By Steve Kim
Top Rank's CEO Bob Arum has made it clear that he is eyeing a match-up between Nonito Donaire and either Scott Quigg or Carl Frampton in the fall. So would Top Rank be willing to send Donaire over to Europe? Well, according to the veteran promoter, there is another market in play for this potential match-up.
"We're willing to go to England with Donaire but I'm working on a big card - not with (Manny) Pacquiao - for November in the Mid East, meaning Dubai," said Arum, who explained why a Donaire-Quigg/Frampton fight could end up here - "because one of the sponsors would be Emirates Airline and they do a lot of business between England and the Mid East."
And yeah, Arum can just hear the snickering from the public. After all, for more than a decade there have been various reports and press releases centering around big money investors putting up money for big fights in this region - that have never come to fruition.
"All the internet geniuses will say - 'well, there's Arum talking about the Mid East, again' - like they said with me with Macao. They don't understand these things take time. If you're being innovative you have to look for new markets and new interests and all of that stuff," explained the veteran promoter to BoxingScene.com.
"Sometimes if works out and sometimes it doesn't work out but we're always on the look out to do innovative things. 'It could possibly be a market - whether it will be or not, I have no idea."
Arum continued, regarding this potential card in Dubai - "We would not do a pay-per-view, it would be a very, very, very strong card and we would do it for like an afternoon on a Saturday in the United States, so like the evening in the Mid East and we would do perhaps the winner of (Jesse) Vargas and (Timothy) Bradley against maybe Sadam Ali."
Vargas and Bradley vie for the vacant WBO welterweight title on June 27th at the StubHub Center in Carson, with the winner having to face Ali next.
Steve Kim is the news editor for BoxingScene.com.