Oscar De La Hoya loves that he is just a stone’s throw away from Bob Arum.
De La Hoya, the head of Golden Boy Promotions, moved from his longtime home of Los Angeles to Las Vegas last year, a decision that the Hall of Fame fighter has described as beneficial to his company because of the concentration of boxing events and powerbrokers in the city.
Las Vegas, of course, is the longtime base of Top Rank, the storied promotional company founded by 92-year-old Arum.
Arum, of course, used to promote De La Hoya when he was an active fighter.
Although they are ostensibly business rivals, De La Hoya mentioned in a recent interview that he plans on communicating more closely with the nonagenarian. De La Hoya believes more “face-to-face” meetings with influential boxing people will lead to more meaningful matchups.
“Any fighter that [Arum] has that we can match up with ours, and just picking his brain,” De La Hoya told a group of reporters about the benefits of being in close proximity to his former promoter. “Bob Arum is one of the best promoters in the world that we have today. He has all the experience in the world. I love picking his brain, the ideas that he has are incredible. Bob Arum is what, 92? I hope he lives for another 20 years so we can continue picking his brain. He’s leading the way. I strongly feel that it makes it easy for me to knock on his door and [say], ‘Hey Bob, let’s talk boxing.’ That’s when you get things done, when you have people face to face.”
De La Hoya said he was pleased by the fact that his rival, Eddie Hearn of Matchroom Boxing, with whom he has butted heads over the years, visited his headquarters in Los Angeles recently. In a sign that things are improving between them, Hearn and De La Hoya are collaborating on a fight between super middleweights Jaime Munguia and John Ryder on Jan. 27 at Footprint Center in Arizona.
“When Eddie Hearn went to visit my headquarters in LA, I was pleasantly surprised,” De La Hoya said. “I was sad that I wasn’t there but those surprises are the ones that can literally make fights happen, when you have face to face with somebody. So I want to talk to every promoter out there. We want to be face to face with everybody and make big fights happen.”
Sean Nam is the author of Murder on Federal Street: Tyrone Everett, the Black Mafia, and the Last Golden Age of Philadelphia Boxing.