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Fight of your life

How Bob Arum's toe-to-toe approach built a boxing empire

Bob Arum was riding with movie director friend William Friedkin last month, slogging through West Hollywood traffic on their way to watch Manny Pacquiao spar, when Friedkin told an old story about reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes.

“You know, it was Hughes who kept me from making the first Ali-Frazier fight,” Arum said as Friedkin finished.

“Hughes did that?” Friedkin asked.

“I had contracts with both of them,” Arum said. “Hughes said he didn’t want the fight in Las Vegas because Ali was a dirty draft dodger and it was bad for the town. Cost me a lot of money.”

Arum drew a crowd at Wild Card Boxing Club as Manny Pacquiao prepared for last year’s fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr., a bout that shattered pay-per-view records.
Photo by:Getty Images
This was the sort of afternoon that got Arum addicted to the boxing business, where he has been one of the dominant promoters for most of the last 50 years. It was never the fights, so much as the fighters; not the knockouts, so much as the knock-down, drag-outs; not the events so much as the surroundings, the people and places and things.

Arum loves the company of a man like Friedkin, director of “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist,” who fascinated him with his recount of a recent trip to Rome to film an actual exorcism. And he loves to share stories of his own.

It might be of a celebratory dinner for 150 thrown by Prince Rainier after Leon Spinks was knocked out in Monte Carlo. Or taking big-money fights to South Africa during apartheid. Of getting kicked out of a Montreal restaurant after lighting up a joint with Hunter S. Thompson. Or bringing live boxing to a low-budget channel called ESPN.

Arum might even tell the least likely of all origin stories, in which a 31-year-old, Harvard-educated tax lawyer meets Bobby Kennedy and Roy Cohn, and ends up promoting Muhammad Ali. Or a more recent one, where he puts together the $600 million Mayweather-Pacquiao fight, or exports shows to Beijing and Shanghai.

Any of those rich and often rowdy tales might spring forth from Arum, who will promote his 2,000th fight card Saturday night in Las Vegas and is looking forward to promoting his first show in New Zealand next month, two days after he turns 85.

“He’s a great raconteur and a great guy to hang out with,” said CBS Chairman Les Moonves, a 20-year friend who fell out with Arum over a business dispute involving Pacquiao a few years ago but has since mended fences. “That point in time where Bob and my relationship became frayed a bit because of business, it was upsetting to both of us.”

The story about Hughes began with Arum getting a call from Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, the Las Vegas oddsmaker who in those days knew everybody who was anybody in the burgeoning casino town.

It was 1970, near the end of the 3 1/2 year period during which Ali was kept from boxing because he evaded military service in the Vietnam War. Though his license to fight was reinstated while his case was on appeal, none of the state commissions that sanction fights were ready to welcome him.

Snyder had been lobbying on Arum’s behalf to bring Las Vegas the biggest comeback fight that could be made, Ali against the champ, Joe Frazier. When Snyder called to say he had secured the support of Nevada Gov. Paul Laxalt, Arum quickly went to work locking down the deal.

First, he got Ali to take the fight for $300,000 against 30 percent of net revenue. Then he got Frazier to agree to the same terms. With contracts in hand, Arum flew to Vegas with press agent Harold Conrad.

The morning they were to appear in front of the commission, Arum and Conrad went to breakfast at the Desert Inn, where they ran into Moe Dalitz, a mobster who was in the process of selling the hotel to Hughes. Dalitz blew a gasket when Conrad told him they were in town to sign a fight for Ali.

Arum was about to head to the commission meeting with Snyder and the governor when Snyder was summoned to the phone. Arum recalls the color leaving Snyder’s cheeks. He motioned for Laxalt. When Laxalt returned, he explained to Arum that the call was from a representative of Hughes, who delivered word that the billionaire didn’t want Ali fighting in Las Vegas.

Laxalt apologized profusely, even offering to stand by his commitment. This time, Arum put up no fight.

