Arum says Wilder-Fury roadblocks are ‘easy to solve’

Badlefthook.com

Top Rank’s Bob Arum takes some time to talk to reporters about what he has planned for newly-signed heavyweight Tyson Fury and if a rematch against Deontay Wilder is now completely off the table…

Arum on his plans for Tyson Fury:

“Tyson Fury’s gonna fight in either May or June in the United States against a top contender…we have offers out, we’re waiting for a signed contract.”

On if he’s even still negotiating with Deontay Wilder at this point:

“Well, sure. Wilder apparently is going to do an interim fight as well on the 18th, I think, and then hopefully we can match them up because we tried to sign Wilder — give him a tune-up fight then have him fight Tyson Fury — but they decided to do the tune-up fight themselves, which is their prerogative. But we’re still obviously open and we’ll sit down with him to do a match between Fury and Wilder sometime the end of this year.”

On if a Wilder-Fury rematch has to happen on ESPN:

“It is a pay-per-view event. A pay-per-view event you can have more than one entity distribute that event. You know, those are problems that in two of three days you can work out. Those aren’t major problems. There’s an issue of who does the pick-up, whose announcers you use, but you can solve those problems relatively easily. This is not rocket science.

“Now if you don’t wanna do the event, then you can use those issues to block the event from happening. But these are issues that are easy to solve!

“We don’t know if Showtime will be involved. Until we sit down and see what’s what, we don’t know. What is everybody bringing to the table? I mean it’s wonderful to have ESPN and Showtime, or ESPN and FOX doing the distribution, but hey, who’s putting up the money for the damn thing?!

“If Showtime is backing their guy and we’re backing our guy and that’s how the money — we’ll then sure they’re entitled to do the distribution. But is ESPN is putting up the money for the whole show, why would you need somebody else to be a distributor?”

On if he still believes Showtime is on its way out of the boxing business:

“You have to understand, the world is not about boxing. Showtime’s competition is Netflix, just the way HBO’s competition is Netflix. And HBO realized they need all the money in their budget that they have to develop new series that they can use as an answer to Netflix and also to please their customers.

“Showtime is virtually in the same position. So therefore when I say that I think they will be out of boxing it is because that is logical — not because they’re not a good network to show boxing, not because Espinoza is not a good programmer. Nothing to do with that. But the economics are the economics, it’s different. That’s all I’m saying.

“My prediction that I think Showtime will be out of boxing is sort of based on the rationale of why HBO dropped boxing and that had nothing to do with the viability of the sport, it had more to do with using their assets for their entertainment division.”