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Bob Arum and Dana White draw big heat for their comments
By Zach Arnold | September 11, 2009
The Las Vegas Sun has a long article about the bankruptcy proceedings involving Station Casinos. This paragraph might get your attention:
With Station’s attorneys now doing the talking in court, it’s also unknown whether Station will stay in control by playing any of its numerous wild cards, which include cash raised from the sale of any of its numerous casinos, more than 500 acres of undeveloped land it owns or controls in Las Vegas, Northern California and Reno, or money raised from the Fertitta family’s Ultimate Fighting Championship franchise.
Frank Trigg, in this article by Kevin Iole, brags about his ability to brag. Then go sell some PPV buys for UFC 103, Frank.
Bob Arum, besides making inflammatory comments about MMA, is making a pitch to having boxing at Yankee Stadium. Here are some notes about the hype job coming up for Manny Pacquiao vs. Miguel Cotto. The Sweet Science has a very long, but very good article on Golden Boy’s Richard Schaefer and what he has meant to boxing.
If you missed Dana White’s comments about the upcoming Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight, here’s the transcript.
“Boxing is trying to sell you the fight that nobody cares about. People want to see Mayweather/Pacquiao, but they’re not giving you that fight. And the other thing in Floyd’s commentary, Floyd goes out there and says, you know, ‘Oh, no Mixed Martial Artist has ever done $250 million dollars in revenue, you want to see big money checks, I’ll show you big money checks’ because the fans, the fans keep doing it, boxing keeps doing it to them, you show up to see Floyd Mayweather not fight. This guy will run around in circles, OK, everybody wants to know why the UFC is becoming so popular is because they’re sick of boxers not fighting! You’re going to pay whatever it is, $55, $60 bucks to see Floyd basically you get to see Dancing with the Stars again with Floyd Mayweather except you have to pay for it this time, OK? You got to pay $60 bucks to watch Floyd Mayweater in Dancing with the Stars again.”
Now here’s the backlash.
In Canada (New Brunswick), the Moncton Boxing and Wrestling Commission has banned MMA for the next six months.
Melvin Guillard faces Nate Diaz next week and did a Q & A with USA Today to hype up the fight. Todd Martin at CBS Sports has an article about UFC’s experiment with a PPV lead-in on Spike TV for the 9/19 Dallas event.
Here is an interview with New Jersey boss Nick Lembo.
Topics: Boxing, Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 33 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
The timing on the New Brunswick ban seems a little suspicious to me. That “commission” has santioned shows previously, and as soon as one starts having a little success they ban it? Sounds to me like someone wants some money.
Moncton hearts mordidas
Arum attacked a big fanbase and them “homosexuals” in one small breath. White talks crap about the boxing politics, but he doesn’t disrespect their fans. Arum ain’t bright.
I’m not one of those ignorant UFCbots who parrot “boxing is dead!” just because Lord Dana says it, but Yankee stadium is way too huge (over 57,000 seats) to risk getting embarrassed having a half-empty stadium. I said it was a dumb idea when UFC was rumored to be running Fenway, and it’s a dumb idea for boxing to do it.
They would need more than one mega-fight (and honestly the only fight with a 57,000 seat demand in America right now is Pacquiao vs. Mayweather) and really cheap seats. We’re talking about selling out 3 Madison Square Gardens, basically. Why would you want to watch a fight from Row W98 at a baseball stadium when you can pay less money to watch it at home and it won’t look like two ants fighting without binoculars?
As for Dana’s comments, if he’s saying this to lure boxing fans to UFC, that’s not the way to go. New fans are going to turn in and see guys laying in a guard without knowing what they’re watching and think “Well, at least there’s movement in boring boxing fights.”
Why is Ariel Helwani interviewing Bob Arum when 90% of the talk is MMA related?
Its so obvious that he was looking for a reaction like this instead of covering the Pacquiao-Cotto fight.