“Why do I need to fight with Howard Hughes?” said Arum, who ended up losing the bid to promote “The Fight of the Century” when it came to pass a bit more than a year later. “He’s the most powerful guy in Las Vegas. I got on a plane and left town. And that was that.”

Envisioning Arum walking away from a fight with an adversary is like trying to picture a hungry dog walking past a bowl of kibble or a paperclip resisting a magnet. It’s an act that goes against nature. Time after time, whether against a network, a venue, a competing promoter or a state commission, Arum has been one to engage rather than retreat.

Understanding why he didn’t will get you a long way toward understanding a man whose dust-ups and blowups too often have cast a shadow across the most accomplished run of any promoter of the last 80 years.

Charismatic and confrontational

Making his way through the onlookers at the Wild Card boxing gym, Arum found his way to Pacquiao, placing a hand on his shoulder. As Arum offered advice to the fighter and Phillipine senator about how to respond when asked about politics, Pacquiao nodded.

After a few minutes, Pacquiao climbed into the ring and Arum made his way into the background, where he checked emails and texts.

These are days of relative calm for Top Rank. Not that the company isn’t busy. Along with its usual promotional duties during Pacquiao’s last fight, Top Rank produced and distributed the pay-per-view. Normally, that would be the role of HBO, but this time the network opted out.

CBS Chairman Les Moonves (left) is among the executives who have had a falling out with Arum only to later mend fences.
Photo by: Top Rank
That irked Arum. Still, HBO and Top Rank appear to be at peace with each other. Top Rank also is getting along with operators of the MGM Grand arenas and, to hear Arum describe it, with Al Haymon, the fight manager and founder of Premier Boxing Champions, a venture against which Top Rank recently settled an antitrust suit.

“You tend to have disagreements with people,” Arum said when asked about the long list of entities with which he’s had beefs. “You tend to not get along. But I never take any of it personally. I mean, fighters go after each other and beat the crap out of each other and look to hurt each other, but when the fight is over they hug and they don’t take it personally.”

Arum concedes that others rarely have seen it that way.

Ken Hershman, who bought fights from Arum as head of sports at Showtime and then HBO, calls Arum a “contradiction,” describing him as one of the most intelligent people he’s ever met, “charismatic, caring and endearing.”

“And then he can flip the switch and be the opposite if he doesn’t like the way things are going,” said Hershman, who was at Showtime when the network lured Pacquiao from HBO and then moved to HBO shortly after the fighter returned. “We’d have our moments, trust me, as everyone who has done business with him has. Nothing is smooth and perfect. But at the end of the day he’s very transparent about his motives. That made it ultimately OK to do business with him.”

During Seth Abraham’s 23 years as an executive at HBO Sports, most of them as its president, the network sued Arum for breach of contract six times. Often, Abraham said, it was Arum saying that he would do one thing — like provide a fight or a rematch — and then reneging when a more beneficial option emerged.

After the dispute was settled, or sometimes while it still was in court, Arum would expect them to resume making fights as they had before.

“I think it’s an Achilles’ heel of Bob,” Abraham said. “Bob believes you can get into these situations, even something as difficult and passionate as a serious lawsuit, and yet the next day you can do business together. He truly believes that. But, six lawsuits? It takes me a while. Six lawsuits didn’t wash off so easily.

“I consider him a friend. I’m not even sure why I consider him a friend, given our history. But he is.”

One of those lawsuits was raging when Arum’s wife, Lovee DuBoef Arum, threw a surprise party for his 65th birthday on the weekend of a George Foreman fight in Reno. On the Monday before the party, she called Abraham to make sure he planned to attend.

Abraham explained politely that he had just returned from a weekend in Las Vegas for another HBO fight. “And,” he told her, “I’m sure you haven’t missed the fact that HBO is suing your husband.” But, mostly out of regard for Lovee, Abraham decided to go. When he got to his seat at ringside, it was next to Arum’s. They sat next to each other without speaking until, finally, Arum broke the ice, but not the chill.

