Bob Arum has been promoting boxing events for more than 40 years. He's worked with a Who's Who in boxing - Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, Oscar De La Hoya, Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao.
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has always been one of the boldest and most innovative risk takers in the NFL. His latest high-stakes gamble is the new Cowboys Stadium, a $1.2 billion palace in Arlington, Tex.
Arum and Jones, two of the shrewdest men in their professions, have teamed up to stage a 12-round welterweight match between Manny Pacquiao and Joshua Clottey at Cowboys Stadium on Saturday night.
Arum and Jones have underlying motives for holding this fight at Cowboys Stadium, which will be scaled down to 45,000 fans with the lowest price ticket being $20. Jones wants to showcase his stadium as a sports and entertainment mecca. Last month it was the site of the NBA All-Star game. Next year Cowboys Stadium will host the Super Bowl and, in 2012, it will be the site for the NCAA Final Four.
For Arum, this is about trying to increase the popularity of boxing, which has become a niche sport - the best matches mainly being held in casinos and available to the masses on Pay-Per-View or premium cable networks.
"In Las Vegas, fight tickets are limited generally to the high-roller types," Arum said. "Here the tickets go to regular customers."
Arum has promoted boxing matches at the old Yankee Stadium and the Houston Astrodome in the 1970s when boxing was as popular as the NFL, the NBA and Major League Baseball.
But times have changed for the sport, and Arum is partly responsible for that. A Las Vegas resident, Arum has gotten fat off the largess of the Vegas casinos and the cable networks with his promotions the last couple of decades. To that end, he and the other big-time promoters have contributed to the shrinking audience for boxing.
But give Arum credit for attempting to pull the sport back from the brink and making an effort to bring it to the regular sports fan. He plans to hold the WBC junior middleweight title match between Yuri Foreman and Miguel Cotto at Yankee Stadium on June 3. And he wants to hold a match between Yuriokus Gamboa and Juan Manuel Lopez at the new Giants Stadium in 2011.
Jones is on board with Arum trying to bring boxing back to the masses. He believes boxing and football have a natural connection. If you walk into an NFL locker room, you don't have to meet too many players before finding a boxing fan.
"The NFL is reluctant to crossover with other sports," Jones said. "But in a very obvious way, when we compete in Cowboys Stadium, the sports and non-sports people will recognize the crossover interest, and that excites me.
"We all know how popular the NFL is and it raises all boats. I'm getting short on time and I want to create some action while I'm still in the ring."
Arum and Jones don't believe that holding boxing events at large stadiums will hinder boxing in Las Vegas. Arum cited the fact that the Super Bowl is held in different cities each year as an example of how that has helped to keep the NFL popular. Jones believes that having thousands of fans see live boxing will increase the sport's popularity.
"We're the most visible programming in all of television," Jones said of the Cowboys and the NFL. "Vicariously, these fights can benefit from that. This is not a bad thing for Las Vegas. This is a good thing."
Once you get the fans under the tent, no matter how big or its location, you have to give them a significant and compelling match.
Arum and Jones missed out on that when a potential match between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Pacquiao fell apart. Now they have Pacquiao-Clottey, which isn't as significant. If Pacquiao and Clottey put on a good show and Jones is really committed to holding more boxing events at his stadium, it could jump-start a movement to push boxing back into the mainstream. But it is an uphill push.
Source: nydailynews.com
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