When you ask Arum about MMA you will always get garbage like this, the same way Dana White trashes boxing. Its an automatic reaction from a promoter, they insult everyone who is a threat. Golden Boy actually does do a decent job of not putting out inflammatory remarks about MMA.
I am not defending the likes of Arum, Mayweather etc for the ignorant things they say about MMA. But is it any wonder that it happens when the media keeps asking them questions about a different sport and insinuates that boxing is dying?
Helwani showed his true colors during the Cro Cop fiasco. I lost all respect for him and I think he indirectly works for ZUFFA since he writes articles on the VS network.
The ironic thing is I agree with you about Yankee Stadium, but have an alternative that is twice as big but could actually work — and that’s Jerry Jones’ new palace in Dallas, the one with the ridiculous scoreboard that people in the cheapest seats in the place go nuts over.
Using the right boxers, running at Jerry’s Palace might be a better shot than Yankee Stadium.
Yes we wanted PBF v Pacman but come on PBF was never going to have hist 1st fight back v Pacman. It could be lot worse. PBF could of had an easy fight and Pacman could of had an easy fight and then both met each other down the line. Now we have PBV v JMM and Pacman v Cotto. I really dont see what not to like about that. If things go to plan we will have a PBF v Pacman mega fight next year. Somebody please tell me how we are getting screwed out of this?
“Using the right boxers, running at Jerry’s Palace might be a better shot than Yankee Stadium.”
That’s an interesting thought. They’d have to really pull out all the stops to make it work, though. They might even have to have Bill Clinton box an undercard exhibition against Texas Governor Rick Perry.
They just had some high school games at Jerry’s Palace last week. It wasn’t even 1/6 full and no one seemed too put out about it.
@Zach
Why do you think that? Because a non-major market like suburban Dallas would be more likely to draw than an entertainment capital like NYC?
Also, isn’t boxing in Texas a bit stigmatized due to the lack of a commission? Texas boxing has a reputation of being “the last refuge” state for guys like Holyfield to go when nobody will license them. Will a massive championship fight with no real commission or drug tests behind it be something boxing would want to do?
Until Dana White gives people Brock vs. Fedor he should pipe down on the ‘they don’t give you the fight you want to see’ crap. And while we’re not seeing Manny vs. Mayweather right away the two build up fights are with very dangerous opponents who are pretty well known and have solid fanbases.
I love both Boxing and MMA. Boxing has lagged in previous years not because of the fight you want to see stuff, a lot of times they have worked that out in previous years. It’s mostly been because there is no bang for your buck. Most of the PPV cards are filled with a main event and then a bunch of cards with blowout matches featuring a rising star versus a nobody.
UFC has quality matches and names all the way up and down their card.
It appears that Golden Boy and Top Rank have taken the whole beefing up the undercard idea seriously as both undercards for the Mayweather and Manny fights look considerably improved.
Where they still need to work is on getting fight tickets to real fans and not just casinos. Pacquaio-Cotto sold out in a very short amount of time but the cheapest seats were $150. $150 for nosebleeds isn’t getting real fight fans in. Casinos bought huge chunks of these seats and now scalpers have these same $150 tickets for nearly $500 a pop online.
Who can afford to go to a fight or take their son to a fight? Where are the next generation of Boxing fans going to come from? A $60 PPV? Also way overpriced.
And they also don’t understand that you don’t need a $40 Latin Fury or Pinoy Power PPV filled with lesser known names fighting easy opponents every month. That’s like charging people for UFN shows.
Those cards would be great for places like ESPN’s FNF or Versus or even ShoBox. But PPVs should always have a top level main event quality fight to sell them.
“Also, isn’t boxing in Texas a bit stigmatized due to the lack of a commission?”
Texas has a “commission” and a “commissioner.” They aren’t called that in Texas, but it’s the same thing, except that the “commissioner,” Dickie Cole, is referred to as the administrator of combative sports for the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. Something like that, anyway.
Texas uses state employees to run their combative sports program instead of “commissioners.”
