A legend in the sport of boxing and a longtime Las Vegan, Bob Arum is our guest this week on Nevada Week In Person.

♪♪♪♪♪ Support for Nevada Week In Person is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

-Welcome to Nevada Week In Person.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

Born in Brooklyn, Bob Arum earned his law degree from Harvard, and it was a case that Robert F. Kennedy assigned him that got him into boxing.

In 1986 is when he moved to Nevada.

And from his Las Vegas office is where the Founder and CEO of Top Rank Boxing told us how Muhammad Ali became the first fighter he ever promoted.

(Bob Arum) It's a very strange story.

I had no interest in boxing ever growing up.

I liked basketball and baseball.

-How come no interest in boxing?

-I just had never any interest in boxing.

I mean, like a lot of people, we would listen every once in a while-- you know, I'll show how old I am-- to the radio for a Joe Lewis fight, but I didn't know anything else about it.

And then I was in the Justice Department in the U.S. Attorney's Office, and Bobby Kennedy, the Attorney General, was determined to seize the funds from the Patterson-Liston fight, which was coming up and was being promoted by Roy Cohn, who Bobby Kennedy felt was a despicable crook.

So he came to New York and met with my immediate boss, Bob Morgenthau, and myself.

I was head of the tax section, and I headed the seizure of funds from that fight, which was like incredible-- the closed circuit locations and the gate.

I mean, the money that was seized that night was incomprehensible at the time.

And in the course of then justifying the seizure in court, I took the testimony, deposition of various people, including Roy Cohn.

And I learned about the business of boxing.

I still had never seen a fight.

When I left the U.S. Attorney's Office in 1965 and went with a law firm in New York, a company whose principals I had taken the deposition of were doing a closed circuit boxing match of Chuvalo and Terrell in Canada and retained the firm and me to represent them.

And the fight was doing terribly, really terribly.

And they asked me, like I knew something, what they could do to stir up interest in the fight.

And this was 1965.

And at that point, a black guy had never been part of a telecast team for sports or for news or for anything.

So I said, I think you should hire a black guy to be one of the commentators on the fight.

And they said, Hey, you do it, okay.

And I went.

I tried to get Willie Mays, and he wasn't interested.

And through a friend, I got Jim Brown.

I paid him 500 bucks to be a commentator, and we became really close friends, because I was the only guy that Brown knew when we did the fight, which was on a Monday night after he had played a Sunday football game.

And when we left, he said, You shouldn't be the lawyer for these guys.

You should be the promoter.

And I said, Well, I'm not interested in boxing, and there's only one guy that I would promote, and that's Muhammad Ali.

And I said, He's taken.

And Brown said, No, he isn't.

I'll introduce you to him.

And a month later, he set up a meeting, and I became Ali's lawyer and promoter.

And the Ali-Chuvalo fight, which was my first fight, was the first fight that I had ever seen, and I promoted it.

-How hard was it to convince Muhammad Ali that you should promote him?

-Really, I didn't convince him at all.

I just said what, you know, what the shares should be, what the stakes should be.

And he was the one that, he and Herbert Muhammad, his advisor, that selected me to do it.

They sent me out to Chicago to meet with Elijah Muhammad, who was the head of the Nation of Islam then-- -And Ali's mentor.

-Yeah, Ali's-- more than just mentor.

And that's how it happened.

So it wasn't that I was selling anything.

It was just-- -I mean, the shares that you were offering, were they better than others?

-Oh, yeah, way better than others.

Because fighters and before that were really being taken advantage of.

-What do you chalk that up to, getting Ali as your first fighter?

Luck?

Fate?

-It was just fate.

It could have been that, number one, he was interested but didn't want to go ahead, or, number two, that I would do it and fall on my face.

And what really happened was the first fight that we were supposed to do was Ali and Terrell and was going to be in Chicago.

And Ali trained in Miami.

That's when a television commentator from CBS in Miami, a guy that you probably remember, Bob Halloran, who worked, interviewed Ali, and that's when Ali said, I'm not going into the Army, because I'm not going to fight the Vietnam.

