Irish Daily Star - Inside Sport
Kinahan told me he role model and I beli
WHEN Bob Arum made his bow, Max Schmeling was heavyweight champion of the world.
A teenage Joe Louis was months away from his first amateur fight.
Professional boxing was only 40 years old when Arum was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in New York on December 8, 1931.
Growing up, Arum didn’t pay much attention to Schmeling or Louis or those who came after them.
He was just short of his 34th birthday before he watched his first fight — and that was on TV. Ernie Terrell’s win over George Chuvalo in November, 1965.
Yet Arum started out as a boxing promoter the following year. He’d go on to found Top Rank — and became one of the biggest promoters in the world.
Draw up a list of the greatest fights of all time. Everybody would have Muhammad Ali v Joe Frazier III in there. And Marvin Hagler v Thomas Hearns. Most would go for Jose Luis Castillo v Diego Corrales.
They are just three of the super fights that happened on Arum’s watch.
He delegates a lot of the day to day running of Top Rank now to others, especially his stepson, Todd duboef.
Cities
But, in his 10th decade, Arum is still very much part of the sport, talking excitedly about a trip coming up to Perth in Australia, one of the few big cities in the world that he hasn’t visited yet.
“I’m 92, and I love it as much as I ever did. I love discovering new talent and watching them develop. It beats retirement and sitting with a fishing rod at the side of a lake.”
This could be a very different piece. Arum’s extraordinary life has brought him into contact with what amounts to a roll call of modern American history.
John F Kennedy and his brother Robert, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Frank Sinatra, Ronald Reagan, George Bush...
He drops all of these names into our conversation. Some of those were his friends. He has yarns about them by the dozen.
Evel Knievel attempting to jump the Grand Canyon on a motorbike? Arum promoted that stunt. He didn’t like Knievel. He is hilarious in his explanations of why.
Write that piece and it’d go down well. There’d be praise and pats on the back and... it would be bullshit. It would be dishonest. Sportswashing applies to journalism too.
This has been a week where snooker great Ronnie O’sullivan — one of the most popular sportspeople around — has been in Saudi Arabia, and he’s been eulogising about the place on social media.
Future
This is a week where Anthony Joshua v Francis Ngannou has taken place in Riyadh — and Saudi is where pro boxing sees its future.
It’s a country with a terrible human rights record and it’s one where children, up to recently, used textbooks that described Jewish people as apes.
“That may or may not be true, but I was in Riyadh in October — and it was after October 7 — and I was guest of honour at this dinner. I met with His Excellency Turki Alalshikh and it was great. Whatever antisemitism may or may not have existed in Saudi in the past clearly doesn’t now,’’ said Arum.
“Being Jewish in Saudi Arabia and dealing with the Saudis, in my opinion, is a lot more comfortable than being in Dublin, Ireland.
“Look at the basketballers who wouldn’t shake the hands of Israeli players. Let’s be honest about it, there’s no f**king medals on you people.
“I’ve been around a long time. I’m not a naive fool but, in Saudi Arabia, I didn’t get a whiff of antisemitism. Indeed, they couldn’t have been more welcoming.”
A couple of years ago, there were whispers in the boxing world that part of Daniel Kinahan’s strategy was targeting Top Rank.
Cultivating a relationship with Arum with the goal of eventually trying to buy the company off him. Arum says they had no such conversation.
“That never, ever happened. Maybe in his head, he was thinking about it, but he never approached us — and that’s the last thing we would have done,’’ he said.
“We were doing business with Kinahan. He’s a charming guy. He told me that he was getting into boxing because he’d done bad things in the past and wanted to reform himself.
Evidence
“He told me that he wanted to clean up his name because he wanted to be a role model for his kids and I believed him.
“We knew the history because, obviously, it was there if you Google it, but we didn’t see anything that he was doing wrong. We saw no evidence that he was a drug dealer.
“Now, apparently, that wasn’t the case. If that wasn’t the case, then Biden wouldn’t have brought in the sanctions on Kinahan.
“I’m not a naive guy, I have a background in law, I was in the Justice Department. I bought into what Kinahan told me because I didn’t see anything to the contrary.
“And, remember this, going back, we had a guy who served a prison term for killing a man by stomping on his head and he became the biggest promoter in boxing.”
Here are words and phrases used by Arum about Kinahan before the announcement of US sanctions in 2022.
Honest. Honourable. The captain. A real rock. One of my favourite guys. Tremendous. Intelligent. Forthright. A nononsense guy.
He says himself that he’d Googled Kinahan — and any Google search would have made it clear that he was