“What are you doing here?” he challenged.

“You know, Bob, this is an HBO fight,” Abraham said. “It’s my job to be here.”

They watched the rest of the fights without speaking. After the show, Abraham joined about 800 other guests in a hotel ballroom, where they surprised Arum. When Abraham wished him happy birthday, Arum again responded, “What are you doing here?”

“Lovee asked me to come,” Abraham said. “It’s your birthday. I’m very fond of Lovee, and so here I am.”

Arum thought for a second, then led Abraham over to an empty cocktail table, where they both took seats. Over the next three hours, they went over details of the dispute. When guests stopped by to offer birthday wishes, Arum mumbled thank you and waved them off.

“He sat there with me for the entire party,” Abraham said, “and at that table we resolved the business issues that started the lawsuit.”

The first time HBO sued Top Rank, it was in a squabble over Marvin Hagler, who at the time was one of the network’s core fighters.

“It was my first big deal and here Bob is breaking the contract to take Marvin off HBO,” Abraham said. “Bob lost no sleep. And I had sleepless nights. Because to him, it’s not a deal. That is a fundamental way he does business. You’re going to call me an ass, I’m going to tell you to (expletive) off and we’ll do business tomorrow. It’s pretty effective armor if you’re Bob Arum. If you’re the buyer and have a contract, then it’s not so great.”

Abraham got his clearest look behind the curtain in the wee hours after a Roy Jones Jr. fight in Atlantic City.

Finding that the restaurants had closed, a large group that included Arum and Abraham went to a rooftop lounge to unwind. One by one, people dropped off. Finally, at about 3 a.m., it was down to Arum and Abraham. Arum was drinking Ketel One vodka. Abraham was sipping beers.

“This is really simple,” Arum said after the bartender gave last call. “I have something you want: good fights. You have something I must have: television. And television money. Everything else is bullshit and we should be able to make every deal.”

That’s the same message Arum often delivered to Mark Taffett, who met the promoter when he started at HBO in 1990 and considers him a mentor.

“To Bob, lawsuits were just another line in the promotion’s P&L,” said Taffet, who headed HBO’s pay-per-view division for 25 years and 190 events before leaving the network last year to become a consultant. “As he told me many times, lawsuits never get in the way of good business. I never met anybody else who could look at it that way.

Bob would completely cast aside that you were in an incredibly difficult and strenuous lawsuit with him, and say, ‘We’ll let the lawyers worry about that. Let’s just do business.’

“Those of us who were just employees would be running on the walls of buildings within companies where lawsuits meant a lot and were something to take note of. But, for Bob, it was just another thing that happened along the way.”

The first time HBO Chairman Richard Plepler met Arum was in a meeting at his office when he was the premium network’s co-president of programming. It was shortly before Arum took Pacquiao to Showtime and CBS. Though surprised, Plepler said he wasn’t about to allow the move to poison the network’s relationship with Top Rank. He arranged a dinner at one of Arum’s favorite spots, the Beverly Hills Hotel. After one pay-per-view fight on Showtime, Pacquiao was back with HBO.

“More than he might even admit, Bob understands why it’s important for others to have wins too,” Plepler said. “If you always leave a negotiation where somebody doesn’t feel good, that’s a myopic thing. It may work for a year or two years. But there’s always tomorrow. I’ve always approached things that way with him.

“It’s a little like a marriage. Every day or week isn’t perfect.”

When Main Events CEO Kathy Duva and her late husband Dan began working on fights with Arum in the early 1980s, they were local promoters providing cards for him to air under the Top Rank flag on ESPN. When their fighters began to emerge as marketable stars, Arum wanted a piece of their promotional rights. Not surprisingly, the two promoters ended up in court.

Main Events prevailed, then signed to produce its own shows on NBC.

“That era is when my husband and Bob would refer to each other as the devil,” Kathy Duva said. “At times, Bob and Dan were at odds to the point of absolute hatred.”

