Bob Arum has a remedy of sorts for boxing’s ailing, cash-strapped media: help chip in for their hotel and travel costs.
The founder of Top Rank proposed the idea during a recent episode of the Everlast TalkBox podcast. Case in point is the junior welterweight title fight that Arum is staging in Haikou, China in February between titleholder Jose Ramirez and Viktor Postol.
“What I’m going to say is this is a long way away and the average cost of one of the reporters going to a fight if the fight was in the United Sates, you say, is (about) $200,” Arum said. “So we would charge them $200, pay for the air far, pay for the hotels. I think you gotta charge something. It’s not a good image if you charge them nothing. But if you charge a reasonable small amount, a token amount – like $200, or $250 – I think you’re going to accomplish what you do.”
He went on: “There is not one daily paper in the whole country that has a full time boxing writer. None. So how are we getting the news out on boxing? We’re getting it out basically from websites that can’t afford anything. They don’t have any money. They’re operating on views. So when a writer for one of those writers says I wanna go across country or to China to cover a big fight, the guy who owns the website says, ‘are you crazy, we don’t have any money to send you.’ And that’s bad.”
In other words, Arum would rather help subsidize reporters rather than risk having no coverage at all. Conflicts of interest be damned.
“We have to now realize that accommodations have to be made so that we can get the coverage for the sport that it deserves and the rules on propriety that existed in the ’70s and ’80s until now be no longer relevant,” he said. “Again, if this was 20 years ago, I would have said that’s outrageous, but it’s not 20 years ago, it’s today, it has to be done.”
There’s another world title fight taking place on the other side of the world and for which, Arum expects, there will be limited U.S. coverage.
“Look at this fight in Saudi Arabia (on December 7), (Anthony) Joshua-(Andy) Ruiz. Long way away. Cost a fortune to fly and so forth. Now these guys working for the website, obviously, the website isn’t going to send them … it’s too expensive. So the result is that no one is going to cover the fight in the United States.”
Note: Boxing Junkie does not accept travel subsidies from any outside sources.