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KING-SIZED WHOPPER DID ALI WRONG Friday,March 2,2001 DON KING THE new wave of shameless sports entrepreneurs - Mark Cuban, please report to the principal's office - has almost made us forget the old reliables. If only they didn't remind us. Don King, tomorrow in the fair-shake town of Las Vegas, is staging another pay-per-fool fight, Evander Holyfield vs. Johnny Ruiz, charging $45 per home. Holyfield needs another fight, you should excuse the expression, like a hole in the head. King this week appeared on Jim Rome's Fox Sports Net "Last Word" show to bang the drums for Holyfield-Ruiz. Rome asked whether Holyfield, by continuing to fight, risks the same neurological fate as Muhammad Ali. While essentially a rhetorical question, King grew indignant, nonetheless. "It can happen to anyone because boxing ain't what did it to Muhammad Ali. No, no, no, no," fulminated King. "He has a motor exercise disability. You forget, Howard Cosell, the same thing and he wasn't taking no blows." And so, the most absurd and revolting myth about Ali - that boxing had nothing to do with his long-time and severe neurological incapacitation - was stated as a self-serving fact by a person who, far more than most, knows better. But King's misanthropic self-enrichment program has always been rooted in the lie. Ali, since middle age, has suffered mightily from Parkinson's syndrome, not Parkinson's disease. His diminished state, painfully evident by the time he was 40, is the result of taking too many blows to the head, not the result of some inexplicable affliction or elusive virus. Cosell's impairment arrived well beyond middle age and was a common residual of the aging process, perhaps, in Cosell's case, exacerbated by alcohol. For King to evenly equate Ali's condition with Cosell's is, even by King's standards, low. As if King didn't stuff his pockets when he threw a washed-up Ali in against Larry Holmes. As if the beating to the head Ali took that night for King has nothing to do with Ali's extended and irreversible condition. As if King wasn't there, front and center. If I had one of those illegal black boxes, I wouldn't waste the electricity on a Don King pay-per-view. http://www.nypost.com/sports/23556.htm ***************