Bob Arum reddit AMA [7 months ago]

I think I'll start doing this more for recent AMA's. Thought many would be interested in this one despite how many months ago it was. I put my two favorite on top, LOL. Have you ever seen the infamous Oscar fishnet pictures? If so, what are your thoughts? Oscar always maintained that it was photoshopped, and that's a testament to his credibility. How much blood do you need to suck before you finally detach from your host? Well, you know, one thing that we're very proud of in the 50 years that I've been involved is Top Rank pays its fighters better than anyone else does. We have made a lot of fighters rich. Nobody complains about their treatment with us. To use something like leeching off fighters...that's just nonsense, not the case. Hi Bob, can you elaborate on the corruption with the sanctioning bodies in yesteryear? You've said that you had to pay the IBF bribes for ranks in the 80s. Is that still a thing in today's boxing? You don't have to elaborate on that one! Well, I'm happy to say that that is no longer the case as far as I can see. Bribery was rampant a number of years ago. The President of the IBF was indicted by a federal grand jury and convicted, and the IBF is a very clean organization today as are the WBC, WBO, and WBA. Now, they may do things that I wouldn't go along with or endorse, but that's part of life. But because I disagree with a particular move that one might make, doesn't mean that they're corrupt. I don't believe that there is corruption within these organizations. Did you guys put Guillermo Rigondeaux in the witness protection program or is he in a hole in the Las Vegas desert? I'm a little concerned since his sudden disappearance after fighting Lomachenko. Anyway, I hope you get this man, hit me back, just to chat, truly yours, your biggest fan, this is Stan. Well, I'm not the one to address that question. I'm not Rigo's promoter. His promoter is Roc Nation so it should be addressed to them. Was Teddy Atlas removed from the commentary team because he was frequently critical of both fighters in the ring? I have nothing whatever to do, Top Rank has nothing to do with the announcing team on ESPN telecasts. That is solely the province of ESPN and their programmers, so it can't be directed at me. I have no idea why Teddy was removed. I just know that Mark is doing a terrific job with Joe Tessitore and Timothy Bradley. How much does it cost to bribe a judge? Are female judges cheaper to bribe? Let me say this...I don't believe that there is widespread corruption as far as bribing judges. Can there be instances where they've been bribed? Probably. It is unfair to point out that some women have had ludicrous scorecards and therefore the allegation is that they've been bribed, but that's insane. If they were really bribed, they wouldn't have a scorecard that was so out of line! Think Adelaide Byrd's scorecard with Canelo winning 10 of 12 rounds, which was absurd! The fact that it was so absurd should convince everyone she wasn't bribed. In 2010, you originally turned down a 14 day cut-off for blood testing against Mayweather. You said his requests amounted to bullying and that he would keep coming up with more requests if you accepted. Why not simply accept the cut off and let him prove you right by pulling out of the fight if you were that sure? Or did you think it was unreasonable for Pac to give blood 14 days before the fight? Follow-up question if time: You eventually agreed to a 14 day cut-off almost immediately after Floyd said the offer was now off the table (and that he would now he asking for blood testing until the day of the fight). What do you say to critics that view that as a PR move and ask why you didn't simply agree to it in the first place if it was now fine by you? Well, that's just not the case of what happened. You have to understand, this whole idea of drug testing was for us in boxing something new. We didn't know how it would be conducted and USADA when we talked to them were not helpful. They said they could test anytime, even when the fighter was in the ring prior ot the fight. They spooked us, very frankly. Finally when we negotiated a cutoff, which was unnecessary but we didn't k now what we were doing, then Mayweather decided not to go along with that. When I look back, it was not anyone's intention to sabotage the fight. It was ignorance on all of our parts, so that later on, years passed, we became more familiar with testing and the parameters, it wasn't an issue in negotiations leading up to the fight in 2015. What are your thoughts on the World Boxing Super Series and why are there no Top Rank fighters participating? Well frankly, when they announced the Super Series in two divisions, cruiserweight and super middleweight, we had no cruiserweights that were attached to Top Rank so we couldn't contribute anybody. Credit where credit is due, they got the 8 top cruiserweights in the world and have had a series of tremendous fights, and the final fight this May should be tremendous. As far as super middleweight, it filled up quickly with a lot of Brits and we had one fighter who could have gone in, Gilberto Ramirez, but he had suffered a hand injury and going into a tournrament like that, you'd have to match him pretty hard and we didn't want to rush him until we knew he had recovered. Other than Ramirez, we had nobody to add to that division, that championship. (asked if he'd be open to others) Absolutely! If the terms were good. As a matter of fact, Kalle Sauerland, has been to see us and depending on the division, we would certainly be open to having some of our fighters participate. With the rise of the #metoo movement, on a scale of 1 to 10 how scared are you of skeletons from your past being exposed? Well, I always envision getting