As is sometimes the case in boxing, the two coalesced around a megafight for which they needed each other, a heavyweight title bout between Evander Holyfield and George Foreman in Atlantic City. Though Arum and Dan Duva started off barely tolerating each other, they soon bonded over a dispute with casino hotel operator Donald Trump, who they said came up $2.5 million short of the $11.5 million he agreed to pay to host the fight.

From then on, Kathy Duva said, the two companies coexisted amicably. She said Arum and others at Top Rank helped her learn the promotion business when Dan Duva died and she assumed control of Main Events. While Duva credits Arum for helping her in the transition, he cut her no slack in negotiations.

“He always treated me like an equal, and that includes telling me to go screw myself, which, oddly, I appreciate,” Duva said. “I’ve always known that Bob Arum would be just as nice to me as he would a guy, and that he would turn around and screw me over just as he would a guy.”

Arum does not flinch when asked about the disputes, nor does he apologize for trying to strike the deal that was most beneficial for him, and often his fighter, regardless of what it meant to a network, a venue or another promoter.

“Partners, as everybody likes to call it, is the culture of the business,” Arum said. “But it’s also the bullshit of the business. None of them are our partners. Doesn’t mean they’re bad guys. Doesn’t mean we can’t go to the Emmy Awards with them and cheer them on. But they’re not our partners. We are people that they do business with.
Period. And that’s the way I look at all of them.”

An introduction to Ali

On the back deck of the Beverly Hills villa that he and Lovee bought and renovated four years ago as a seasonal complement to their primary residence in Las Vegas, Arum sipped iced tea from a tall glass, contemplating the course his life would have taken had he not collided, ever so coincidentally, with a career as a fight promoter.

“I’d probably be a retired judge,” Arum said, looking around. “Not living in a house like this!”

Born in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section in the midst of the Great Depression, his only recollection of boxing was of an occasional Joe Louis fight playing on the family radio. He graduated from NYU and then Harvard Law School, took a job with a Manhattan firm and before long had New York Giants season tickets. His only connection to sports was as a fan.

Arum’s first bout featuring Muhammad Ali came in 1966 in Canada against George Chuvalo.
Photo by: Getty Images
Then, in 1962, a couple of years after joining the tax division in the U.S. attorney’s office in New York, Arum was summoned to a meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The AG’s office was looking into the finances of Roy Cohn, a politically connected New York lawyer whose company was promoting the fights of heavyweight champ Floyd Patterson.
 
Kennedy believed Cohn planned to move money made from Patterson’s upcoming fight with Sonny Liston overseas to avoid taxes, a strategy that violated federal law. He told Arum to seize all funds from the fight, which ended up approaching $5 million.

Working on the case for the next few months, Arum learned the ins and outs of the fight game — and particularly the closed-circuit business. He saw a venture that showed potential if managed professionally. Using little if any of his own capital, a savvy promoter could cut deals that would return a profit with almost no risk, so long as the promotion was kept on budget. If the fighters wanted more money than you could secure in guarantees from the venue and the closed-circuit distributors, you didn’t make the fight.

Arum understood all that, but he couldn’t have fathomed that he’d ever put it to use.

That changed when he left the Justice Department to join the firm of famed trial lawyer Louis Nizer, whose clients included many of the bigger names in entertainment. By chance, Arum had made a friend, Mike Malitz, whose father was in the closed-circuit TV business. Arum was doing legal work for the Malitzes when they approached him for advice on an upcoming heavyweight fight that few theaters wanted to buy.

Arum suggested a gimmick, like putting a big name from another sport on the telecast. A friend put him in contact with Jim Brown, who said he’d do it for $500. They spent the day of the fight together, getting to know each other. After the fight, Brown caught Arum by surprise with the suggestion that instead of advising the promoters, he should become one. Arum waved him off. Though he knew business, he didn’t know boxing.

“Besides, there’s only one guy out there that means anything,” Arum said, alluding to the rising star Muhammad Ali, “and he’s taken.”

