Book smart and street smart, Arum at top of boxing

By DAVE SKRETTA,

NEW YORK (AP) The most powerful man in boxing is a Harvard-educated tax lawyer and a street-savvy businessman, a Talmudic scholar with a penchant for four-letter expletives.

He's been called generous and charming, ruthless and conniving, yet he's universally respected for spending the better part of five decades atop a pitiless sport.

"Bob Arum is one of the 10 smartest people I've ever met, not one of the 10 smartest boxing people I've met," says longtime HBO executive Seth Abraham, who has known Arum as both a businessman and friend. "He combines, which is extra formidable, traditional book smarts with street smarts, common sense and experience.

"You put those things together and he is truly brilliant."

The former Justice Department attorney had seen only a few fights before he promoted one, and certainly never envisioned a lifetime spent just outside the ring. But as he approaches his 78th birthday, having guided the careers of everyone from Muhammad Ali to Oscar De La Hoya, Arum closes in on one more achievement in a professional life full of them.

His Las Vegas-based promotional company, Top Rank, will stage the biggest and most lucrative fight of the year when Manny Pacquiao meets Miguel Cotto on Nov. 14 in Las Vegas.

Both of the charismatic fighters are promoted by Top Rank, part of a stable that includes middleweight king Kelly Pavlik and lightweight champ Edwin Valero - all told, nearly a dozen world champions. Indeed, while rival promoters like Don King have fallen by the wayside, and upstarts like De La Hoya's Golden Boy Promotions try to claim their piece of the business, Arum is proving once more that he's the best in the game.

"When you get to be my age, you appreciate more the things that mattered to you when you were coming up," he says, folding his hands in the cozy dining room of the Friar's Club in midtown Manhattan, where he spoke to The Associated Press at length about his life and career.

His son-in-law, Todd duBoef, is beginning to take over Arum's boxing empire, but that doesn't mean the promoter is slowing down.

"Right now," Arum says, "this is something that keeps me going, keeps me young."

The son of an accountant, Arum grew up in Brooklyn and excelled at Harvard Law School. He landed a job at a prestigious Manhattan law firm upon graduation and eventually went to work in the U.S. attorney's office under Robert F. Kennedy.

In 1964, Arum was ordered to seize the assets of a fight between Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson. The experience made Arum enamored of boxing - or, more specifically, the money in it.

He didn't truly become a player in the sport, though, until meeting Jim Brown.

The Cleveland Browns running back had a direct line to Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, and thus to Muhammad Ali, who had recently converted. Arum was introduced, and soon a devout Jew was promoting the most bankable star in boxing.

"When Brown asked me to become Ali's lawyer and promoter, my idea was that I would promote one fight and then we'd find someone else and I'd continue as his lawyer," Arum says, shaking his head. "I had no intention of being a promoter."

Even now, Arum lets a genuine smile cross his face when he recalls his days with Ali.

Their first fight together, against George Chuvalo on March 3, 1966, came as pressure was mounting on Ali over his defiant stance on the Vietnam War. They'd been banished from just about every city in the United States, finally ending up in Toronto, and Arum says he kept promoting Ali because he was so angry with how the heavyweight had been treated.

The two men wound up traveling the world, spending more than 20 years together. Ali became a legend and Arum a legend-maker.

"Because I was so up close and so involved with all these fighters, I could tell who was a good person, who was not, who was a selfish person, and who was an OK person, and who was a great person," Arum says. "And Ali was a great person. I'm talking about what was in his heart of hearts - what was he deep down, what was he made of. He was made of pure gold."

Not only did Ali provide Arum the means to quickly grow a major boxing operation, he also sparked the most heated rivalry in the sport - outside of the ring, that is.

Ali had just fought Joe Frazier for the second time in Madison Square Garden when a former numbers runner came on the scene. Fresh out of prison for manslaughter, Don King had quickly moved into boxing, and through an arrangement with the Zaire government secured a $10 million purse for Ali to fight George Foreman - the famous "Rumble in the Jungle."

"Ali asked me what to do," Arum says, "and I tell him, 'Take the fight!' Five million is a lot of money. So he took the fight, he won, King had me banned. Soon after that we started promoting Ali again, and then we did the third Frazier fight that I co-promoted with King."

It was a rare instance when the two big egos somehow managed to work together. For the most part, their relationship has been acrimonious, their styles dichotomous.

The flamboyant King is known for his bombastic personality, wild hair and over-the-top antics; Arum is known for his business sense and boxing acumen, someone who enjoys the spotlight yet appears humbled when fans ask for his autograph or picture.

"I remember Arum promoted a fight, King was there, and King wanted to get in the ring and show the winning fighter he was there," says longtime sports writer Jerry Izenberg. "So Arum grabbed his pants and started trying to pull him down. The security guard had to break it up.

"It was the greatest non-fight in history."

The two men grudgingly reconciled not long ago, and of course, it was the promise of a big payday that brought them together. During the post-fight news conference after that bout, King leaned over to Arum and said, "You know, we really need to do one last big one before we're done." It still hasn't happened.

If boxing is truly on the decline, as some critics believe, the 1980s may well be remembered as the last great era, when the middleweight division reigned supreme with names like Leonard, Hagler, Hearns and Duran.

And behind the scenes, everywhere you turned, Arum was orchestrating the show.

Not long after Ali retired, Arum had the foresight to see he could make more money with less risk by turning his attention to lighter weights. He signed dozens of the best fighters and began pitting them against each other, often under the twinkling lights of the outdoor arena at Caesar's Palace. Thrilling bouts like Marvin Hagler-Thomas Hearns left an indelible impression.

"It was a special time. You could see the sky, and there was just a different kind of energy, a buzz in the crowd," says Marc Ratner, the former head of the Nevada State Athletic Commission. "It was just a very, very exciting time."