up at a press conference and talking and some old lady in a walker comes in and accuses me 50 years ago of doing something inappropriate. I can always plead at my age that I have no memory, but it's possible! If you could have one fighter from any other promoter's stable to add to the Top Rank collection, who would it be? Anthony Joshua. I think Joshua has the ability to be a major star. He is a very articulate young man. He showed a tremendous amount of courage and guts when he fought Klitschko, who had him out, and he got up and knocked Klitschko out. I think he's the real deal. I don't know if he beats my guy Joseph Parker, but if he does, that's the guy I'd love to have as part of the Top Rank team. How would you have scored GGG-Canelo? I had Golovkin winning 8 rounds to 4. I thought that Golovkin gave away a round or two in the beginning and may have lost a round or two at the end, but he won everything in the middle and it wasn't even close. You have to understand, I've been in boxing for a very long time and people see things differently. Just because I saw the fight one way doesn't mean others couldn't see it some other way. I just think based on how i viewed it, Golovkin won and won quite easily. Do you think the time is finally right for Juanma vs Gamboa? Yeah, I was criticized for not making that fight when the public was demanding it, but I really believe that at that point in time Gamboa, who had this extensive amateur background, Olympic gold medal, would have been too much for Lopez and that's the real reason that I didn't make the match at the time. I wasn't going to say that at the time because I was promoting Lopez! But that's the reason. Was Mayweather-Pacquiao the most difficult fight you had to negotiate? Or does Oscar take the cake here? Please give us some details on which fights were hard to get done. Mayweather-Pacquiao was not a difficult fight to negotiate once Lesley Moonves, the Chairman of CBS, got involved. I thought it went smoothly. The promotion had a lot of bumps because there was a lot of infighting, but negotiations went smoothly. The prior attempts to make that fight went on for a few years and were unsuccessful because we didn't have someone like Moonves helping. Once we got that type of leadership, it was relatively easy to negotiate the deal. Are you still salty at Howard Hughes for not wanting Ali-Frazier in Vegas and thus costing you a lot of money? Yes. (laughs) There was no reason for that! What happened was a half-year later that fight took place in Madison Square Garden and was the biggest fight of its time, so sure I resented the fact that Howard Hughes...I believed it was Hughes, but no one ever talked to him, but General Mayer (?) called us to say Hughes was against. The son of a ***** cost me a lot of money! Why do you think the UFC has failed to build Latino stars while you've excelled at it in the past? Do you have any tips for Dana White? Yeah, I mean, look...let's be honest about this. UFC always said that they appeal to a younger demographic than boxing. And to some extent, it was true when boxing was limited to premium networks. Now when we're on ESPN, we beat them overall in ratings, but we beat them with the younger demographics 2 and 3 to one. The reason for that is when you go on an ESPN, you bring in young demographics from the urban community, from the Hispanic community, and those two communities overall are boxing fans, not UFC fans. With white young males, that was not particularly the case, we sort of split that demographic. But now I think that we're on free television and we're going to build the white demographic, young people, and even exceed UFC in it. But overall in the young demographic, we are smashing them head to head. Mr Arum, a pleasure to have you here. Could you please go into more detail about the orgy that transpired after the final Ali-Frazier fight? I think the passionate young boxing fans here would love to know names, details and acts. Well, tell the passionate young boxing fans to get their rocks off on someone else's story! We haven't had a boxing video game in 7 years is there anyway you can use your promoter skills to get us one in the future? I think Todd DuBoef, who is the president of Top Rank, is working on that with a major company. We hope sometime this year to announce a new, improved, great boxing game. (asked details) Negotiations are going on with a major company that does these things. They're arriving on a format for the game. You gotta understand that that stuff with games, that's really relatively new for me. I don't understand any of it so it's hard for me to give you an answer! What is the process when one of your fighters tests positive for a PED? Well, the commission then applies the punitive measures and levies a fine and/or a suspension. That is appropriate, regulatory bodies have to deal with people who cheat and fail a drug test. It is not for a promoter, in my opinion, to act on his own to either overlook it or put his own penalties. In other words, we do testing through a commission who then retains VADA or some other organization to do the testing. I don't think promoters should be involved in that, it's a job for the commissions. Weed is now legal in many states. What is your experience with the drug? Have you ever smoked with any of your fighters (ex. Julio Cesar Chavez Jr)? No, they're all younger than I am! Years ago, fighters like Ali never indulged. It was considered not to be good to smoke marijuana. I opposed it...I think there's nothing wrong with recreational marijuana, but I've never smoked with any of my fighters. But I don't think smoking out of competition is wrong. Can you give us a breakdown of the differences between running a show on a regular cable network and then running a PPV? Are there