Just when you think you know, you don?t.
Remember when all the geniuses of the sport ? you know, the so-called fight freaks and the lemmings who follow ? claimed it would never happen, and they were all sure that they knew why?
We know Bob Arum and Floyd Mayweather Jr. don?t get along, they insisted, so the idea that they?ll ever be able to share a stage while a fight with Manny Pacquiao is being announced is simply not possible.
Less than a year ago, in fact, when reporting on Pacquiao?s contract extension with Top Rank, those clairvoyants used phrases like ?killing any hopes? and ?impossible to fathom? when discussing how the Filipino?s deal with the Las Vegas promoter would impact a possible mega-fight with ?Money.?
Not only were they the smartest guys in the room. They had the attitudes to match.
Right up until they were wrong, that is.
?The quality of journalism today is not what it used to be,? Arum said in a recent phone chat, in which he described the way Mayweather had responded over the years to agenda-wielding queries about him.
?There?s a lot of gotcha journalism. It depends on how a question is asked, how the answer will be. I think that with a lot of this, the press prodded Floyd into castigating me personally when I don?t think he really believed it, or that he would have said it if the question had been asked differently.?
His dealings with Mayweather, he said, have been nothing less than business appropriate, buoyed at least in part by the fact that the fighter continues to have a friendship with the promoter?s stepson.
Mayweather was with the Top Rank organization upon turning professional and laid much of the groundwork for his current success there, before choosing eight years ago to go it alone.
?It?s extraordinarily cordial,? Arum said. ?Understand that Mayweather came out of the amateurs and went with us. He was a young kid, didn?t know how to pay bills or anything. He came over to our home. We spent over 10 years together. Whenever we meet, he greets me cordially. We come from different worlds and different generations, but we still are very, very cordial to each other.?
The reason the fight took all these years to get made, Arum contended, had far less to do with personality conflicts and far more to do ? in his estimation ? with Mayweather?s lack of real interest.
Even after a meeting with Les Moonves inspired breathless global assumption that the match would finally get made, the non-believing side of the Top Rank boss remained in full command until a fateful chance get-together in South Florida changed his tune.
?I was skeptical. I believed that we could get things done, but the one caveat I had, and that Manny had when we talked about it, was that we didn?t believe that Floyd really wanted the fight,? he said. ?That perception did not change until that chance meeting at the Miami Heat game, when Floyd asked Manny if he could visit Manny in Manny?s hotel suite. That was a completely accidental meeting. Manny called me afterwards to say, ?You know something, Bob, I really think he wants to do the fight.??