“No, he’s not taken,” Brown told him. “I’m going to arrange a meeting.”

Two months later, Brown called.

“I want to meet you tomorrow at the New York Hilton,” Brown said. “Ali will be there with his adviser, Herbert Muhammad.”

Joined at the meeting by Malitz, Arum laid out the economics of the closed-circuit business. He also explained the ways in which he thought Ali and other fighters had been short-changed. Arum told them he would give Ali a larger percentage, suggesting a partnership that would include the handful of people Ali trusted most. Herbert Muhammad and other leaders from the Nation of Islam would control half of the company. Arum and Malitz each would take 20 percent stakes, Brown 10 percent.

In January 1966, Ali announced the creation of Main Bout Inc., structured as laid out above, to manage promotional rights to his fights.

Arum’s first bout with Ali would be in Chicago, where the Nation of Islam was based, against Ernie Terrell. All was moving along smoothly until a month before the fight, when Ali, an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, saw his draft status reclassified, making him eligible for military service. When Ali famously said he would refuse, it ignited a firestorm that got the attention of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.

“Daley was a right-wing guy, so he goes crazy,” Arum said. “He tells the [state athletic] commission he wants us out. I tell the commission that’s not right. At least bring Ali in and let him explain. Meanwhile, I’m telling Herbert, ‘Get the guy calmed down. You’re blowing everything.’ So we arrange to fly Ali into Chicago.

“On the way he goes and visits Elijah Muhammad. And then he comes into the meeting and makes it 10 times worse. We get kicked out of Chicago. Kicked out of Illinois. And now every city in America is putting out statements that they don’t want the fight — even though nobody is asking them.”

Scrambling to salvage the fight, Arum went shopping in Canada. A deal in Montreal fell apart. Then he got a call from Harold Ballard, who owned half of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Maple Leaf Gardens. Ballard was willing to take the fight, but his partner, Conn Smythe, wanted no part of Ali. In a stunning development, Ballard landed financing to help him buy out Smythe’s stake in the partnership.

Unfortunately, soon after Arum secured the venue he lost Ali’s opponent. Faced by a boycott of the closed-circuit showings, Terrell pulled out. They worked quickly to replace him with a Canadian fighter, George Chuvalo. With all that, the fight still had to be approved by the Ontario parliament.

It passed by one vote.

Bob Arum was in the boxing business. Or at least the Ali business.

Though it transpired before he was born, Arum’s stepson, Todd DuBoef, president of Top Rank, is convinced that Arum’s combative approach to the business stems from the way he got his start. DuBoef’s is an interesting perspective. The first meeting he attended with Arum also involved Arum’s rival Don King. Taffet tells a story about an Arum-King pay-per-view negotiation in which, though face-to-face at a small, round table, neither spoke directly to the other. But this meeting with DuBoef quickly deteriorated into a shouting match.

DuBoef’s intention was to work in commercial real estate. He soon changed his mind.

“They’re banging on the table, screaming MF this and that,” DuBoef said. “It was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen. It was crazy. But I realized pretty quickly that I wanted to be a part of it.”

Since then, DuBoef frequently has been the “fixer” at Top Rank, the cooler head who goes in behind Arum, cleaning up the mess.

“Always remember that Bob started as a fighter in this business,” DuBoef said. “He started defending somebody he felt was being treated unjustly. I still believe that is the source of the optics that he takes into our offices every day.

“He was always being thrown out. He was always resisted. And with his education, and his demeanor as a fighter and an advocate for what was right, he would never back down.

“When you start out the way Bob did, I’m not sure you ever leave that behind.”

Ali would fight six more times before he was stripped of the title in 1967. It might have put Main Bout out of business had ABC not come to Arum with a proposition to promote the tournament to choose his successor. Arum still didn’t see boxing as his future, but he saw a chance for a windfall and agreed. After that, he drifted away from the sport, focusing instead on more lucrative work with investment banking clients. But when Ali was cleared to return in 1970, Arum came with him, this time without Malitz, who had fallen out of favor with Ali’s camp.