Texas is stigmatized, to the extent that it’s stigmatized, because the people running the program aren’t exactly progressive and interested in being state of the art in any way whatsoever.
If Arum’s idea is “big is better,” then Jerry’s Palace is better than Yankee Stadium on a few levels. First, the Palace doesn’t have to be sold out to look good on TV (just look at some of the pre-season Cowboys games at the place) and if there are a lot of people there (like there was last week at the Oklahoma game vs. BYU), it looks terrific. Second, it’s the one huge venue I’ve seen that really attracts people because it’s Jerry’s Palace. He’s done a magnificent job of branding, so anything that goes to the place has an aura to it. Third, Dallas has the biggest airports around, so if you’re doing a huge event and you want people to show up from Mexico, Canada, and elsewhere, it’s as good as New York on that front.
But the biggest advantage Jerry’s place has over Yankee Stadium is the surface. Cowboys Stadium uses field turf and the place can configured for any event (similarly to Cardinals’ Stadium in Glendale), whereas Yankee Stadium could conceivably be used for other sporting events but there’s a hesitancy to do so to damage the field.
Robert Poole
Not only Arum didn’t give us Pacquiao vs. Mayweather, but he also failed to do Pavlik vs. Abraham, Donaire vs. Darchinyan 2, Caballero vs. Juan Manuel Lopez etc.
According to Meltzer UFC offered Fedor a pretty decent contract (2 mln + PPV %) and they chose lesser offer from Strikeforce. I don’t think you can blame them, especially after they put dozens of dream match-ups since they bought Pride.
I’ve seen boxing in a large open air field in a secondary US market. To put it bluntly – it makes no sense. If you’re gonna do it, you do it at Shea or Yankee Stadium in NY, because you have a market there willing to see the fight. Cotto/Mayweather on the weekend of the Puerto Rican Day Parade would be the fight and the time to do it in this country.
Northeast weather is too volitile to do a Yankee Stadium show. I haven’t been to the new stadium yet (going next week)…. But most people say it’s a very nice upgraded version of the old stadium. And I can’t imagine watching any fighting there. It made sense back in the day before TV was popular. Now it makes no sense. Unless you have a seat on the field, it will be a horrible view….
And I agree that the new Dallas Stadium would be good…. $25 for a nose bleed to get the crowd reaction and watch it on the big screen….
Unless you build a time machine and grab a prime Julio Cesar Chavez, you won’t sell 10,000 tickets in Cowboys Stadium. You go to where the people are. You go to Yankee Stadium.
Lemme put this another way:
K-1 Dynamite USA was held in a giant ass stadium to make it look impressive. It was empty, and they gave away tickets to make it look better. They could have taken that show to the midwest or even Vegas and probably had a better shot of selling tickets and actually making some money at Thomas And Mack or something.
Long story short, you don’t ignore where it is that a fighter draws to go somewhere that looks nice. Those big screens for fans in the nosebleeds are meaningless if NO ONE IS SITTING IN THE NOSEBLEEDS. As Don King about that sometime from when he ran Chase Field.
I’ve been saying they should do Floyd vs Cotto in Yankee Stadium for years.
Cotto can sell it out. The three biggest attendence in Madison Square Garden are all Cotto fights. You make the Upper Deck seats $15 – $20 and you get Fat Joe, Marc Antony or a Salsa y Merengue act and you’re set. Hold the fight the night before the Puerto Rican Day parade.
There’s no question they can sell out.
I read that article on Station Casinos. What a clusterfuck.
It looks to me like that part you quoted was just the writer doing some wild speculation.
Anyway, in my totally unprofessional and uneducated opinion, Deutsche Bank looks like a giant, unethical bully in this whole deal.
As far as ‘giving the fans the fights they want’ I think Dana and the UFC have done a pretty great job.
We wanted Penn/GSP, we got it. We wanted Lesnar/Mir 2, it happened. Yes, we want Fedor/Lesnar, and it could very well still happen – but that’s out of the UFC’s control right now.