Roberto Duran in particular became a reclamation project for Arum.

After his infamous "No Mas" fight against Ray Leonard, when he committed the cardinal sin of quitting in the ring, most had given up on him. Arum realized that Duran had a tremendous following in New York, and put together a fight against a young puncher named Davey Moore.

Advertising almost exclusively in Latino newspapers, Arum set the top ticket at $100 and Madison Square Garden was sold out by the night of the fight. The newspaper headlines the next morning told the story: "No Mas, No Moore." It was a victory for Arum as much as Duran.

"I like guys that are something really special as people, like Ali, who I started with, and George Foreman," Arum says. "And Marvin, Ray, Tommy, and Duran - there was a substance there that I really admire. They're people with such humility and who are so driven to give back to other people. That to me is incredible."

Arum's mastery of closed-circuit television, the precursor to pay-per-view, and his knowledge of cable gave him a platform on which to showcase their talent. From 1980-95, Top Rank oversaw the longest-running weekly boxing series in TV history on ESPN, and agreements with Spanish language channels Telemundo and Azteca helped grow the Hispanic market.

"I have always felt that Bob is unmatched in the business of boxing," says Rich Rose, who was in charge of sports at Caesar's Palace during the 1980s. "He may not be the most flamboyant guy, but he gets it, and he's not afraid to do something that's a little off the chart to make it work."

Ability isn't always the most valuable characteristic in building a fighter, much to the chagrin of boxing purists. After all, fighters are commodities that must be marketed and sold.

In that respect, Arum is like an architect with an ever-discerning eye, and he found perhaps his greatest masterpiece in De La Hoya, the charismatic lightweight gold medalist from the Barcelona Olympics. The Golden Boy exuded all the qualities that Arum seeks in a potential superstar: bilingual, good looking, effervescent personality and the ability to throw a punch.

De La Hoya moved quickly from the undercard of main events to headlining his own, on his way toward 10 titles in six weight divisions during a Hall of Fame-worthy career.

In 1996, De La Hoya presented his Olympic medal to Arum on his 65th birthday as a gesture of gratitude, and three years later his fight against Felix Trinidad generated $70 million in pay-per-view revenue, one of the highest-grossing non-heavyweight fights in history.

"Bob took a page out of the Frank Sinatra handbook, having modern-day 'bobbysoxers' planted at every stop and event getting hysterical over him," says publicist Fred Sternburg, recalling some of the promotional ploys that Arum masterminded.

When De La Hoya formed his own company, Golden Boy Promotions, Arum helped guide him.

Almost everyone who runs across Arum has a run-in with him, though, and his relationship with De La Hoya eventually soured. The promoter returned that gold medal two years ago, and there have been a number of disputes between their companies.

The rift runs so deep that De La Hoya declined multiple interview requests for this story, and Arum had few positive things to say about him.

"Oscar was an uneducated kid who was very good looking, who was a lot better fighter than he turned out to be," the promoter says, shrugging. "I don't want to demean him, but when you talk about substance as a person, he was just ordinary.

"He carried the sport for many years, but as a person, nothing special. As a fighter, better than average - a lot better than average - who had a lot of potential."

On a breezy day in early September, Arum stood outside the home dugout at Yankee Stadium for a news conference to officially announce the Pacquiao-Cotto fight.

It had been more than three decades since Arum promoted the last bout at the old ballpark across the street - a heavyweight title match between Ali and Ken Norton - and he spoke ardently about bringing the first major boxing show to the new stadium.

Then he was asked about mixed martial arts leeching away his sport's fan base and, never one to refuse a bully pulpit, offered a politically incorrect yet scathingly candid answer.

"Our audience in boxing is ethnic: Hispanic, Filipino, Puerto Rican, Mexican," Arum said into the glass eye of a video camera. "UFC are a bunch of skinhead white guys watching people in the ring who also look like skinhead white guys."

Vintage Arum.

What's forgotten is that Arum is friendly with Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, the casino magnates who own the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and he lauds the company for its creative marketing and rapid expansion. In fact, Arum believes the growth of MMA has forced boxing to reconsider how it markets itself.

It was another example of the controversies that have marked his career.

Several years ago, Arum was fined $125,000 by the Nevada Athletic Commission for allegedly bribing the IBF to rank woeful heavyweight Axel Schulz so that George Foreman could defend his title against him - which Arum admitted to being "a stupid, wrong thing to do."

Four years later, in January 2004, the FBI raided the Top Rank office over allegations that a rematch between De La Hoya and Shane Mosley had been fixed. Later, with much less fanfare, the government quietly closed its investigation having found no evidence of wrongdoing.

"One thing that sticks out in my mind is 'Yesterday I was lying, today I'm telling the truth,'" says Top Rank matchmaker Bruce Trampler, referring to a quote Arum made in the early 1980s that seems to follow him everywhere. "They malign the guy and he doesn't deserve it."

Perhaps that's true, because for every time he's sued a television network or squeezed a rival promoter, he's given fighters second chances and offered reconciliation. He's often blamed for the physical decline of Ali, yet supported the decision to trim championship bouts from 15 rounds to 12 in an attempt to make the sport safer.

He's been lampooned for giving little back to boxing, yet produces more champions than any other promoter - and now has given fans the event of the year next weekend in Las Vegas.

Arum is a study in contradictions, and a model of what it takes to be successful in a brutal yet rewarding arena.

"You have to be a bad guy sometimes," says former champion Ray Leonard, who admits that he owes much of his success to the promoter. "You have to have that thick skin, and Bob has that. Nothing hurts Bob. He dealt with Don King, with casinos and venues and things of that nature, and he's still kicking."

Updated November 7, 2009

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