Bob Arum on ‘horrible’ negotiations for Mayweather vs. Pacquiao: It was just to ‘break our balls’

While the ‘Fight of the Century' between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao is days away, it was certainly not the smoothest of negotiations. Top…

By: Karim Zidan | 8 years ago
Bob Arum on ‘horrible’ negotiations for Mayweather vs. Pacquiao: It was just to ‘break our balls’
Bloody Elbow 2.0 | Anton Tabuena

While the ‘Fight of the Century’ between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao is days away, it was certainly not the smoothest of negotiations.

Top Rank CEO Bob Arum delved into the rough negotiation process that took place over the past few months and even referred to the entire process as “horrible” which signifies the tension between the involved stakeholders.

“It has been a very hard promotion because of a lot of nonsense and a lot of in-fighting and people making alliances with other people,” Arum told SBNation.com’s Luke Thomas. “But when you’ve been through a horrible situation and are now approaching the finish line and you can see the end, you relax and you’re happy. You don’t really think about how horrible the situation was that you went through.”

While he admitted that the initial process was not particularly strenuous, it was the small details that were difficult to iron out. There was always one party who was not interested in playing along with the agreement.

“The negotiation of terms between the two fighters and the two promoters; that took longer than usual but that was negotiation. Once that deal was signed, the other side tried to use its relationship with MGM to get around what we had negotiated and signed.”

They even struggled to come to terms on the lighting for the event.

“For example, we like to do spectacular lighting at our fights. It makes it more of a significant event, like the UFC does. When we proposed it and they asked Showtime, who said it would be $400,000 to do that. Then they said it wasn’t worth it and they didn’t want to spend the money. Ok, that is a legitimate position. Later, we spoke to HBO and Top Rank and HBO each agreed to pay half. So now we went back to Showtime and said ‘hey, great news. We’re going to do this and it is going to cost you nothing.’ Showtime still said ‘no, we don’t want you to do it.’

“(It was) just to break our balls.”

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About the author
Karim Zidan
Karim Zidan

Karim Zidan is a investigative reporter and feature writer focusing on the intersection of sports and politics. He has written for BloodyElbow since 2014 and has served as an associate editor since 2016. He also writes for The New York Times and The Guardian. Karim has been invited to speak about his work at numerous universities, including Princeton, and was a panelist at the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival and the Oslo Freedom Forum. He also participated in the United Nations counter-terrorism conference in 2021. His reporting on Ramzan Kadyrov’s involvement in MMA, much of which was done for Bloody Elbow, has led to numerous award nominations, and was the basis of an award-winning HBO Real Sports documentary.

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