Watching a boxing card in Saudi Arabia recently, Dana White couldn’t believe his eyes.
The president and CEO of UFC had glimpsed 93-year-old boxing promoter Bob Arum in attendance, just a few nights after White had seen Arum in person halfway across the world at a WNBA game in Las Vegas. White and Arum are bitter rivals in a fiercely competitive combat sports industry, but on this occasion, even White had to say he was impressed with the indefatigable Arum.
Recounting the experience in an interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson earlier this year, White admitted he was flabbergasted yet again when he saw Arum a third time in quick succession. That came the next week at a news conference in London for a different bout.
“It’s nine o’clock at night. He’s sitting over there courtside. I’m like, ‘Holy shit, Bob Arum is here. This is crazy. This guy’s 94 years old,’” White said of seeing Arum at an Aces game in Vegas. “I hate him. But you’ve got to respect it, right? How do you not respect that?”
Much like Arum, White brought the story up to discuss how he never plans to retire. But the comically rueful, yet clearly genuine, praise from White points to the stunning longevity of Arum’s career, a run that even his rivals marvel at and wonder if they will one day match. This year marks six decades of Arum being in the business of boxing — his first promotion came in March 1966, with a then-rising fighter named Muhammad Ali.
Over a half-century later, Arum is still scrapping and clawing to keep his company, Top Rank Boxing, succeeding in an always changing and challenging business. Now approaching an astronomical 2,200 fight cards promoted during his tenure, Arum’s résumé includes more than 500 bouts that he arranged in the state of Nevada and nearly 1,000 on the ESPN family of networks.
ESPN still airs fights from Top Rank after the sides first partnered in 1980. But Top Rank’s deal with ESPN expires this summer, and the promoter is now looking to split its content across multiple networks.
Behind boxing’s biggest moments
Continuing as CEO of Top Rank to this day, Arum is surely one of the oldest active sports executives. Like many in the rough-and-tumble world of professional fighting, Top Rank has not gone without its controversies and challenges, from myriad lawsuits to Arum surviving an airplane crash in 2002.
But amid it all, the company has continued to promote events all over the world, and Arum is set to go down as the promoter behind some of the most famous athletes and fights of all time. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1999.
Bob Arum has promoted 2,200 fight cards, including 27 for Muhammad Ali (including the “Thrilla in Manila” against Joe Frazier in the Philippines in 1975), 20 with “Marvelous” Marvin Hagler, 14 with George Foreman and countless others with Oscar De La Hoya, Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao.
Eddie Hearn, the 45-year-old chairman of global boxing promoter Matchroom Sport, recounted a speaking engagement for fans when he and Arum were asked the biggest fights they ever promoted. While Hearn felt pretty good after he reeled off a couple big fights at Wembley Stadium, he instantly felt small after Arum gave his answer with two of the most famous sporting events in world history, listing either the “Rumble in the Jungle,” between Ali and George Foreman in 1974 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or the “Thrilla in Manila,” between Ali and Joe Frazier in the Philippines in 1975, as his best.
“If I’m alive at 93, I’ll be absolutely astonished — and if I’m in boxing, please remove me, because it is the worst business in the world,” Hearn said. “Don’t get me wrong; it’s also the most exciting, but you have to be so resilient to put up with the constant aggravation that exists during your day, and for anyone to work in a business, you’ve got to respect them, but for someone to do it as long as that at the highest level is crazy.”
While he’s navigated plenty of complex eras during his time in the sport, Arum now is dealing with the disruption that a heavy influx of Saudi Arabian money has brought to boxing. But, as he always has, Arum has adjusted to this most recent twist, and Top Rank is now among the promoters that does business with Saudi power broker Turki Al-Sheikh, ranked by ESPN as the No. 1 most influential person in combat sports.
Many have come to assume that the Saudis soon will run the sport in full. But a recent and perhaps unexpected triumph for Top Rank came on Cinco De Mayo weekend this year, and showed that the wily veterans of the sport still hold some advantages.
The fights by Al-Sheikh’s The Ring magazine, including one in Times Square and another with Canelo Alvarez in Saudi Arabia, were largely deemed boring by the boxing community, devoid of punches and drama. But the event that Top Rank promoted that weekend, involving Japanese star Naoya Inoue, was deemed thrilling, and social media was littered with comments by boxing fans that Top Rank had saved the weekend.
It was a proud moment for the company at a time when some have posited that longtime promoters could be heading toward extinction, not only due to the rise of Saudi influence, but also the entrance of TKO Group Holdings and the UFC’s White into boxing. TKO struck a deal with Al-Sheikh to form a boxing promotion that will launch in the coming months with young fighters, and TKO is helping put on separate boxing matches with more established stars while the Saudis underwrite the costs. White has long been a critic of the traditional structure in boxing, and some of its key promoters such as Arum.
In a sport that can be brutal, Arum takes verbal punches but is also on the giving end of plenty, too. In 2021, Arum exploded on boxing reporter Mike Coppinger after Coppinger interrupted Arum during a press scrum, with Arum caught on camera telling Coppinger, “Shut the f*** up, you little prick!” More recently, Arum drew the ire of Jake Paul after he said in an interview that Paul’s upcoming fight versus Julio César Chávez Jr. is “not even boxing.”
Paul taunted, “Keep my name out your dentures and keep pushing Nico Ali Walsh, who is a ‘real fighter,’ right?” (Walsh is the grandson of Ali and promoted by Top Rank.)
On the Friday of Cinco de Mayo weekend, Todd DuBoef, the president of Top Rank and Arum’s son-in-law, compared Arum and Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffet, another businessman working well into his 90s. The next day, Buffett announced at his annual shareholders conference that he intends to step down at the end of this year, something that further underscored how rare it is that Arum is working so late into his life. Arum has no plans to step down from Top Rank.