different costs for you guys as the promoter? Yeah, it's completely different. If you do it on PPV, all the costs are borne by the promoter, including the purses of the fighters, the massive cost of advertising, and so forth. And if you do it on regular TV, whether it's on ESPN or HBO or Showtime, a lot of that burden is taken off the promoter because the broadcaster does the TV production and most of the advertising for the event is done by the network. Do you still have disdain for Donald Trump because he was short 2.5 million to host the Holyfield-Foreman fight or are there other factors you'd like to lay out for us? Donald Trump proved to me in that instance that he is nothing but a con man, he's a disgrace to the United States. I am absolutely appalled that he is president. He is doing horrible damage to the credibility of the US around the world, and what he's doing now with the dreamers is an absolute disgrace for this country and it really angers me. The 2.5 million the bastard can keep, I don't care, he's nothing but a con man. Serious question for Bob: Who is the most difficult fighter you’ve ever had to promote, and what made him so? Well, there are fighters that were difficult for various reasons. There was an Argentine fighter named Hugo Corro, who was a middleweight champion at one time, but he would come to an event ready to fight and then the last week leading up to the fight, he'd find a dozen excuses as to why he wasn't ready to fight. This was a saga that went on with all of us, most in Europe, Rodolfo Sabatini, myself, we'd spend weeks trying to talk this guy into fighting but it wasn't a very happy week in a great place like Italy or France. He was, I think, the craziest and most difficult that I promoted. Do you feel Manny was being truthful about his shoulder injury and the healing properties of salt water? Absolutely. This was an injury that he had since the De La Hoya fight many years before and the orthopedic surgeon told me personally that a lot of pitchers, major league pitchers, have the rotator cuff tears, some as much as 90%, and can still get on. Manny was able to fight with that rotator cuff for many years. He reinjured it in sparring, and with treatment it seemed to be fine, he was sparring well. And then he reinjured it in the fight, and they finally decided to operate on it. This happens in sports. Rotator cuff injuries are difficult in the sense that they sound sometimes worse than they really are. Since 2011, Pac's only notable win has been Timothy Bradley. What responsibility do you hold over that? Why didn't you attempt matching Pac with top welterweights from other promoters considering his popularity and leverage? No, we, I think, matched Manny against the best fighters available. Remember, this was a period before guys like Thurman and Spence, who fight for other people, came into prominence. But we matched Manny, who really was a small guy, against top big guys like Cotto and Margarito and Clottey and of course he had those great fights with Marquez, and three fights with Bradley. If you look back at Manny's career and say why didn't you match him with a Thurman, I would say it was timing. By the time Thurman rose to prominence, Manny was sort of ending his career Recently, Manny Pacquiao said he wanted to fight Lucas Matthysse. Many fans were happy to hear that, since these are two popular fan-friendly boxers. But then you said "I see he has talked about fighting Matthysse, but that’s not gonna happen.”. Why not? Why do you think fans would want to see Alvarado instead? Well, because nobody's ever talked to Matthysse, about whether he's ready. I think some writer asked if he'd want to fight, and he said yes. Would he fight Matthysse down the road? Why not? But we were up against a deadline in April, so at that point not having talked to the opponent, it was a non-starter. To you, what was the greatest fighter ruined by a bad promoter? It's hard for me to pick out somebody right off the top of my head, but you know, tremendous disappointment for me was the career of Donald Curry. I thought Curry could have been one of the great fighters of all time, and he just went off the tracks. After he lost to Lloyd Honeygun and got knocked out by McCallum, it was really sad because at one point in time I thought he was unbeatable. Would you promote a Dana White vs Oscar De La Hoya fight and who would you pick as the winner? Well, that's sort of a stupid question. Oscar was a great professional fighter and even though he's not in his prime, I would pick Oscar any day to beat Dana White. If you had to rate the Zou Shiming experiment out of 10, what would you give it? Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently if you could do it again? I wouldn't do it differently. Shiming was a disappointment as a professional. A lovely young man and I got along with him and his wife, but he never fulfilled what I thought he could become as a professional. It may have been because he was at a relatively advanced age when he became a pro fighter. He had been in the amateurs most...for many many years and I was disappointed he didn't become the star that I envisaged he would. If Oscar said the only way to make Linares vs Lomachenko was to put it on HBO, what is your response to him? HBO is a very very small network. It gets a limited number of viewers. ESPN because it's free has potential audience of more than 3x HBO. So to put a good fight on HBO is sort of a waste when we have the ability to put it on a major network like ESPN. It's time that boxing got out from under the shadows, I mean, the premium networks have been good to boxing but they have limited audiences. WE need boxing to be seen by the most possible people, and that's over free television. What plans do you have for Lomachenko? Unify