Bob Arum's 50 years packed with crazy stories and outstanding fights

LAS VEGAS – Moe Dalitz was a casino owner and businessman who played a major role in shaping this gambling capital. Dalitz, who first came to prominence as a bootlegger and racketeer during the Prohibition Era, was known by many as Mr. Las Vegas.

Later in his life, he became an influential casino operator with stakes in The Desert Inn, the Stardust and others. He sold the Desert Inn in 1966 to the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes.

Whatever Dalitz wanted in Las Vegas, he generally got. And what he didn’t want, didn’t occur.

In 1970, Bob Arum, a young and aggressive boxing promoter from New York, came to Las Vegas and seemed to have arranged for Muhammad Ali to fight Joe Frazier in a battle of unbeaten boxers who each had a claim to the heavyweight title.

Arum came to the desert at the urging of famed gambler Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, who told him that Gov. Paul Laxalt had signed off on it and that he’d permit Ali-Frazier to be held in Nevada.

That was key, since most states were not allowing Ali to fight because he’d avoided induction into the military.

“Jimmy the Greek called Harold Conrad, my p.r. guy, and told him that everything was fixed and to get Ali and Frazier signed up and come out and put the fight on in Las Vegas,” Arum said. “It was all arranged with the governor, and the commission was going to give [Ali] a license and the fight would be set.

“So I got both Ali and Frazier signed, and I guaranteed them $300,000 against a percentage [of the fight’s revenues]. Armed with the contracts, Harold Conrad and I went out to Vegas. The bad luck was that we stayed at the Desert Inn.”

They were eating breakfast in the coffee shop when Dalitz saw Conrad and wanted to know what he was doing in Las Vegas. Conrad knew that if Dalitz was opposed to the fight, the chance that it would happen in Las Vegas was next-to-nil.

Much to Conrad’s chagrin, Dalitz was opposed. There was no changing his mind, though Arum didn’t know it as he headed to the commission meeting.

“When Harold told him we were in Vegas to get a license to do the Ali-Frazier fight, Dalitz went crazy,” Arum said. “He said, ‘I don’t want this [expletive] draft dodger in this town. It’s not good for the town.’ ”

When Arum arrived at the commission meeting, he saw Gov. Laxalt and was greeted warmly. Laxalt was there to support Arum’s application.

Just before the meeting began, Snyder received an urgent phone call from Robert Mayhew, Hughes’ long-time assistant. He wanted to speak to the governor.

The message that Mayhew delivered from Hughes was simple: He didn’t want the fight in Las Vegas.

Arum saw Laxalt’s expression as he was on the phone – “His face turned totally white,” Arum said – and Arum knew. He withdrew his application, understanding he had no shot to make it work without the support of Dalitz and Hughes, and thus he lost out on promoting the most significant fight in history.

But he promoted a slew of the biggest fights in the second half of the 20^th century. Since his debut with Ali-George Chuvalo on March 29, 1966, when Lyndon Johnson was president, Arum has promoted 12,250 fights on 1,937 on six continents and in 21 countries.

He promoted 37 Oscar De La Hoya bouts, 35 Floyd Mayweather fights, 27 Ali fights, 20 Marvelous Marvin Hagler bouts, 17 Manny Pacquiao matches, 14 with George Foreman, 13 with Thomas Hearns, seven with Sugar Ray Leonard and Julio Cesar Chavez Sr. and even four by Mike Tyson.

Arum has been one of the biggest, if not the biggest, promoter in the sport in each of those 50 years.

Unquestionably, though, Arum’s heyday, and the heyday of boxing in the modern era, came in the 1980s.

He promoted 766 cards on ESPN, most of which were in the 1980s, and did some of the greatest bouts in history in those 10 years.

They included the epic Hagler-Hearns battle in 1985, both Alexis Arguello-Aaron Pryor bouts, Leonard-Hagler in 1987, Leonard-Roberto Duran and many others.

The majority of the major bouts he promoted in the decade were non-heavyweight matches, which was curious because Arum didn’t even know there was a division other than heavyweight until sometime in the 1970s.

He promoted the first bout he ever saw in person, Ali-Chuvalo, and freely admits he knew little about the sport when he entered it.

“After Ali had his license taken and his passport taken and all the commissions suspended him [for evading the draft in 1967], we were contacted by ABC,” Arum said.

The network had done well on telecasts of Ali fights from England and Germany on its “Wide World of Sports” property, and wanted to see if Arum would do something other than just Ali fights.

He put on a heavyweight tournament that Jimmy Ellis won, and got his first inkling of the corruption in boxing.

After Ellis had the title, Arum arranged for a title defense in Sweden against ex-champion Floyd Patterson, who had a Swedish wife. The scheduled 15-round fight was on ABC with Howard Cosell calling the play-by-play.

Harold Balen was the referee and, as was often the case in those days, he served as the sole judge.

Patterson badly outboxed Ellis.

“If Ellis won three rounds, that was a lot,” Arum said.

But when the scores were read, Balen’s card had Ellis winning the fight. Fans went crazy, Cosell was apoplectic on the air and boxing was banned for a time in Sweden as a result.

Arum later saw Balen in the hotel and asked him how he could have scored the fight so badly.

“I said, “Harold, what the hell were you doing? Patterson won that fight hands down,’ ” Arum recalled. “And he looked at me and said, ‘Bob, don’t you realize. I’m a stand-up guy. You brought me over. You’re paying me. How could I decide against your fighter?’ ”

Arum is able to laugh now, but he didn’t laugh at the time. But he eventually branched out to other divisions beyond the heavyweights and had remarkable success.

Much of it was borne of the success of a closed circuit middleweight title fight he put on from Europe between Carlos Monzon and Jose Napoles. Arum noted the large number of Hispanics in California and promoted the fight heavily there, to that audience.

Not long after, the Leonard-led 1976 U.S. Olympic team won a slew of gold medals and there were ready-made stars.

They were more great fighters in the 1980s, he said, than in any other decade in which he worked, and the best part about it was that all of them were willing to fight each other.

“Guys knew they had to fight those kinds of fights to make it and there was never any hesitation,” Arum said.

He remains proud of helping not only launch ESPN with his live boxing series on the then-fledgling all-sports network, but also keeping it alive.

He promoted on the network for 15 years and developed a slew of fighters. He said it was struggling financially at one part in the decade and said there was talk it would go under.

“In our fifth or sixth year with ESPN, it was about to go out of business” Arum said. “They were losing a lot of money and their revenue streams came primarily from commercials. That wasn’t enough to support the network and make any money.

“They were about to close up shop. One of their executives at the time was driving around the country with his family, and he saw these motels that had signs out front: ‘We have ESPN Boxing.’ ‘We have Top Rank Boxing.’ And he was amazed.”

It got him to thinking and led to a dramatic change, according to Arum.

“He realized that this was something that people had to have, and he got the idea from that to charge the cable companies for every subscriber,” Arum said. “Before, they were begging the cable systems to include them. Then, after that, once they started charging, it went crazy. And if it weren’t for the Top Rank Boxing series on ESPN, who knows. Boxing is responsible for saving that network.”