UFC has several existing stars, and many more on the rise. They will have superfights for many many years to come.
Boxing simply can’t produce any new stars. The only mainstream fight left is Pac/Floyd…after that?
Boxing wasn’t supposed to be able to create any new stars when Oscar De La Hoya was the biggest name. Yet, oddly, Pac/Floyd is a mainstream fight?
So tired of these debates. It should be funny to see what variant is produced 4-5 years from now.
Bob Arum should be ashamed of himself for what he said. At least he didn’t use any anti-gay slurs, but what he said was right up there with what former IFL head Jay Larkin said about ground-fighting (although Larkin never actually said “like homosexuals,” he just implied it).
“Boxing wasn’t supposed to be able to create any new stars when Oscar De La Hoya was the biggest name. Yet, oddly, Pac/Floyd is a mainstream fight?”
Here is the problem. First, FMJ retired, so people assumed he was out of the equation.
Second, back in the 1990’s, boxing had ODLH, Roy Jones Jr, Lewis/Tyson, & Trinidad. There was a few more, but they were the bigger ones. And out of all those guys, only Oscar De La Hoya was able to really create the next generation of stars when he faught Floyd Mayweather Jr & Manny Pacquiao. All of the other big guys from the ’90’s didn’t help produce the next generation of stars.
Mayweather & Pacquiao are just the left overs from the ODLH days. Once that fight is over, honestly who is after that? There are no potential stars at Middleweight and above. Chad Dawson is good, but has nobody to fight. David Haye is a long shot at beating a Klitchko and becoming a star. Beyond that, there is nobody in the larger weight classes.
Boxing suffers from that alone, especially when by comparison the UFC has what are perceived to be very solid Heavyweight, Light Heavyweight, Middleweight, & Welterweight Divisions.
Then looking at the smaller fighters, it seems like the British Invasion is basically over for now. The guys who are going to rise to the top in some of the smaller divisions don’t have that star power quality.
Simple stated, 2 major blockbuster fights a year doesn’t make a sport in America. And boxing is even having a hard time at pulling that off right now.
“Anyway, in my totally unprofessional and uneducated opinion, Deutsche Bank looks like a giant, unethical bully in this whole deal.”
It should be criminal what these banks do. They approve deals such as public companies going private…. And on paper there is no way the deal makes sense. And yet through a combination of capital firms and bank debt, these deals are able to go through. What ends up happening is that the companies become so leveraged that they can’t even afford their bank interest, and then the bank gets higher fees and more control.
Like I said, it should be criminal for companies to even go private the way Station Casino’s did. At least with the bank enabling them.
And also, the article basically blames the economy on the situation. That is a bunch of hogwash. Since about 2003, there was a slew of companies going private.
This made sense. Stock prices were down, so the ability to buyback stock was a good deal. Just for the sake of discussion, let’s say 90% of the money came from capital firms. Then about 2006 and 2007 happened. The stock market increased so much that in order to take a company private, they had to buy back the stock at an overprived value. Then we started to see deals happen where 50% or more were financed off of debt. This debt was allowed due to the banks being able to get so big and make deals that didn’t make sense.
Specifically looking at Station Casino, they went private at the wrong time due to the stock market being so high. It had very little to do with the economy. The only thing the crash of 2008 did was speed up what was always going to happen…..
And the same thing was said when Oscar was on the verge of retiring, since he was just sort of the continuation of the era of Chavez and Whitaker. Its getting old. Pacquiao isn’t even 30 and people are talking seriously like he’s gonna be out of the sport any day.
As for Station, they like all the other casino chains overleveraged themselves in a bad way. Not only that, they serve a market that’s among the worst out there right now; locals in Vegas. Its not good. With that market falling, they need to restructure and sell off some of their properties (Boyd is plenty interested).