Joining with the leaders of the Nation of Islam and friend Fred Hofheinz, the son of Houston Astrodome impressario Roy Hofheinz, Arum incorporated Top Rank in 1973.

“That’s when it became a business, because Ali wanted to fight every couple of months to make up for lost time,” Arum said. “So we started doing fights around the world, wherever they would give us money. And it became sort of fun. Traveling with him. Seeing new places. Being treated, because you were around Ali, as being something special. That was great. There was nothing like it.”

Arum finally went in with both feet. He wouldn’t promote all of Ali’s fights — losing out on two of three against Frazier, for example — but he got most of them. Focusing on closed-circuit television, he expanded beyond Ali.

When international promoters wanted U.S. distribution for their fights to air either on closed circuit or on a weekend afternoon on ABC, they went to Arum.

On one memorable occasion, an Argentine promoter flew Arum to Paris to meet with Rodolfo Sabbatini, an Italian promoter who had served in the underground during World War II. He was the sort of larger-than-life character who captivated Arum. Before long, Arum found himself amid deals with the leading fight promoters around the world — Tito Lectoure from Argentina, George Parnassus from Greece, Jarvis Astaire from Great Britain and, of course, Sabbatini — a syndicate of sorts who would gather for lavish dinners, plotting the course of the sport.

These weren’t backroom deals, struck through the haze of cigar smoke. Arum and his Top Rank associates worked from the 31st floor of the same Park Avenue office building that housed the Nizer law firm.

“It always fascinated me to do business on a global level; to pick up the phone and sell television rights to a fight in Colombia or Russia,” said Arum, who earlier this month put the Top Rank name on three nights of fights in Shanghai and later this year will do his first show in New Zealand. “That to me was like the best part of business.

And even today, at my age, the reason I stay in the business is really to meet people from all these different cultures who I deal with. That I find fascinating.”

Facing all challengers

After Ali was upset by Olympic gold medalist Leon Spinks in 1978, he called Arum to his side in his dressing room.

“I got you into this business,” Ali told him. “Now, you gotta do me one last favor. Make a rematch. I want to fight the guy again.”

Arum said he agreed, under the condition that it would be Ali’s last fight. If he won, Arum would pay him $250,000 to retire, paving the way for a three-fight tournament to crown his WBA successor. That’s how it played out. Ali disposed of Spinks in front of 63,500 at the Superdome in New Orleans. His retirement set the stage for Arum to embark upon yet another adventure.

Arum (left) is shown with South African hotel operator Sol Kerzner in 1980.
Phot by: Getty Images
While the American heavyweight picture deteriorated around an aging Ali, a pair of contenders emerged on the other side of the Atlantic, in South Africa, where the government’s segregationist policies had led to international boycotts of events. Set to promote the tournament to determine the next champion, Arum met with Sol Kerzner, a South African hotel chain operator who wanted to use fights to promote his new casino.

Working through the WBA, Arum set up a bracket that would have two U.S. Olympic medalists, Spinks and John Tate, meet South Africans Gerrie Coetzee and Kallie Knoetze, with the winners meeting for the title. Spinks would fight Coetzee in Monte Carlo. Tate would fight Knoetze in Bophuthatswana, a tribal homeland created to keep blacks separated from whites. There, Kerzner planned a casino resort larger than Caesars Palace.

If either South African fighter advanced, the championship would be contested in Johannesburg. When Tate and Coetzee both won by knockout, it set up a title fight in a setting that Arum knew could be toxic.

“Sol, for you it’s OK,” Arum told his new friend. “But, for me, we’re going to get killed.”

Kerzner told Arum he would approach the government about relaxations of its apartheid policies that might make the event more palatable. Arum demanded integration of the stadium and hotel, along with a promise that all sporting venues in South Africa would be integrated going forward.

