RIP Don Elbaum: The Library of Elbaum

“I have a lot to do,” he told me, his voice weaker than it had been only a few months ago.

Elbaum had been working on an autobiography with writer and former New Jersey police captain Joe Botti.

“How many pages is it going to be?” I asked.

“That’s the problem, we don’t know what to leave out,” he replied.

The book can start by telling us about the days when Elbaum was a concert pianist performing duets with his mother at the Warner Theater when he was still a child. It can tell us about the off-Broadway play he wrote about Liza Minnelli. It can tell us about his friendships with Frank Sinatra, Robert DeNiro, Bob Marley, and Prince.

“He gave me a purple umbrella – I still have it.”

“Marley was a fan of Simon Brown,” he said of the welterweight champion he used to manage. “He came to his fights in Jamaica.”

Boxing was a big part of Elbaum’s life, and Elbaum was a big part of boxing’s life.

He promoted Sugar Ray Robinson and Willie Pep during their final years and was ecstatic when I told him I was in touch with Rudolph Bent.

“I promoted his fight against Ray!” he shouted. Bent, a former middleweight from Belize who was living in New York when I met him, had been in the ring against the likes of Robinson and Jimmy Ellis . When I gave Bent the phone and told him who it was, he was just as excited as Elbaum was. The two spoke and laughed for minutes.

Every conversation with Elbaum was filled with laughs and informative gems that only someone like him would know.

“You know,” he started, “Ray told me he could have finished against Maxim. That he could have pushed two more rounds.” He continued, “But he didn’t want the Archie Moore fight. He said it would have been too hard to avoid if he won.”

He told me that Prince was a huge Aaron Pryor fan and that he once gave him ringside seats for one of his fights, who he was promoting at the time. That’s when he got the purple umbrella. A few months later, when Prince heard Elbaum and he were in Las Vegas at the same time, the singer upgraded Elbaum’s room and gave him VIP passes for two to one of his shows.

“I took a girl with me. She was about twenty years younger and didn’t want to go. Then I told her I had the VIP passes. Hey, when you look like I do, you use whatever you have.”

Elbaum is perhaps best known for introducing the boxing world to Don King. But he also played a role in the formation of the IBF. “I knew Bob Lee when he was a beat cop,” he said.

What about Elvis, I asked. Yes, he had met him, and he added, “Hey, that guy would’ve been a good fighter. Tom Jones too. Geez, I would’ve liked to promote their fights – maybe against each other!”

Elvis vs Jones – only Elbaum could come up with that.

We could fill an entire book just with Elbaum’s quotes. A book on his life? It’s gonna have to be a big book–big enough to replace a library.