All Boxing really needs is to get Arum, Golden Boy, Goosen-Tudor and Banner Promotions all on the same page. Have them form their own group and negotiate a network or cable TV deal. Through revenue sharing you incentive them to put their talented guys in quality matchups. The group can run 2-4 PPVs per year and revenue split again. The exposure will negate the losses some, if not all, of the up and comers will accrue and expectations of will/loss records will be like they were back in the 50’s-70’s and how they are in UFC.
People love boxing. It just got awful for a long time. Just like baseball got bad and people stopped watching. Baseball has people back in record numbers now. There’s no reason that with a change in presentation style boxing can’t do the same thing.
Will the promoters ever work together? That’s the big question and it may be unlikely.
Thanks for linking to my “backlash,” Zach.
I wrote that before Bob Arum went off on his rant.
This boxing vs. MMA “debate” is getting to be like an Obama speech vs. the Republican response, except in this case BOTH sides are talking gibberish!
Floyd and Pacquia are definitly a continuation. The problem is that the line has been completely broken in the higher weight classes. And eventually a guy like JMM is going to beat a guy like Mayweather and not be able to replicate his star potential. Putting it bluntly, boxing is constantly risking it way too much everytime there 2 or 3 stars fight. That’s a horrible way to do business.
Not to mention they have lost the entire younger generation of younger fight fans. You can’t
magically gain that back. How do they continue success with no major stars and a dying fanbase? The fact that only 2 or 3 events all year have any meaning showcases this. Even boxing people are starting to sing it’s own death.
As for the boxing guys working together…. I would be shocked to see that happen. It’s not in them to do it. Deep down each promoter is too worried about his own interests to make it work.
There are boxing stars. They’re just Eastern European or Hispanic so Americans aren’t interested in either unless they are Latin-American. Floyd Mayweather is the last major draw who is American born, so when he goes I don’t know what American promoters are going to pull off to get non-Latin-Americans interested. Boxing will still pull off decent enough PPV numbers from those who aren’t close minded saying “Hey, he doesn’t speak English I can’t get behind him” where calling them “dead” is idiotic. It’s going to thrive as a whole, though. The world is bigger than just America believe it or not. King, Arum and De La Hoya can easily fly overseas to make money. And MMA hasn’t penetrated Latin America or Europe enough to take their spot yet.
If Chris Arreola can make a fight of it against Klitschko later this month, that’d be a big deal for American boxing. Look for him to get blasted, though.
Another Dana bullshit fest…look at all the main events or the rest of the year in the UFC…are those really fights that everyone was clamoring for? And bagging on PBF for dancing is ironic when we got two PPVs of his “P4P best in the world” doing the same exact thing.
Showtime Super6 tournament could generate some new stars if the Americans manage to get some exciting wins over the Europeans. Taylor, Ward, Dirrell all have the skill set and ‘look (aka not Latino) to be considered mainstream.
Chad Dawson is another guy who with more activity might gain some fame. Kelly Pavlik took a wrong turn too soon, but young enough to rebuild.
Finally the Klitschkos are human beings. Sooner or later one of them will topple. If an American happens to be the one who stops one of them, a revenge fight against the brother is damn near super-fight status.
Dana White claims to be a (in his words) a boxing guy, but goes out of his way to trash the sport. He also lays claims to being a former fighter but I haven’t been able to find anything on him ever fighting as a professional.
The reasons why you don’t get Floyd against Pac Man off the bat is because you don’t tak almost two years off and come back and face the number one pound for pound fighter in the world. Period.
Second, White doesn’t have to deal with sanctioning bodies who don’t rate a fighter who holds another organizations belt, ego driven promoters who won’t work with each other, fighters under contract to seperate cable giants that won’t make getting into the ring easy. He mainly only has to work with himself.
So he can make claims that all of the biggest fights over that past ten years have been made by him. It’s easy when it’s only you and the fighters sitting at the barganing table.
Boxing does give us the fights we want and usually in a timely manner when possible. Every once in a while we don’t get a mega fight that the fans want to see. Eventually the boxers do square off and everyone forgets the politics involved for one night.