Robert Arum (born December 8, 1931) is an American lawyer, boxing promoter and businessman. He is the founder and CEO of Top Rank, a professional boxing promotion company based in Las Vegas. He also worked for the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York in the tax division during his legal career before moving into boxing promotion.
Video Bob Arum
Biography
Arum was born in New York City. He grew up in the Crown Heights section of New York, with an Orthodox Jewish background.
Maps Bob Arum
Education and legal career
He attended Erasmus Hall High School, New York University, and Harvard Law School, where he graduated cum laude. He worked as an attorney in the United States Department of Justice during the Kennedy administration, and had little interest in boxing until 1965.
Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy and his Justice Department service under Robert Kennedy; Arum researched Kennedy's assassination for senior partner Louis Nizer, who wrote the Forward to the Warren Commission Report.
Boxing promoter
In 1966, Arum became a boxing promoter. Despite having previously been assigned by the Department of Justice to confiscate proceeds from the September 25, 1962 Sonny Liston vs. Floyd Patterson world heavyweight boxing title fight Arum "had never seen a boxing match before the first fight I did with Ali," referring to the 1966 Muhammad Ali vs. George Chuvalo Toronto bout. Arum was a secretary and vice-president of Ali's promotion company, Main Bout. During the 1980s, he became a driving force behind the sport, rivaling Don King. Arum organized superfights like Marvin Hagler vs. Roberto Durán and Hagler vs. Thomas Hearns.
Arum mounted the Hagler-John Mugabi, Hearns-James Shuler doubleheader in Las Vegas in April, 1986. After the Hearns-Shuler fight, Shuler, who had lost by knockout in the first round, showed up at Arum's hotel room to thank him for the opportunity to fight Hearns. Ten days later, Shuler was dead in an unfortunate motorcycle accident.
Arum kept producing big-scale undercards and superfights, including the Hagler-Sugar Ray Leonard bout, the Leonard-Hearns rematch, Evander Holyfield vs. George Foreman, and many others.
Some of Arum's superstars from the 1990s include former world flyweight champion Michael Carbajal, six-division world champion Oscar De La Hoya, eight-division world champion Manny Pacquiao, and three-division world champion Erik Morales. Arum also promoted the legendary champion Julio Cesar Chavez in his later years of boxing.
Arum has concentrated largely on promoting Hispanic fighters in recent years, citing surveys which show boxing is among the most popular sports within the Hispanic community. He has had great success with fighters such as Miguel Cotto, who has won world titles at the 140, 147, 154, 160-pound weight divisions, and Antonio Margarito, who held a 147-pound WBO belt from 2002-2007.
He has concentrated many of his shows in the Southwestern portion of the U.S., in cities with large Spanish-speaking populations. He's also the promoter of many of the cards on Telefutura, a Spanish language network.
Arum was inducted into the International Boxing Hall Of Fame in 1999.
Controversies
While working as a boxing promoter, Arum had been involved in many feuds and controversies.
In 1994, he was involved with John Daly for the High Noon in Hong Kong boxing event. The fights were called off at the last minute when Barry Hearn withdrew his fighters as no purses were forthcoming. John Daly blamed Arum when he said, "I've tried desperately to convince my partners to keep the faith. I offered them as much security as I could but it was not quite good enough. It seems I was ready to take the shots, but Mr Arum wasn't."
In 2000, citing extortion; Arum voluntarily testified to having paid IBF president Bobby Lee $100,000 in two installments in 1995, as the first half of a $200,000 bribe, through "middleman, Stanley Hoffman," adding that Lee had first demanded $500,000 to approve the Schulz-Foreman fight, but had settled for the lesser amount of $200,000 (half of which was never paid). Lee was indicted for racketeering in 1999, but convicted of money laundering and tax evasion in 2000. Following his testimony, Arum was sanctioned and fined $125,000 by the Nevada State Athletic Commission. Boxing promoters Cedric Kushner and Dino Duva also admitted to making similar payments to Lee.
He has been involved in a forty-year feud with Don King, who called him a "rat fink" in 2000 for admitting during a federal trial that he bribed the International Boxing Federation president in order to gain a more favorable rating for one of his fighters.
Oscar De La Hoya successfully sued Arum and was legally released from his contract with Top Rank in January 2001. Following years of acrimony; he and De La Hoya publicly salvaged their relationship.
In 2003, Arum complained about the judging in the September 13 bout between Oscar De La Hoya and Sugar Shane Mosley and suggested there was a vendetta against him from a member of the Nevada State Commission that led to De La Hoya's loss. Arum later made an apology for the remark which commission chairman Luther Mack accepted.
