Promoter Cedric Kushner passed away at age 66 on Thursday from a Heart Attack in New York City.
“I got a call and I had to go to the hospital because he had a massive heart attack,” said promoter Lou DiBella, one of Kushner’s closest friends for more than 25 years. “His brain had been affected. I knew he wouldn’t have wanted to live like that. I got in the car, and by the time I got to the hospital, he had passed. Ced and I went back to my first week in boxing over 25 years ago. We have a lot of history. He was a dear friend and one of the great characters in boxing.”
“For a long time, Ced was one of the most powerful promoters in the world. You can’t even count the number of world champions and top contenders he promoted,” said DiBella, who got to know Kushner when he bought fights from him as a senior vice president at HBO during the late 1980s and 1990s. “Ced had like 10 houses and 35 cars at one time, but he made some bad business decisions and he fell off the mountaintop. But he had a lot of friends in this business, and he was a beloved figure in this sport.”
“He had this [South African] accent that sounded refined and educated, but he barely got out of grade school,” DiBella said. “He was shining shoes and cleaning the pool at the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami and scalping concert tickets. And he became one of the biggest promoters in the music business. From there he got involved in boxing and was one of the biggest promoters in the world.”
Kushner promoted fighters such as Shane Mosley, Virgil Hill, Angel Manfredy, Vuyani Bungu and Welcome Ncita, but he made his name in the heavyweight division and became one of the regular promoters who worked with HBO.
Kushner’s syndicated television series, “Heavyweight Explosion,” became a breeding ground for numerous contenders and titleholders in the 1990s and 2000s. Often they would fight on “Heavyweight Explosion” before moving on to major fights, and when they would eventually lose, Kushner would return them to the series, build them back up and get them another big fight.
The heavyweights he promoted included a who’s who of the era, including Hasim Rahman, Shannon Briggs, Oleg Maskaev, Chris Byrd, the late Corrie Sanders, Ike Ibeabuchi, David Izon, Derrick Jefferson, Kirk Johnson, Jameel McCline and many others.
In 2001, Kushner was on the top of the boxing world when he counted then-heavyweight champion Rahman and welterweight champion Mosley, the pound-for-pound king at the time, as his cornerstone fighters. Mosley had upset Oscar De La Hoya in June 2000 to win the welterweight title, and in April 2001, Rahman pulled off a massive upset to win the heavyweight championship by knocking out Lennox Lewis in the fourth round. Making the crowning moment of Kushner’s career even more special was that Rahman’s championship win came in South Africa.
“His family was his boxing family,” DiBella said.
“Ced was a character but a good man,” said Top Rank matchmaker Bruce Trampler, a friend of Kushner’s for more than 30 years. “He had a great sense of humor and sly insightful way about him. His perception of the fight game was unique. He had many triumphs and a few low blows thrown at him. Recent years had been very difficult for Ced. My pleasure to have known him.”
“He’d hold court, and everyone would listen to his racy, raunchy stories. We had a lot of laughs. I miss those days,” DiBella said. “This is another one of those days that’s a sad day, when the sport of boxing got a little less colorful. Ced had a penchant for the dark side. He liked his women of the evening, and he would tell stories that would have everyone rolling around. Nobody was funnier to sit down with. Everyone would listen to the stories Cedric told.
“I saw him a week or two ago, and he looked terrible. But he said, ‘I’m gonna have one more big triumph in this business.’ He had nothing going on but he thought until the very end he could get to the top again and have one more big fighter. I hope wherever he is right now, he gets that one big shot.”
DiBella, who is handing the arrangements for a memorial service, said Kushner would be cremated.
“We’ll have a service soon, but we want to give Cedric’s many friends from around the world time to make plans to come,” DiBella said. “He was an international promoter and had friends all over the place. We want them to come in. It will be the kind of great party Cedric would love.”
