This Misfit Has Learned the Ropes

A fight promoter used to be this kind of guy: His office was his pocket, his phone was in a booth in the lobby and had coin slots. He called collect. He got his shoes shined every day but he owed the rent for six months.

He lived in a room with a sink in it, but the bath was down the hall. But he never went out without a flower in his buttonhole. He never married; his lady friends charged for their time together. He could get you tickets to every show in town, for a price, but wouldn’t pay to see Lady Godiva ride Man o’ War himself. He thought he was smarter than everybody else but he was going to die broke and he knew it. He was too uneducated to know how dumb he really was. He thought he had it made.

He would bet on the color of the next cow you passed on the train. He never drove a car or bought insurance. Home life was for suckers, work was for horses. No matter how big a score he made, he bet it on the next card. He was always sure the next hand would be aces full.

He traveled light, never knowing when he might have to go down the fire escape. His biggest worry was he wouldn’t have anybody to talk to late at night. He hated people who went to bed early or cities that didn’t stay open. He always wanted it to get dark out.

He saw pugs for what they were: slow-witted cretins who would be busting heads for loan sharks or loading freighters with steel hooks if it weren’t for wise guys like him.

He had a small record. He ran some girls once upstate or he made book or ran a boiler shop. He liked to pretend he could call on muscle if he needed it and he relished his contacts with the underworld. He was proud he knew people who were called “Mr. Gray” or “Blinky.” He thought they were the real big shots in this world.

He was Tex Rickard, a taciturn loner out of the gold fields of the Klondike and the gambling dens of Nevada who put boxing into high society by printing tickets in gold and filling his ringside with ermine and top hats. It was Rickard who got Dempsey off a freight train and, with the help of a few free drinks for his newspaper pals, made him an American folk hero. Rickard himself was more of a western legend than any they would write about. He was everything the public thought Bat Masterson was.

After Rickard, the promoter was Mike Jacobs, an unromantic nail-biting Broadway scalper who got into fights to sell tickets. He found Joe Louis knocking over stiffs in midwest whistle stops and brought him to Broadway. Jacobs had no interest in sports or history, just money.

But the unlikeliest fight promoter of all time may be the current top-ranked one (whose corporate name is fittingly just that, “Top Rank”), Robert Arum.

Arum is no gold-field drifter, no Broadway loft ticket scalper. Arum is, of all things, a Harvard lawyer. He comes out of an American tradition of Louis Brandeis, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Felix Frankfurter. Bob Arum was never intended to be putting on extravaganzas featuring worthies known as the “Motor City Cobra” or “The Hit Man” or “Fists of Stone.” Bob Arum was supposed to become Attorney General of the United States. He was supposed to follow in the footsteps of Henry Kissinger, not Tex Rickard.

Arum was working in the U.S. Attorney’s office in 1962, in fact, when the President’s brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, assigned him to go out to Chicago where, rumor had it, the promoters of the Sonny Liston-Floyd Patterson heavyweight title fight intended to spirit the receipts out of the country.

A crack tax attorney, Arum became fascinated with both the fiscal and social aspects of the world of boxing, particularly with the limitless horizons pay television seemed to provide for it. Boxing became an obsession with Bob Arum.

His friends reacted as if he had run off and joined a trapeze act. They wanted to know what’s a nice Harvard Law School graduate doing, not in the corridors of the Supreme Court but in the sport of Frankie Carbo, Owney Madden, Maxie Hoff and people named “Ray the Enforcer” and “Big Frenchy” and Broadway Billy Duffy.

Well, a funny thing happened to Bob Arum on his way to Camelot. He fell under the spell of Muhammad Ali and the glamour of the ring game.

Arum was an up-and-coming young partner in the super-firm of Louis Nizer and associates in New York, the New York Yankees of litigation, when Jim Brown, the football player-actor, came to him with recommendations from Muhammad Ali’s mentor, Herbert Muhammad, that he take over the overview of the financial aspects of the champ’s career.

Ali at the time had not yet declined to step forward for military induction, but he had enraged the American Legion and other paramilitary groups by noting publicly that “I ain’t got nothin’ against no Viet Congs.”

Ali fights were being run out of the country, and Arum found himself part of an entourage putting on fights in places like Frankfurt, West Germany; London, England, and, finally, the Houston Astrodome (where Judge Roy Hofheinz defied the prevailing tenor of the times and made his arena available to Ali and Arum).

What usually happens when a guy in a three-piece suit joins the boxing establishment is, he, in a sense, gets it all over him. He doesn’t rub off on it, it rubs off on him. Usually, the next scene in this olio finds our hero tarred with an old brush, finds himself getting his picture in the papers alongside people called Tough Tony Salerno or Crazy Joey Gallo or other nonmembers of the Social Register.

Boxing is like China. It swallows up all those who wander into it. They don’t change it, it changes them. You expect, any day, the ex-Harvard types will show up in wide-shouldered pinstripes with wide-brimmed gray hats and gold chains and two-toned shoes, talking out of the sides of their mouths and eating with their hats on.

It has not happened to Attorney Arum. Boxing does not yet resemble Harvard-Yale, but he has staged Ali-Spinks fights, Duran-Leonard fights, Hagler-Hearns. He has staged fights in Africa, where 83,000 showed up, and so far, no grand juries have been impaneled to check into his dealings.

He has not yet wound up in any mug shots with any guys off the FBI’s 10-most wanted list. “I can honestly say I have never been involved in any mob implication in boxing,” he insists. “I don’t think that aspect of boxing has any credibility any more.

“When I first came in the game, boxing being boxing, a lot of people thought I was an FBI ‘mole.’ ”

Boxing will never be U.S. Steel, Arum concedes. In fact, it won’t even be Barnum and Bailey.

“Boxing is excitement,” concedes the ex-tax whiz who has not yet become “Tex” Arum or even “Uncle Bob.” I lost money on my show this week (Curry-McCrory), but that’s show biz. Boxing is life. I was a kid from an orthodox home who led a structured life, and boxing broadened me. I learned things that weren’t in law books.”

In short, Arum has changed. If you get a collect call from him in the near future, you’ll know boxing hasn’t.