Bob Arum has gotten religion again.
We’re talking that old-time promoter’s religion. At 75, the founder and chairman of Top Rank has gone back to his roots and, well, he’s lovin’ it.
“Thank God I knew how to do it, because I did it before. It’s hard work, but let me tell you, I haven’t had this much fun in a long time,” Arum says of his latest pay-per-view extravaganza, the June 9 show at Madison Square Garden that will be headlined by the matchup of WBA welterweight champion Miguel Cotto (29-0, 24 KOs) and former undisputed welter champ Zab Judah (34-4, 25 KOs).
Tickets for Cotto-Judah are moving so briskly that the mezzanine at the Garden will be opened, the first time that has happened for boxing in who knows when. Arum is expecting a paid attendance of 20,000-plus, a blip on the heart monitor that suggests, with apologies to Mark Twain, that maybe all those rumors of boxing’s imminent demise have been greatly exaggerated.
And before skeptics say that it’s no big deal, that a matchup of a Puerto Rican (Cotto) and a guy from Brooklyn (Judah) ought to do boffo box-office in the Big Apple the day before New York’s annual Puerto Rican Day Parade, consider the roadblocks that often are placed in the path of common sense.
It’s those roadblocks, which often come disguised as the paths of least resistance, that prompt many promoters to become soft and lazy, to grab the easiest handful of cash made available up front and then to go through the motions.
Last I checked, the cost of doing business in New York was prohibitive and Madison Square Garden is not attached to a casino-hotel eager to put up a hefty site fee as well as comped rooms for the fighters and their entourages. Which means, of course, that the promoter of record can’t just show up for photo-ops at press conferences while casino executives and pay-cable operators do most of the heavy lifting.
All right, so Cotto-Judah – which is supported by three intriguing undercard bouts on the PPV portion of the show – is being done in conjunction with HBO, an occasional target of Arum’s verbal barbs. But make no mistake, this event is in keeping with Battling Bob’s rediscovered vision of how boxing should be presented to the public, as was the did-it-on-his-own PPV card of April 14 in San Antonio, the marquee bout of which pitted popular Filipino junior lightweight Manny Pacquiao against Jorge Solis.
Six publicists are working Cotto-Judah, and they’re literally tripping over one another in trying to come up with inventive ideas on how to get the show enough sound bites and headlines to be competitive, from a media standpoint, with Roger Clemens’ looming return to the New York Yankees’ rotation.
Arum being Arum, of course, it’s not enough for him to hit a home run here, or even a possible grand slam. He also has to strike out his archrivals of the moment, Golden Boy Promotions and UFC.
The July 21 HBO pay-per-view matchup of Bernard “The Executioner” Hopkins and Winky Wright, which is promoted by Golden Boy and will be staged at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, is the first target to drift into Arum’s cross-hairs.
“That fight makes no sense in Las Vegas in the middle of the summer when the temperature outside will be well over 100 degrees,” Arum says. “That’s an East Coast fight all the way. You can’t just put a fight in Vegas and think it’ll fly. If I did Cotto-Judah in the Staples Center in Los Angeles, I wouldn’t have nearly the result I’m having in Madison Square Garden. You have to find the appropriate site to do a particular fight. That’s Rule No. 1. And New York clearly was the best choice to do Cotto-Judah.
“Hopkins-Wright is what I would call a businessman’s dance. By that I mean a fight where you have two guys and neither one wants to get hurt and both of them leave the ring looking the same as when they came in.
“That fight is going to die at the box office in Vegas. They should have put it in Philadelphia, Hopkins’ hometown, or Tampa or St. Petersburg, which is where Wright is from. I could see it making sense in Atlantic City. But Vegas? It’s insane.”
Arum, whose company has long had its headquarters in, yes, Las Vegas, admits to having frequently looked in his own backyard first and doing fights there that might have been more appealing elsewhere.
“When you go out of a casino setting you have to work your ass off to sell tickets, to get a buzz going. It’s hard, hard work,” Arum says.
“But I’m not going to make calls to the casinos to dump fights in Vegas that don’t belong there. I learned my lesson. Look, everybody looks for the easy money and the easy way out, including myself. But I find it doesn’t work any more. You have to fish where the fish are.”
Right now the fishing is good for UFC president Dana White, whose events in Vegas and elsewhere all appear to do well. And while Arum is loath to toss any compliments in the direction of mixed martial arts – it’s for damn sure White, who has the same regard for Arum and Don King that he reserves for vermin, is not reciprocating – he said you have to give credit where credit is due, and that boxing would do well to borrow elements of UFC’s business template.