To Arum’s surprise, Kerzner delivered. But the promises did little to salve the concerns of those supporting the boycott of South Africa. Aware of the opposition, Kerzner invited activist Jesse Jackson, hoping to convince him the event would advance race relations. Following their meeting, Kerzner phoned Arum in New York.

“Jesse Jackson is coming back to the States,” Kerzner said, “and he vows that he’s going to prevent Tate from fighting here.”

Arum hung up quickly and called Tate’s manager.

“Get him on a plane,” Arum said. “He’s going to South Africa tomorrow.”

When Arum arrived in South Africa, his first meeting was with the ministry of sport, where he received a tepid welcome. At a press conference in Pretoria, he realized why. After Arum opened with a rundown of historic concessions the government had made for the fight, the representative from the ministry offered a different account.

“We’ve agreed for this fight,” he said. “For the future, we are not sure.”

“What the (expletive) are you talking about!” Arum screamed on live television. He stormed off, swearing there would be no fight.

On the 90-minute drive back to Johannesburg, Kerzner did not say a word to Arum. Even if he changed his mind, it seemed unlikely the fight would come off. Three days later, finances won out. Though it brought protesters to NBC in New York, the show went smoothly in South Africa, attended by an integrated audience of about 86,000. Starved for high-caliber sporting events, the nation became fertile ground for more Arum fights.

Of all Arum’s contradictions, South Africa may be the most difficult to square.

Here was the man who promoted Muhammad Ali in league with African-American leaders, putting on fights in a country best known for an apartheid system that segregated blacks from whites. When Arum recalls those stories, he focuses on his role to integrate the events.

To be fair, he did so. But when the writers of the time chronicled those events, the emphasis was not on the fact that blacks and whites sat side by side for the fight, but that they still were required by law to go their separate ways after it. It would be almost 20 more years before the end of segregation and release of Nelson Mandela from prison.

“The Apostle of Apartheid” is what King called Arum during that tumultuous period. Arum says that was King trying to get under his skin, as always, and to drive a wedge between him and the African-American fighters they both hoped to promote.

“Mandela later told Sol that even though people opposed it … it was one of the greatest things that happened in South Africa,” Arum said, “because it helped ease everybody into the normal transition. For me, that was one of the great vindications.”

‘Common sense and brains’

In a sitting room area near the front entry of his Beverly Hills home, not far from a desk at which he does business while away from his Vegas office, Arum settled onto a sofa, back from his afternoon watching Pacquiao. He was due up early the next morning to head to an ESPN studio, where he’d appear live with Stephen A. Smith, trying to gin up sales for the upcoming pay-per-view.

Arum raises the arm of Zou Shiming following a victory this month in Las Vegas.
Photo by: Getty Images
“You spend 50 years doing something, it has to be that you like what you’re doing,” Arum said, almost as if in concession. “I enjoy this. It’s been very broadening.”

He had spent the last two days recounting all of it, stacking story atop story, always in striking detail, painted with brightly colored, and often off-color, language. There were those now on these pages, but also so many others. The careers of Oscar De La Hoya, whom Arum helped develop and then warred with, and Floyd Mayweather Jr., who he aided but could never quite understand. And of Pacquiao, the senator.

He told war stories about most every network that has three initials and made a stop on every continent not known for penguins.

He talked about his pride in his two living children from an earlier marriage, a son who is a college dean and a daughter who works on software used in schools, and the heartbreak of losing an equally accomplished adult son to a mountain hiking accident six years ago.

Arum brushed off any conversations about a legacy, saying those are for people who do “way more important things” than put on fights.

“The thing I like most in people is a Yiddish word called seykhel, which means common sense and brains,” Arum responded quickly when asked about qualities he admires. “If somebody doesn’t have common sense and brains, I really have difficulty communicating and dealing with them. That to me is essential. And the second thing that is important is humanity. They can’t be people that are only in it for themselves and only think of themselves.

“Those are flawed people.”

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