Arum Blasts HBO and Canelo-GGG II Card

While some boxing fans may not be happy with the results of the Canelo Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin fight on Saturday night in Las Vegas, Top Rank CEO Bob Arum would denigrate the entire broadcast.

Arum, who has an acrimonious relationship with Golden Boy’s Pay-Per-View partner, HBO, took to SiriusXM this week to bury the entire event, which featured only nine rounds of preliminary action across three fights, as Roman Gonzalez would drop Moises Fuentes in five rounds, David Lemieux dropped Spike O’sullivan in one round, and Jaime Munguia running through Brandon Cook in three rounds.

After the lopsided Munguia victory, fans watching in the T-Mobile Arena and at home/theater would be waiting nearly an hour before Alvarez and Golovkin would make their walk to the ring, replaying two fights that happened prior to the 8pm et broadcast.

“Let me tell you, the people who did that telecast should be horse-whipped,” Arum told SiriusXM Boxing. “They had nothing fights on the undercard. And now this is the big boxing fight of the year, and to have people with television and in the arena sit around for nearly two hours waiting for the fight to start – what the hell was that? You have to have somebody with some planning,” Arum told SiriusXM Boxing.

“They start the thing at 5PM [PST]. Why the hell would you start it at 5PM? Well, maybe the fights go the distance. The chances of those fights going the distance were remote. They were one-sided fights with guys who were knockout punchers. The fact that they got [nine] rounds out of three fights is a miracle. All three could have ended in the first round.

“It was between an hour and a half and two hours [where people were waiting]. I have never seen anything like it. At the beginning, they played an interview with Canelo and an hour later they played the interview again. It was the most horribly produced telecast for a big pay-per-view event that I’ve ever seen – and maybe it’s appropriate that the time is right for HBO to get out of boxing.”

HBO has undergone budget cuts and has limited its amount of boxing content, and with Canelo Alvarez looking into a potential new broadcast home as Showtime, ESPN, Fox, and DAZN have been offering sizable contracts to promoters and fighters, this may very well be the end of HBO’s nearly four decade run of airing boxing.

Quotes Transcribed by: Boxing Scene