Cotto-Mayorga fight could spell the end of an era for boxing heavyweights Bob Arum and Don King
Bob Arum and Don King are two men who came from completely different sides of the track to eventually become the two biggest boxing promoters in U.S. history.
Arum, the son of a rabbi, started his professional career as a Harvard-trained lawyer working in the tax division of the Justice Department of the Kennedy Administration.
King, the son of a steelworker in Cleveland who attended Case Western University for a year, was a numbers runner who did his post-graduate work in the Marion, Ohio penitentiary on a manslaughter conviction and eventually was pardoned by Ohio Gov. James Rhodes.
Combined, King and Arum have over 80 years of experience in promoting boxing. Their paths have crossed several times over the years and most of the time boxing fans have been the beneficiaries because they were the men in control of the two boxers that everyone wanted to see matched together.
That is not the case with their recent collaboration of Miguel Cotto, the WBA 154-pound champion promoted by Arum, vs. Ricardo Mayorga, the foul-mouthed former welterweight champion, promoted by King, at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on Showtime on Saturday night. Cotto is a legitimate champion and Mayorga hasn't won a significant fight since be beat Vernon Forrest for the welterweight title in 2003.
The fight is only worth noting because this could be the final time that King and Arum, both 79 years old, share a stage together.
King has been slowing down in recent years and a significant amount of his steam was taken away by the recent death of his beloved wife, Henrietta.
Arum has also been dealing with the death of his son in a mountain climbing accident, which has prompted him to scale back his usually heavy workload. He had already turned over a significant amount of his promotional work to his other son, Todd duBoef, who is the President of Top Rank.
As Arum and King depart the scene they are leaving a sport that is much different than the one they entered 40 years ago. Odd that on the same week they are promoting Cotto-Mayorga it is the 40th anniversary of Ali-Frazier I, the single most important boxing event in the modern history of the sport.
It is inconceivable that there will ever be a time when boxing will command the type of attention that it did when Ali and Frazier fought. It has largely become a niche sport with a hardcore following. The fan base is not only shrinking, but aging. And the ones who can vividly recall the glory of Ali-Frazier couldn't even tell you who the heavyweight champion of the world is right now.
The fact that there are three who hold four titles and they all live and fight in Europe tells you everything you need to know.
A lot of people will blame Arum and King for what has happened with the sport. That is partially true. The things that they rail against now - other promoters not working hard enough to build their own stars and picking off those from other promoters, and waiting for fat license fees from cable TV networks rather than working hard to build their own events - are the same things that they did to enrich themselves and build their own empires.
It is only now as they are about to depart the scene that they can look at the sport with a wistfulness that makes them want to see it as vibrant as it was when they first started out 40 years ago.
King and Arum recently conducted a joint telephone press conference where they talked about the competition between each other over the years and the state of the sport today. Their first promotion together was the "Thrilla in Manila." Later they worked on the first Leonard-Duran fight in Montreal, which ushered in the Pay Per View era of boxing.
"There's never been a better salesman in boxing than Don King. I worked my tail off as a promoter because I had such a measuring stick, a bar to reach," Arum said. "I think Don made me a lot better promoter than I would have been and I think I made Don a better promoter than he would have been."
King agreed with Arum.
"When you have somebody who is formidable you have to deal with what is real and you cannot rest on your laurels. You've got to make the next one better than the last one. And so he's always been there sniffing at me which means I have to go out there and work that much harder to bring the people the best in boxing."
In a career filled with highlights, Arum points to one moment that stands out. It was the night that he unplugged King's microphone following the Oscar De La Hoya-Felix Trinidad fight. Trinidad had upset De La Hoya in a fight where De La Hoya decided to run over the course of the final four rounds and ended up losing a split decision. King took over the post-fight press conference and kept screaming, "The Lights are going out in Arumville!" over and over again. Arum had someone pulled the plug on the mic.
"And they couldn't hear him anymore. That was my crowning achievement," Arum said.
The second crowning achievement? The night that Arum pulled King from the ring following the Marvin Hagler-Sugar Ray Leonard fight.
King said he never had a bad relationship with Arum.
"We're not acrimonious, we're promoters. And that's what we do," King said. "We have to seize the environment and take time
to see what's going on and figure out what's the best way for the promotion to go. If it needs a little acrimony then we'll give them a little flavor of acrimony. But no, I've never just hated him. Get even with him? Well absolutely."
King said the crowning achievement of his career was promoting "The Rumble in the Jungle" - Ali vs. Foreman in Zaire.
"That set the tone for a whole new era," King said. "For Ali to pull that out that then led to so many more crowning
achievements. Everyone in the press predicted he was too old and he was finished and he wouldn't beat this giant of a man in George Foreman and he won."
Recently King has been making overtures to Floyd Mayweather Jr. They have been keeping a regular dialogue. But Mayweather, who promotes himself, hasn't made a commitment to returning to the ring. Mayweather-Pacquiao is the fight that everyone wants to see. It is this era's version of Ali-Frazier or Hagler-Hearns.
"If Don had Mayweather and I have Pacquiao, I didn't say the fight would be made in a day. I said the fight would be made within one hour," Arum said. "Don and I would have cut to the essentials. We would have worked out the few details and we make the fight. Mayweather would do well to go with Don. It would be one of the greatest promotions ever."
PUNCHLINES
Yuri Foreman will meet Pawel Wolak on the undercard of the Miguel Cotto-Ricardo Mayorga show at MGM Grand in Las Vegas on Saturday night. It is the first time that Foreman has fought since losing his WBA title to Cotto at Yankee Stadium last July.
It has been an eventful nine months for Foreman of Brooklyn by way of Belarus and Israel. He tore cartilage and ligaments in his left knee during that fight and had to have surgery to repair the injury. He has gone through rehab, witnessed the birth of his first child, a son named Lev, and suffered the loss of his manager Murray Wilson, who died suddenly from a heart attack.
Foreman, who is studying to be a rabbi, has taken a philosophical approach to all the changes, good and bad, that he has gone through in the last nine months.
"There is a saying in Judaism that everything happens for something good in the future," Foreman said.
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