Bob Arum is in hot water – again.
Weeks after his former client Terence Crawford filed a lawsuit against him, citing breach of contract and racial discrimination, the founder of Top Rank Inc. stoked the flames of the buzz-o-sphere by asserting in an interview last weekend that consumers do not “particularly pay attention” to women’s boxing.
Arum was prompted to give his thoughts on the matter as he will be promoting a projected April 30 junior lightweight unification fight between Shakur Stevenson and Oscar Valdez on the same night that promoters Eddie Hearn and Jake Paul will be holding an undisputed lightweight championship between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano at Madison Square Garden in New York City and which is being billed as the biggest women’s fight in a generation. Asked if he was concerned that his fight would suffer from the competition, Arum promptly discarded that notion.
“I mean, as good a fight as [Taylor-Serrano] is, come on,” Arum told IFL TV. “You know, whatever reason it is, people don’t particularly pay attention to the women’s fights. The answer is ESPN made the schedule and they couldn’t care less. I don’t want to denigrate fights, I don’t want to be accused of being anti-women in sports, but I’m telling you, this is like the Premier League against women’s football.”
Arum, whose company has an exclusive output deal with ESPN, has a vested interest in Valdez-Stevenson, so it should not be surprising that he would back that fight over a rival promoter’s event. But his rationale did not exactly endear him to the public. Soon after his comments were published and circulated, Arum began drawing the ire of prominent figures from the boxing world, with many pointing out that Arum, by apparently downplaying women’s boxing, was also denigrating his lone female boxing client, Mikaela Mayer.
Boxing influencer Jake Paul, one of the promoters of Taylor-Serrano and Serrano’s business partner, immediately hit back at Arum on social media, calling the 90-year-old promoter a “dinosaur.” Paul has been a vocal supporter for women’s boxing since he began his boxing journey.
“Men like this dinosaur r the reason women haven’t been given a fair shake in many parts of society,” Paul wrote on Twitter. “I feel sorry 4 @mikaelamayer1 - she deserves better. & he says @espn doesn’t care about the biggest women’s boxing event in history?”
Arum’s comments reflect an unspoken but tacitly acknowledged view that networks, the organs that are responsible for pumping money into and greenlighting fight cards for promoters, are not overly keen on women’s boxing. And it isn’t just limited to ESPN, if Arum’s own comments are to be trusted at face-value. Three-division weight champion and two-time Olympic gold medalist Claressa Shields, the self-proclaimed Greatest Woman of All Time, has been very critical in the past of Showtime, the premium cable channel, with which she was affiliated for most of her career. Starting in 2020, the Flint, Michigan native, regarded as perhaps the most talented women’s boxer of her era, began butting heads with the network over what she felt was the network’s refusal to prioritize her as a marquee attraction. Showtime has an exclusive deal with Premier Boxing Champions, so its schedule is primarily allocated to fighters on the PBC roster, which is mostly, if not completely, made up of male fighters.
“They (Showtime) just give me crap about, telling me that I’m not big enough to be on pay-per-view,” Shields told CNN.com in 2021. “But they’re putting guys on pay-per-view who I know I’m more known than.”
Still, however well-intentioned they were, Arum’s seemingly glib remarks did not likely win him any fans, as his fatalistic tone suggests he believes there is no room for improvement in women’s boxing. Moreover, it is not clear if Stevenson-Valdez will actually be a bigger event than Taylor-Serrano. In addition to benefiting from Paul’s outsize megaphone on social media and Taylor’s celebrity in her homeland of Ireland, Taylor-Serrano is an undisputed title match, and will be the first women’s fight to actually headline the “big room” of MSG.
The 35-year-old Taylor will be making the sixth defense of her undisputed lightweight crown. Serrano (42-1-1, 30 KOs), the 33-year-old Brooklyn-based southpaw from Puerto Rico who currently reigns as a featherweight titleholder, has amassed titles in seven divisions.
Newark’s Stevenson (17-0, 9 KOs) will put his WBO 130-pound title on the line against Oscar Valdez’s (30-0, 23 KOs) WBC version. The bout, projected to land in Las Vegas, has not yet been officially announced.
