Tag: Gov. Ron DeSantis

Bob Arum: All fighters could train in one, controlled environment

Bob Arum told ESPN that he and his team are considering small cards and having Top Rank fighters train in a controlled environment.

Promoter Bob Arum is trying to find ways to get the boxing gears turning again amid the coronavirus pandemic.

A few days ago, he raised the possibility of staging fights at World Wrestling Entertainment facilities in Florida after Gov. Ron DeSantis declared WWE events – without spectators – essential business.

On Wednesday, Arum told ESPN that he and his team are considering small cards and having Top Rank fighters train in a controlled environment. Arum has his own gym in Las Vegas.

“What we’re doing is looking at facilities, including our gym, where the guys would have to train,” he said. “You can’t have them in these old gyms because they can pick up the virus that way. But if you clean your gyms and you just let a limited number of people in to train, and then you bring everybody to the location, put them up in a hotel and keep testing them, you can get it done.

“We would sanitize the Top Rank gym, limit the availability to those in the program and bring everybody into Vegas. If the hotels aren’t open, rent them a facility to live in and get them ready when we do open up and we do the events with the testing and so forth, whether it’s in California, Nevada, Texas or Florida, any of those places. So we’re working on all of that, but again, it’s a work in progress because we’re flying blind.”

ESPN reported that the UFC Apex Centre in Las Vegas is another possible venue for boxing. Top Rank President Todd duBoef has been in contact with UFC officials.

“We really have to look at what the leadership of those states are going to be doing in terms of opening up and getting back to easing up the ‘stay at home’ orders and then opening up the states for business, in general,” duBoef said.

“So I think you’ve got to look at the ‘hot’ states and assume they’re not going to be open for a while: New York, New Jersey, possibly California. Some of those hot states will probably take a longer period of time. But once states that are more amenable to hosting events are identified, we hone in on the leadership and the jurisdiction of them, then we can hone in on facilities, specifically.”

Added Arum: “We don’t have the expertise, nobody has expertise to see how this is going to work. We have to take a lot of cues from entities that are better financed than we are and involved at the cutting edge, like the NBA, the NFL, and they would use our program, almost like a laboratory for them when they do roll out.”

Could designation of WWE as essential business in Florida open door for boxing?

Bob Arum is looking into the possibility of staging boxing cards in Florida after the WWE was declared essential business.

Could Florida be the state in which boxing makes its comeback?

Promoter Bob Arum told ESPN that he’s looking into the possibility of staging boxing cards there after Gov. Ron DeSantis described World Wrestling Entertainment in a memo as essential business in Florida during the coronavirus pandemic.

WWE officials reportedly are considering their training facility in Orlando and the private Full Sail University in Winter Park as possible sites for events.

Arum said DeSantis’ announcement could open the door to combat sports events. He added that he planned to reach out to WWE officials.

“It’s very, very interesting, and we’re going to be in touch with them. There’s a possibility to use their facility to maybe do events without a crowd,” Arum said Tuesday.

He went on: “We’re very close with Vince [McMahon] and the WWE. So let’s see, but we’re still not talking before June.”

Arum told ESPN that there is a strong possibility that events will be held without live audiences, at least as the sport begins to rebuild. And he suggested that big events will have to wait until it’s safe to have spectators.

“But it all depends, the whole reopening of the country, the different states, it all comes down to the same thing — testing, adequate testing,” he said. “You cannot open it and have athletes compete against each other with referees, the judges, with camera people, unless you can ensure that it’s safe. And the only way you can ensure that it’s safe is with testing. It comes down to testing.”

And as for the big events: “Those are either going to have to wait until you have spectators, or if the fighters get antsy, they will have to deal with an adjustment in their purses because you will have cut off an important revenue source from the event.

“For example, [Tyson] Fury and [Deontay] Wilder, the gate was close to $17 million. And that’s from the public buying tickets to the fight. How do you replace that? Well, if you don’t replace it, then somebody has to eat that.”
The third Fury-Wilder fight has been pushed back to the fall.

“I’m very optimistic that we’ll be doing events for audiences in the last three months of the year,” Arum said. “Do I know for sure? No. But that’s in my mind how I’m calculating it.”