“We’re competing with UFC,” Arum says. “I know we have a better product because there’s nothing as compelling as a prizefight, as long as it’s a good prizefight. Cotto-Judah is a good prizefight; it’s going to be an electric atmosphere. That’s what UFC is bringing to the table – an electric atmosphere with great presentation although, to me, their product sucks. I can’t watch that s**t. But, in all honesty, the UFC people can say that about boxing sometimes, too. The public doesn’t want to see Jermain Taylor against Cory Spinks because that wasn’t a good fight. And as hyped as it was, I think many people feel let down by De La Hoya-Mayweather.
“It’s our job to give the people fights they want to see. In boxing, you can sort of predict whether your main event will be a good fight or a businessman’s dance. What you need to give them Pavlik vs. Miranda, Morales vs. Pacquiao, Morales vs. Barrera – guys who stand toe to toe, take chances and fight their hearts out.
“Sometimes a fight that looks great going in turns out not to be. Things happen in boxing. So you have to do enough with your card to make it enticing even if the main event is disappointing. You have to give fans more action and less talk. You have to give them four (PPV) fights, not three. You have to keep fights moving, you have to play a lot of music, you have to keep everything upbeat.
“That is the way boxing will survive. That’s my theory, anyway.”
Toward that end, and as an insurance policy that will allow the paying customers to leaved happy even if Cotto and Judah somehow end up staging a stinker, Arum has front-loaded the PPV portion of the card with three bouts that all provide something of interest to the discriminating patron of the pugilistic arts.
The pairing of junior middleweights Anthony “The Messenger” Thompson (23-1, 17 KOs) and Yuri Foreman (22-0, 8 KOs) at the very least ought to identify the winner as maybe the next big thing in the 154-pound weight class.
Bloodlines play a big part in the storylines for the other two PPV fights. Junior lightweight Bobby Pacquiao (27-12-3, 12 KOs), who takes on Humberto Soto (41-5-2, 25 KOs), is the brother of Manny Pacquiao, who will be honored the night before as the Boxing Writers Association of America’s 2006 Fighter of the Year, at the BWAA’s 82nd annual Awards Dinner at the Copacabana, just down the street from Madison Square Garden. And 21-year-old welterweight Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. (31-0-1, 24 KOs), son of you-know-who, tries to avenge the last defeat of his legendary father’s career when he swaps punches with Grover Wiley (30-9-1, 14 KOs).
“Chavez Jr. has stunned everybody, he’s gotten so good, so fast,” Arum notes.
But while Arum is painting a rosy picture of the June 9 card and beyond, history tells us that his utterances often are made for expediency’s sake. Remember, this is the guy who forever will be known for the quote that won’t go on his tombstone but probably should: “Yesterday I was lying, but today I’m telling the truth.”
Sure, Arum is all for creating attractive undercards again, but what of all those instances when he used two novelty acts, XXXXXL-sized heavyweight Eric “Butterbean” Esch, and curvaceous former Playboy model Mia St. John, as filler on PPV shows headlined by Oscar De La Hoya?
“I wouldn’t do that now,” Arum says. “At that particular point in time they fit very well on pay-per-view cards. They were affordable and they gave us publicity. But times change. I’ve been in this business 42 years. I’ve seen things change year to year, decade to decade. Unless you’re flexible, you’re going to get wiped out. You can’t keep doing things like you did before when you need to change your strategy.”
Visionaries who always detect trends beforehand are as rare as public sightings of unicorns and leprechauns. Sometimes you make the right call and are way ahead of the curve; sometimes you’re just guessing, like everyone else. Whenever I find myself agreeing with Arum on his latest critique of boxing’s future, I am reminded of the time he assured me that the biggest blockbuster in the sport’s history would pit De La Hoya against … uh, Dana Rosenblatt.
Was Arum’s prediction just wrong, wrong, wrong, or was he merely being self-serving? He was promoting both De La Hoya and Rosenblatt at the time, so in all likelihood he was trying to plant a seed in my mind that hopefully would come to fruition. It wouldn’t be the first time a promoter hit a media type with a blizzard of a snow job in the middle of August in the hope the poor sap would reach for his overcoat and mittens.
In presenting his arguments, Arum is a lot like – and it no doubt will irk him to hear this – Hopkins. Ask either one a question and you get 15 minutes of stream-of-consciousness. Much of what is said can be discounted, but you can find real nuggets of information if you pan long enough. The trick is separating the gold from the shiny iron pyrite.
What does seem certain is that Arum, invigorated by the threat posed by new enemies (hey, you can only butt heads with King for so long before that conflict starts to become tiresome), has gotten his rambunctiousness back.
“I look at this as part of my legacy,” he says of his renewed commitment to getting things done just right. “Everybody (else in the Top Rank hierarchy) is younger than me. I want the people who are with me now to see how we did it in the old days, when we did major fights – Hagler-Hearns, Hagler-Duran – that had undercards that were as strong as steel.
“It’s easy to sit back and to overly rely on the casinos to bail you out. Why spend money on an undercard when all the media is going to write about is the main event? But to think that way is shortsighted.”