against Berchelt or will he be moving up next? Berchelt is the last and easily toughest test for him at his current weight. The plan now is for Vasyl to test the waters at 135, hopefully we can get the Linares fight done for May 12th. If that's not possible, Lomachenko would look to fight the winner of tonight's fight between Beltran and Moses. (Asked about Oscar's twitter comments) We made a deal with the main promoter of LInares, Teiken, to fight on May 12th which is a special date for us. And we're looking to do that fight on May 12th. It's the weekend of the BWAA dinner in New York. It's a major major date, the Madison Square Garden is available and we booked it. We have tremendous lead-ins with the NBA playoffs. As far as HBO and Oscar is concerned, remember last year we did a fight on November 11th and they put a fight on HBO against our fight. We did Loma and Rigo on December 9th, and HBO put a fight against us. Now suddenly they're taking the position that they can't put a fight against ESPN on May 12th? It just shows the deceitful nature of HBO and the people who run HBO Sports. How can boxing prevent robberies like De la Hoya-Trinidad, Pacquaio-Bradley I, and Pacquaio-Horn? I think that the big problem is getting a group of judges from all over the world that get assigned to the fights on a basis of how good they are. Similar to the NFL, you see the NFL has a core of referees and umpires and linesmen that officiate at the games, and then when they get to the playoffs, they take the top top top officials. Now boxing, if boxing did that and got a group of 40-50 judges and appointed the judges in those championship fights and a group of referees who would also be appointed on that basis, you would have a lot lot fewer bad decisions. (asked to elaborate) You have to cultivate that list at the top. It's less of a problem with referees, they seem to be using top top referees, whether Nevada, New York, England. I don't think the problem is the referee anymore, top guys get picked to officiate. I think it's with judges. I think you can get a pool of top judges from whom you'll select for a fight and you'll be much better off than having some of these people who are appointed and come up with crazy scorecards What are your top 2 favorite fights that you've promoted? That's sorta easy. I think the top fight was Marvelous Marvin Hagler against Tommy Hearns. That was 3 rounds, absolutely exciting, incredible. I think the next best fight was the Thrilla in Manila, Ali and Frazier, when they fought to the death to the 14th round when Frazier's eyes closed. That had ebbs and flows. Maybe one other candidate was Morales-Barrera, that was back and forth, they never stopped. Those are my 3 favorites. Listen, I been doing this over 50 years! Duran knocking out Davey Moore in MSG, I'll never forget that, so I've had many opportunities to do fights that have been sensational. What was the hardest fight to make official? What fights were 99% done deal but fell through last minute? I don't know what that means, hardest fight to make official. You know, sometimes you come close to making a fight and then you struggle with the details in order to finally effectuate a final agreement. That happens a lot, but again, your question then assumes that the fight happens. Once the fight happens, human nature is we begin to forget the difficulties in making it happen, so it's hard for me to answer it. I'm not ducking it. I remember there are some (that fell through), but I can't recall offhand. I hope Lomachenko Linares is not one of them. I thought the fight was completely done before Peter Nelson convinced Golden Boy to start all this nonsense. If promoters had to choose their fighters via a draft, who would be your first pick? Well, I'd be conflicted because half the people in my organization would say pick Bud Crawford, and the other half would say pick Lomachenko. Great problem to have, luckily I don't have to pick. It's hard to separate those two guys if there was a draft. Do you think having only one sanctioning body, instead of multiple, would be more beneficial to the sport overall? Probably so, but it's impossible to contemplate that because these sanctioning bodies all have people who are devoted to them, work for them, and by and large do a good job, and wishing to have 1 instead of 4 is wishful thinking. ASK THIS QUESTION LAST: Which of the questions Adam has asked you was your favorite and why? I'm 86 years old, I don't remember what I had for breakfast this morning! Do you think the PPV model is here to stay? Or with the ever increasing amount of people ditching cable subscriptions, will it be forced to change with the times? I think it's all going to go digital. The whole world is going digital. Television in the next 10 years will not be the potent force that it is now. Listen, when I first started in this business, we didn't even have satellites, if you can believe that. I really believe that people will be watching what we call television now on their devices, which will be able to be linked up to big screens, and that's the future. The future is digital, and let me tell ya, when we get this rolling, this digital universe, and we do PPV in China and charge $2 to watch a boxing event, we're going to do a half billion to a billion people buying that event in China alone. It'll bring the price way down but make it available to many more people. When can we expect to see the hundreds of fights in the Top Rank library on the ESPN app? Or will there be a standalone Top Rank library? It's not hundreds, it's thousands, some of the greatest fights of all time, just unbelievable fights. Hopefully together with Espn, we're coming up with a plan to make those available on a digital app. Stay tuned, it'll be sooner rather than later.