Arum, King reconciliation, hope for current qualms?

Arum, King reconciliation, hope for current qualms?

Mark E. Ortega

UndisputedFightMag.com

March 11, 2011

One of boxing's biggest rivalries is not one that took place between the ropes. It's not one where few, if any blows were exchanged. But it is one that helped fuel the sport for much of the last five decades.

Promoters Bob Arum and Don King, long the sport's most influential promoters worldwide, are winding down their personal careers and therefore have made amends over their tiff that crossed more than five decades.

Last night was a piece of it, as both Arum and King sat side-by-side and answered questions from the media, reminiscing seemingly about the glory days of the sport where they were unquestionably the two promotional giants that controlled a majority of the stars produced in pugilism.

The culmination of all of the recent publicity will be Saturday night's 154-pound world title defense of Miguel Cotto against the overmatched Ricardo Mayorga in a Showtime pay-per-view event expected to be fun but far from competitive. But what has garnered most of the publicity while Mayorga plays his usual circus clown act has been the stories of Arum and King, who both turn eighty this year.

One wonders what jarred these two men to their senses. 2010 was a year of heavy personal loss for both, as Arum lost his son John in North Cascades National Park outside of Seattle, Washington last September and King lost his wife of fifty years or so Henrietta last December.

As both enter their twilight years, it seems as though they are ready to let bygones be bygones despite being involved in the most competitive conflicts the sport has ever seen.

“When you reach a certain age, you've got to be an idiot to continue the fights you had when you were much younger,” explained Arum to a panel of the media Thursday in Las Vegas.

The conversation was light hearted though both promoters were able to vocalize quite a debate against each other on certain instances in the past that may have bothered them. A particular point of contention was the immediate aftermath of the December 1999 bout that saw Felix Trinidad earn a controversial decision over Oscar De La Hoya in a superfight that was supposed to help rejuvenate the sport but instead sizzled.

“King, of course is in the post-fight press conference yelling and gloating,” recalled Arum. “'The lights are out in the Arum building.' I had one of our people pull the plug [on King's microphone]. And even Don King, with the way he talks, the crowd was so noisy and full of people, they couldn't hear a thing he said. Don gets angry, slams down the microphone and went out and held his own press conference.”

“But you've got to understand, he violated everything he swore to uphold: Freedom of speech, no censorship, protection of the First Amendment,” exclaimed King, noting Arum's license as a lawyer.

“The First Amendment,” interrupted Arum, “guarantees freedom of speech – except when some promoter is acting obnoxious.”

There's no question that for awhile it seemed that Don King controlled boxing, by proxy of controlling the long booming heavyweight division. He had Muhammad Ali. He had Larry Holmes. He had Mike Tyson. But as the heavyweight division went, so went Don King. And when it faded from public perception in America, so did King's clout in a sport that saw a shift to the lower weight classes for a majority of the sport's biggest bouts.

King saw things slip away with the retiring of Lennox Lewis. King tried as best as he could to gain a stronghold on the belts but was turned away by the Klitschko brothers. Less than desirable matchups featuring John Ruiz, Chris Byrd, and Hasim Rahman forced King out of favor with the American boxing public, and by relation those who had worked so closely with King at HBO in promoting the bouts.

No promoter was on King's tail closer than Arum and Top Rank Promotions. Arum had no foothold in the heavyweight division and instead shifted his focus to the lighter weight classes, and perhaps more importantly, markets outside the United States that were begging to be built. Don King had Julio Cesar Chavez, Bob Arum had almost the rest of Mexico's biggest stars. Arum helped cultivate a modern appreciation for the little guys south of the lightweight division and made those fighters the most money they had ever seen in the history of the sport. His company Top Rank has built the blueprint on how a young fighter should be developed and built into a star.

Arum and King have worked on some of the sport's biggest fights over the years: Ali-Frazier in Manila, Duran-Leonard in Montreal. Their last co-promotion was the Floyd Mayweather, Jr.-Zab Judah welterweight “title fight” [used as loose as possible, Judah still had a belt because the man who defeated him Carlos Baldomir had forgotten to pay a sanctioning fee to fight for the IBF version] from 2006.

Though the future of Don King Promotions looks bleak under the future guidance of Don King son Carl, Top Rank looks poised to be the best it has ever been. They have shifted the power towards them in a not-so-long standing tiff with rival Golden Boy Promotions, headed by former Top Rank fighter Oscar De La Hoya. Arum won the battle for the services of Manny Pacquiao, once the focus of a lawsuit between the sport's two current biggest powers when Golden Boy tried illegally to lure an under contract Manny away from Arum.

The way that King and Arum reminisced leaves one wondering, how long will it take to squash the one argument that keeps the biggest fights in boxing from getting made? Is it something that we will see happen before Arum retires from the game and leaves the keys to his son-in-law Todd DuBoef? Or will this be far down the line when a wilting DuBoef and De La Hoya sit on a perch in Las Vegas to reminisce about their glorious war in an effort to promote a not so meaningful fight?

One would hope that the end comes much sooner than that.