“It’s phenomenal to have that passion, to wake up every morning and for all of us in the office to get his morning calls like, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ Like, I love that. He wants to be active and we want him active, and we love sharing stuff with him and him being a part of it,” said DuBoef. “People don’t realize how his life journey has been such a path of social reform, media evolution, integration socially, the apartheid [rule ending in South Africa], being so intimately involved in Ali back in the ’60s.”
DuBoef added: “He does have a temper, so you have to be careful. He’s very bombastic, but he has a passion, and that passion just trickles down to everybody who touches the ground they walk into when they come into our office.”
The path to boxing
As he recounts it, Arum had no plans to get into boxing when he was a young prosecutor working for the U.S. Justice Department in its Southern District of New York. Born in 1931 in New York City to a Jewish family, Arum grew up knowing little about the sport referred to as “The Sweet Science.” But after he attended Harvard, Arum became a tax specialist and was assigned in 1962 by the Justice Department to look into the revenue coming from a fight between Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson at Comiskey Park in Chicago.
That was his first brush with the sport, but it proved to be far from his last. Arum later joined a law firm with an entertainment practice, at which he met Ali and was asked by Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad to promote Ali’s fight versus George Chuvalo in Toronto. Arum went on to set up 27 fights headlined by Ali, along with 20 fights with “Marvelous” Marvin Hagler, 14 with George Foreman and countless others with Oscar De La Hoya, Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao.
While Arum got into boxing by accident, eventually he realized that he was on the ride of a lifetime. Since then, he’s never looked back.
“When the time would come for me to leave the sport, and to go back to what I was trained to do, which was practicing law, there would suddenly emerge an Oscar De La Hoya from out of nowhere, and then a Manny Pacquiao and a Floyd Mayweather,” Arum said. “So every time it looked like it was coming to an end with one fighter, another fighter or two would emerge, keep me in — and now I’m 93 years old and I guess it’s too late for me to get out.”
“When the time would come for me to leave the sport, and to go back to what I was trained to do, which was practicing law, there would suddenly emerge an Oscar de la Hoya from out of nowhere, and then a Manny Pacquiao and a Floyd Mayweather. So every time it looked like it was coming to an end with one fighter, another fighter or two would emerge, keep me in — and now I’m 93 years old and I guess it’s too late for me to get out.”
— Bob Arum
Arum stays deeply in tune with Top Rank’s business, but as the years have gone on, he’s delegated more of the work to his top lieutenants. That includes DuBoef; COO Brad Jacobs; Carl Moretti, vice president of operations; and Chief Revenue Officer Brian Kelly.
Still, Arum will get on the phone to take part in negotiations when a significant impasse is reached, and he remains a fixture in the front rows of fights that Top Rank promotes. He can’t get into the ring much anymore, so fighters signed to Top Rank often go by and shake his hand after their bouts, “almost like a sign of respect, and that to me is such a wonderful gesture,” DuBoef said.
But while Arum has trouble bending between the ropes to get into a ring, he has no such issues flying all over the world in private airplanes. Arum has been to Saudi Arabia several times in recent years, and he also travels to Japan when Inoue fights. That part of the job is easy, Arum said.
On May 3 last year, he started one of his most ambitious travel schedules yet that covered six weeks, six events, five countries, four continents, four world title fights, and three undisputed title showdowns.
Some might be surprised to hear that a proud Jew was traveling so often to Saudi Arabia, the culturally conservative Islamic country that has no formal diplomatic relations with Israel. But the Middle Eastern kingdom is intent on overhauling its image and economy, and Arum said he’s never felt unwelcomed there. The Saudis are fully aware of his religion, Arum said, and he has “heard things from them regarding Hamas which are even more militant than the most right-wing Israeli.”
“I enjoy meeting people, and it’s real exciting for me that wherever I go — really, let’s be honest, because of my age and longevity — I’m looked at by people who follow boxing and sports fans as an icon. Everyone wants to take a picture of me, everyone wants to have a part of me, and that’s a really heady experience,” Arum added. “That serves, in a way, as a justification of how I’ve spent my life, so going to these foreign countries and being recognized and people making a fuss over me, that is hardly work — that is like a victory lap that’s been going on for the last, I think, 10 years.”
These days, Top Rank has more than 60 fighters on its roster, between boxers it either promotes exclusively or co-promotes. That includes Inoue, who is ranked as The Ring’s No. 2 pound-for-pound fighter in the world; Tyson Fury; and several of the most highly rated prospects in the sport, such as Keyshawn Davis, Bruce Carrington and Abdullah Mason.
Joe Hand Jr., president of PPV combat sports distributor Joe Hand Promotions, noted that Top Rank doesn’t necessarily have the biggest names in boxing on its roster, like Canelo Alvarez or Terence Crawford, though Crawford formerly worked with Top Rank. But Hand said that having such an exciting crop of rising fighters is an impressive feat for Top Rank, and something that should help the promotional company for years to come.
“I was just reading an article the other day where he’s right in the middle of their new TV distribution deal, and I know he has some family there and other great people running the company for him, but Bob is right in the middle of it,” said Hand.
To that point, Arum was quoted in an article from industry publication Boxing Scene in mid-May, saying that Top Rank is nearing media rights deals that will result in partnerships with three companies. He expects the deals to be announced in the coming weeks.
Even at the age of 93, Arum is still keen to sell boxing to anyone who will listen. He called the sport a “giant hiding in plain sight” when asked how confident he was in its future, before waxing poetic about the young and diverse demographics of boxing relative to UFC and stick-and-ball sports.
“That’s why I say that the future of boxing is very, very bright,” Arum said. “Because as long as we hold on to the core audience, which we appear to be able to do, there’s a great demand, there should be an even greater demand for our product.”