They never used the N-word with me.

And as a result, we got kicked out of Chicago.

We couldn't do a fight anyplace in the United States.

It was really hairy.

I mean, we signed a contract to do a fight in Montreal, and the American Legion put pressure on the mayor.

They were doing a world's fair the next year, that they would boycott the world's fair if he allowed the fight to happen.

So he kicked us out of Montreal, and then I got a call from a guy named Harold Ballard, who was one of the owners of the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Maple Leaf Gardens.

And he said, You come here to Toronto, and I'll make sure the fight happens.

So I went to Toronto.

And then he had a partner named Conn Smyth, who said, I don't want this draft dodger in the building.

So in one week, Ballard raised the money to buy out Smyth from the team and the building.

I mean, that took a lot of, a lot of guts for somebody to do something like that.

So Harold Ballard will always be one of my heroes.

But that was an adventure that was like unbelievable.

So it served me well, because whenever I was in a hairy promotion where there was so many issues and problems, people said, Is this the toughest promotion you ever done?

And I said, No, the toughest was the first one.

-Any other impact that Muhammad Ali has had on you that you can point to that you know is part of you today?

-I remember early on, people would come up to me and compliment me for how we sold this fight and how we presented it, and they said, You're a real genius to come up with this idea.

And it wasn't my idea at all.

It was Ali's.

So in a way, even though I was the, I was the promoter, I was really the student, because Ali was the greatest promoter that I ever met.

-So you were in your 30s when you're getting into boxing.

And as you're beginning to immerse yourself in it and watching it a lot, what did you think of the brutality involved?

-I never looked at it being a particularly brutal kind of thing, because, at first, I just promoted Ali fights.

And they were really almost had the feeling of a big music production.

The brutality was such that it wasn't brutality.

If there was a knockout, that was part of the show.

So I never looked at it being particularly brutal.

And-- -Has that changed?

-Yeah, because later on, when I really got into promoting boxing with the lighter weight fighters starting in 1974, that was-- I had been in boxing for a long time.

Then at that level with the lighter weight fighters, then I could see the brutality that existed.

I mean, there's not brutality.

It's a contact sport.

Any contact sport has brutality.

Professional football, which I love, you can't watch, see a game where there isn't one or two players stretched out and have to be carted off the field.

But that's what we are taught to expect in a contact sport: You can't have a contact sport without brutal moments.

-Do you remember when you first became aware of the long-term impacts that boxing can have on an athlete because of the repeated hits to the head that they take?

-In the '80s.

I remember when Marvin Hagler was fighting Mugabi.

On the undercard, we had a fighter who was in the lighter weight division named Richie Sandoval.

And Sandoval got knocked out so bad that he was carted off to the hospital, and he had a brain injury, which he recovered from.

And I said, Richie, I don't want you ever to go back into boxing.

I'll give you a job with Top Rank, and he still works for us.

I realized then at that point how dangerous this world of boxing was.

And unfortunately, since then, I've had instances where fighters died in the ring-- Duk-koo Kim, who fought Boom Boom Mancini at Caesar's Palace.

But I think that the doctors now are trained, and the referees, to stop a fight sooner rather than later to avoid these injuries.

-What is it like for you after all these years, interacting with fighters who at one time, you know, had all their capabilities, and you come in contact with them, they may have trouble speaking, moving?

-So much less so today, Amber, because, I mean, we have here in Vegas the Cleveland Clinic that the UFC supports and we at Top Rank support.

And they have a program for boxes to spot abnormalities early.

And that has reduced the incidents of fighters having brain damage.

Yes, years ago, there was a number of fighters who fought too long and, as a result, were impaired speaking, impaired mentally.

But thanks to people like the care you can get at the Cleveland Clinic, that has been reduced dramatically.

-More from Bob Arum on the mob, his move to Nevada, and whether he still considers Las Vegas to be the fight capital of the world.

That's next week on Nevada Week In Person.

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