,500. I remind myself of that from time to time because whenever I see Don now he tells me, ‘Elbaum, if you’d stuck with me, you’d have been a millionaire.' And my answer is always, ‘Don, if I’d stuck with you, I’d have wound up in jail.'"

On March 17, 2007, Elbaum promoted a fight card at the Grand Casino in Hinckley, Minnesota. The event was unique because, to save money, Elbaum refereed all six bouts.

“I was very fair,” Don noted afterward. “And there was a fantastic fight. Zach ‘Jungle Boy’ Walters and ‘Gentleman’ James Johnson really got into it. James hit Zach in the balls, and Zach complained, ‘He hit me low.’ So I told Zach, ‘Then you hit him low.’ What a fight.”

“Half of the referees today don’t know what they’re doing,” Elbaum added. “Believe me, I’m a good referee.”

As for the travails of being a promoter, Elbaum was once putting together a fight card in Sweden and telephoned a manager to ask if one of his fighters would participate. The opponent, purse and travel expenses were discussed. Then the manager told Elbaum, “I’ll have to think about it. What country is Sweden in?”

Closer to home, in 2001, 7-foot-2-inch Nikolai Valuev fought George Linberger in Atlantic City. Elbaum, who was co-promoting the bout, hosted a pre-fight press conference at the Russian Tea Room in New York. "Blini and caviar will be served," the media advisory promised. At least there were Blini.

On another occasion, Elbaum was confronted with a fighter who he'd advertised as being 7-foot-1 was really only 6-7.

"He's short for his height," Don explained.

Notes on a Telephone Conversation with Don Elbaum.

Don: You’re not going to believe this.

Thomas Hauser: Since I’m talking with you, that’s probably true.

Don: No, you gotta listen to me on this one. It’s a great story, and you’re the first guy I’m calling. You’re the only one who can write this the way it should be written.

Tom: In other words, Dan Rafael, Ron Borges, Mike Rosenthal and Norm Frauenheim all turned you down.

Don: Don’t be a wise guy. This is a great great story and I’m offering it to you first. I got a heavyweight. He used to be a banker. His name is Jeremiah Williams. I’m promoting a card in Flint, Michigan, and Jeremiah will be on the card. He’s a great guy, 37 years old, used to play football at Wake Forest. But here’s the thing: Jeremiah looks exactly like O.J. Simpson. He could be O.J. Simpson’s identical twin. If you could get O.J. Simpson out of prison, put him in a time machine and make him 37 years old again, he’d look exactly like Jeremiah.

Tom: Don, I’m looking at Boxrec.com as we speak. Jeremiah isn’t 37. He’s 44. And his record is 2-9.

Don: You know something? That’s a problem you have. You always let details get in the way of a good story.

And by the way, Elbaum is the promoter who put Michael Buffer in a boxing ring for the first time.

"It was in Atlantic City in the summer of 1982," Buffer later recalled. "I was working as a model and pitching myself to casinos, trying to get in the door as a ring announcer. I'd met Elbaum before and been to a few of his shows at the Tropicana. I asked him if I could work one of his fight cards. And he told me no, he already had a ring announcer, but there was another life-changing opportunity he could make available to me."

And the life-changing opportunity was?

"A publicity event for his next show at the Tropicana," Buffer recounted. "Don didn't pay me. But he said it would be an incredible opportunity because hundreds, maybe thousands, of people would see me. That's how I wound up in a boxing ring in a parking lot outside a mall in Pleasantville, New Jersey, on a hot, sticky muggy summer afternoon. At most, there were 15 people watching. I introduced the fighters. There were a few rounds of sparring. And that was it."

"Now let me tell you my version," Elbaum said when apprised of Buffer's recitation. "I was using Ed Derian as a ring announcer back then. Michael was sitting next to me at one of my shows and said, 'I could do that.' So I gave him his first break. Michael is where he is today because of the exposure he got that afternoon in the parking lot in Pleasantville, New Jersey."

Yet through it all, Elbaum has been something of a purist. "The thing that keeps us all going," he once said, "is when we put together a four-round fight and it's a barnburner and the fans are on their feet cheering. That feels so good."

"And you know what makes me mad? I see guys, their hands are being wrapped. One hand is being wrapped and the fighter is on the phone with the other. No. You're supposed to be paying attention to the handwrap 100 percent. How does it feel? Is the gauze and tape going on right? When the fight starts, your cell phone can't help you. You don't punch with your cell phone."

So that’s Don Elbaum — one of the last of a dying breed who have been in boxing's trenches for what seems like forever.

Times can be rough. "I'm broke," Don told me several years ago. "I can't make any money. I'm staying in a Motel 6 in Erie, Pennsylvania, because I can stay here cheap. But I want to tell you something. I woke up this morning and I said to myself, 'Fuck all that. I'm in the International Boxing Hall of Fame. And no one can ever take that away from me.' Every morning when I get up, I kiss my ring. Don't ask me why because I don't know why. I just know that it felt so good getting into the Hall and it still feels good. Every day there's sunshine in my life because I'm in the one boxing hall of fame that really matters."

And Elbaum still has hope. He knows that someday he’ll be at a toughman contest in Kentucky or Pennsylvania or Missouri or Tennessee. He’ll see some monster heavyweight who has more natural talent than any fighter who ever lived and needs an advisor to help him out. Don will step into the breach and the two of them will make history together.