Arum explains why he stopped promoting young Mike Tyson

Bob Arum spoke about why he decided to break up with Mike Tyson and stop promoting the boxer. Remember that the famous American promoter and the future boxing star worked together in the mid-1980s at the beginning of the athlete’s professional career.

Then, in the first year of work, Tyson had 15 fights. And he won his first world title – the WBC belt – in a fight with Trevor Berbick just 20 months after turning professional.

However, Top Rank, owned by Bob Arum, did not meet the demands of the boxer’s management, who demanded that Iron Mike fight weekly.

“We had weekly fight shows on ESPN. We did them for 15 years, essentially building fighters on those shows. Tyson was just starting out, and we booked him a whole series of fights. But the problem is that he is so scary, that he knocked out every opponent we got in the first round, which is not good for a TV channel that relies on advertising sales time.

I think Tyson is a bad guy outside of the ring and the only way management can figure out how to keep him out of trouble is to give him fights as often as possible. We had other fighters that we put on the program and we couldn’t get Tyson to fight on a weekly or bi-weekly show, so his management was looking for opportunities elsewhere,” Arum told talkSPORT.

Let’s remember that then Tyson signed a contract with another promoter – Don King. Mike later left King in 1998 and sued his promoter.

Tyson claims he cheated her out of millions during their employment. As a result, the parties entered into an out-of-court settlement, and King paid the boxer $14 million.

Earlier, the promoter talked about the great excitement in the fight between Mike Tyson and the blogger.