Bob Arum plans to get things rolling again next month.
The Top Rank CEO is working with television partner ESPN to determine dates on which to schedule boxing cards, which will be staged without live audiences. Top Rank, like other promoters, hasn’t promoted shows since the coronavirus took hold.
Arum expects the first few events to be held in Nevada. His headquarters are in Las Vegas.
“We are coming back in June,” Arum told ESPN. “These will be shows that will be on ESPN and ESPN+. … They will take place during the week and on weekends. They’ll all be top fighters, really top fights. Will there be a [Tyson] Fury-[Deontay] Wilder? No. But they’ll be some of our top fighters, like Jose Ramirez, he’ll be in the mix, various others, Teofimo [Lopez], Shakur [Stevenson], all of them.
“In other words, the fights will be similar as the fights we’ve been putting on ESPN and ESPN+.”
Arum said he doesn’t expect to sell tickets any time soon.
“Don’t kid yourself,” he said. “For the rest of the summer, there won’t be a crowd. I don’t anticipate — now, I don’t know — being able to do fights with any kind of crowd ’til the fourth quarter [of this year].”
Why Nevada?
“That’s what we’re planning because it makes it easier for us,” Arum said. “Our gym can be used for training. We have hotels that we [can] be opening up, and there won’t be, initially, a big market of customers for rooms. They will have plenty of rooms available.
“These hotels have big ballrooms, which we could use to stage an event, and these ballrooms we could take for a two-month period, June and July, to put on events, maybe with an option to take them in August or September.”
He went on: “Everybody is working together. We’re going to do this. We got word that Nevada will have a major testing facility at one of the hospitals in Las Vegas, which can handle many thousands of tests a day. So we’re working through everything.
“It’s not something that we’re experts in. We have to rely on the medical experts and so forth. But just now, we’re working closely, certainly in Nevada, with the commission and the medical experts, with the hotels, and we’ll be doing the same in California.”