In the first week of January 2004, FBI agents raided Arum's Top Rank office in Las Vegas. Arum was on vacation when his office was raided, and the FBI originally declined to comment on the raid. The media reported that the FBI was investigating allegations that Top Rank was involved in fixing the rematch between De La Hoya and Shane Mosley, even though De La Hoya lost and Arum was De La Hoya's promoter. The federal agency also announced that it was investigating some of Eric Esch's fights, as well as the Jorge Páez-Verdell Smith fight. The investigation closed in the summer of 2006 with no charges being filed.
In 2007, Floyd Mayweather Jr., whom Arum promoted from 1996-2006, accused him of both underpaying and undermarketing him while exploiting his talents and manipulating officials.
In 2007, UFC president Dana White accused him of "sucking the life out of the sport (boxing) and not putting anything back in." Amongst White's criticisms were that Arum had created a weak undercard for the De La Hoya-Mayweather fight in 2007 saying Arum did not promote the show correctly. "He promoted that show completely the wrong way, because he worried about the money as opposed to trying to secure the future", White said. "He should have stacked that card. He should have had Shane Mosley and Bernard Hopkins and (Marco Antonio) Barrera and Winky Wright on there and used it to show that boxing is back". Arum responded by saying that MMA fighters need to examine the revenues being generated and ask why the UFC wasn't paying them more.
Arum also filed a lawsuit against HBO for overstepping its boundaries in the sport by becoming a de facto promoter while trying to intentionally eliminate him as a promoter. Arum complained that HBO dropped Floyd Mayweather Jr. from his exclusive deal after he insisted his fighter have a tougher bout than the network wanted. The suit was settled out of court but Arum continued to criticize HBO by saying "Instead of working with promoters, like they have done in the past, they have become promoters themselves. They make the fights just like promoters and pay fighters", Arum said. "It's their money and they can do what they want, but Don King doesn't have to go along with it and neither do I. King and I can get along without HBO or Showtime...The problem HBO Sports got into is they became defenders of the status quo. They held you back because they had control."
In 2009, Arum defended Antonio Margarito when he lost his boxing license in the US state of California on charges of illegal hand wraps, implied it was racially motivated and stated that Top Rank would not come back to the state of California until the issue was rectified.
In late 2009, Arum called UFC fans "skinhead white guys". Bas Rutten accused him of racism for this remark. Arum also stated that MMA fighters are "guys rolling around like homosexuals on the ground." Earlier in the year, Arum described UFC President Dana White as "nuts" and "a little too much of a loose cannon" for White's use of a gay slur in reference to an MMA reporter.
Personal life
Arum is Jewish. He has been married twice. He had three children with his first wife: Richard, Elizabeth, and John. His son, environmental lawyer John Arum (1961 - 2010), fell to his death in 2010 while climbing the north face of Storm King, a mountain in North Cascades National Park; he is most remembered for his meticulous representation of Native American tribal rights. In 1991, he married Lovee Duboef with whom he has two stepchildren; Todd Duboef, President of Top Rank and Dena DuBoef, Vice President of Top Rank. Bob is a close friend and business partner of billionaire casino tycoon, and CEO of Las Vegas Sands Corp, Sheldon Adelson.
As a former backup singer, during his college days, Arum has a deep interest in music. He famously declared Manny Pacquiao to be the "Filipino Frank Sinatra."
Cannabis advocate
Arum appeared as corrupt DEA agent, "Stokes", in the 1975 film, The Marijuana Affair, at the behest of his friend, Jamaican-born boxing promoter, filmmaker, bookie, and horse-racing aficionado Lucien Chen (June 6, 1928 - December 16, 2015); has advocated for the decriminalization of cannabis; and, in a 2017 interview, stated that he had started smoking Cannabis in 1966, declaring, "Cannabis is good for you! It's these damn people during the Nixon administration that really put cannabis into the position where it was a drug like heroin and cocaine and that was wrong" and adding that "in a lot of ways, marijuana is better for the athlete as pain medication than the drugs." In a 2017 VICE interview (which errantly reports film producer Chen as Shen); Arum was also quoted as saying, "I think the NFL is gonna revise its policy on marijuana and I think everybody should. It was the Nixon administration that demonized marijuana, to the real harm of a lot of people, particularly people who have terminal cancer. Marijuana can be a very therapeutic thing."
See also
- Boxing
- Floyd Mayweather Jr.
References
External links
- BoxingInsider.com Biofile interview with Bob Arum
- NSAC Fines Arum
- Top Rank
- Interview
Source of article : Wikipedia
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