If your viewpoint of professional boxing leans toward the days when legends like Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Marvin Hagler and Sugar Ray Leonard ruled the ring, odds are you have Bob Arum to thank for it. A degree from Harvard Law School may be an unlikely entry point into the sweet science, but Arum, 73, made it work for him, promoting some of the most glamorous and memorable fights in history. In Denver recently to promote the Nov. 12 WBC heavyweight championship bout between Vitali Klitschko and Hasim Rahman, Arum took some time to go a few rounds.
Anthony Cotton: You’ve been carrying the word for a long time.
Bob Arum: Forty years. It’ll be 40 years next March.
AC: What was the first fight you promoted?
BA: The first fight I promoted was the first fight I saw – Muhammad Ali vs. George Chuvalo for the heavyweight championship of the world. I had never seen a fight in person. Jimmy Brown, the football player, had introduced me to Ali and I became his lawyer and promoter. It was in 1965, and Ali was supposed to fight Ernie Terrell. Then he talked about not having anything against those Viet Congs, and they ran us out of Chicago. We ended up in Toronto, and then Terrell pulled out and Chuvalo came in and it was fought in Maple Leaf Gardens.
AC: Nice start.
BA: Crazy things happen. People say, “How can you take it?” Because the first promotion I did was the hardest. I had the whole country baying at me because the war was popular, so we got run out of the U.S. and then the Ontario Parliament voted on whether or not to allow us to have the fight, and we won by one vote. I didn’t have a dime. We promoted the whole thing on my Diners Club Card.
AC: When you go to Harvard Law School, you cannot be thinking, “I’m going to become a fight promoter!”
BA: Like everyone else of my generation, when I was a kid I’d listen to Joe Louis fights on the radio, but we were really baseball fans. The Brooklyn Dodgers were all we cared about. But when Jack Kennedy was elected president, I was a young lawyer and I became head of the tax division in New York. Bobby Kennedy was the attorney general and he had me seize all the money from this big fight, so I got to know all the players. Three years later I was in private practice, and there was a fight between Ernie Terrell and George Chuvalo, and the firm was handling the promotion for it. We needed a commentator, and I got Jimmy Brown for $500. He played in a game on Sunday and flew to Toronto for the fight on Monday.
AC: And that led to Ali?
BA: Jimmy said, “You shouldn’t be the lawyer for these guys, you should be the promoter.” I said there was only one guy in boxing who meant something and that was Ali, but he was tied up. Jimmy said he wasn’t, and he took me to Chicago and introduced me. These were unbelievable things that were happening to a Harvard lawyer.
AC: Do you still get a kick out of it today?
BA: When I started, I didn’t know there was a division other than the heavyweight division. I didn’t know anything. It wasn’t like I had this background; it was a real learning process.
AC: But to a lot of the public, even today, the heavyweights are all there is.
BA: That’s right. If anybody has done anything to get the public away from that idea, it was me. I did all those fights in the 1980s with Hagler and Tommy Hearns and Leonard and Roberto Duran. Those were all my fights. They became the popular attractions. After Ali, I really wasn’t that active in the heavyweight division until Foreman came along for his comeback. This fight next month is a good opportunity for me to get back into it, because it’s dreadful now. People don’t care about it, and it hurts boxing. This fight has a chance to revive it.
AC: Was there ever a point when you had to reconcile the idea of being this Harvard-educated guy in a business that a lot of people think of as unsavory?
BA: I’m going to go to my 50th reunion for Harvard Law next year. I went to the 40th 10 years ago, and there were all these guys from the WASP law firms. Most of them were retired even. They sort of looked at me a little askance. I don’t think my job was something they approved of. “What happened to him?” they were saying, but I don’t regret it. The day Kennedy was shot, my immediate boss was in Washington. He was going to become attorney general and Bobby was going to become secretary of state, and I was going to go to Washington to become the head of the whole tax division for the country. If that had happened … if, if, if, if. I wouldn’t be here now, I’d be in tax court making people pay up.
AC: What’s your relationship with Don King like now?
BA: Well, it’s sort of funny. I think in a lot of ways, there’s a mutual respect. We’re like the dinosaurs, going at this for a long time. I don’t do things the way he does. I don’t want to say necessarily that the medal’s on me, but with my background, I couldn’t do things the way he does. He’s a street guy. But that being said, he’s very, very smart, he’s very charismatic and very clever, so I give him his props.
Staff writer Anthony Cotton can be reached at 303-820-1292 or acotton@denverpost.com.
