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.”