Inside Sports: Bob Arum Still Going Strong
By Ronnie Nathanielsz
PhilBoxing.com
Tue, 11 Dec 2007
Top Rank promoter Bob Arum celebrated his 76th birthday last Saturday and you simply have to marvel at the man?s energy and deep involvement in the sport of boxing when many people his age have long retired.
Arum, with the money he has made out of boxing as one of its most dominating promoters and certainly one of the most astute, could very well retire and live the rest of his hopefully many years in a totally relaxing environment. But that wouldn?t be him. While he personally wishes to shun the limelight and let it focus on the fighters and the sport, his passion for boxing invariably brings him to center stage.
Indeed if and when he does step aside from the sport of boxing the world will miss him and the sport will be orphaned in a very real way.
Bob Arum and ourselves have had some little differences in the past but they have been more issues of perception than anything else. Some of those differences were not caused by either of us but rather by whispering sycophants who surrounded him and couldn?t stand us telling it like it is.
But every time we call, Bob Arum never fails to answer and is always most accommodating which is so unlike an individual who is sometimes perceived as being at odds with us which, we hasten to add, isn?t our sentiment at all. For sure we have had a couple of verbal jousts but that?s because he is a smart Harvard lawyer who graduated cum laude in 1956. While we have nothing like the education he has had or the credentials he carries, we are not averse to engaging men like him in enlightening discussions because the nuances of the business of boxing is an enthralling subject.
Our confidence to some extent comes from an affordable but decent education anchored on the British system that my late beloved father gave us and mentored in a sense by him in our youth and in our later years by our eminent lawyer friend Rudy Salud who has, through the years, taught us how to probe and to strengthen the fiber of an inquiring mind while maintaining our integrity.
We first men Bob Arum in 1975 when he was in Manila for the famed ?Thrilla in Manila? between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier and then again the following year when he was back to enjoy the hospitality of President and
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