The Main Event: Boxing in Nevada from the Mining Camps to the Las Vegas Strip

Round 8: Las Vegas, “Boxing Capital of the World”

200 Between 1960 and 2010, Las Vegas was the site of more than two hundred championship fights. Although these contests attracted sizable crowds and served the underlying purpose of creating high demand for hotels, restaurants, and other Las Vegas amenities, they also increased significantly the action at the sports books and on the casino floors. These fifty years spanned an era that was marked by major changes in American race relations and state and national law. The substantial entry of black fighters into American boxing during the 1940s and ’50s anticipated and accelerated the civil rights movement that would crest during the 1960s. The in-migration of Hispanics to the American Southwest and California that intensified in the 1970s and continues to the present time contributed to the sharp increase in Hispanic fighters—especially fighters of Mexican heritage—who became prominent in Las Vegas during the 1980s and thereafter. Two promoters, as different in style and temperament as possible, provided the catalyst for making Las Vegas the capital of prizefighting. Every one of my big fights was in Las Vegas. I loved it there. —Sugar Ray Leonard The high rollers were there. Oh, the little rollers were there too, but they were watching the high rollers smoke their foot-long cigars, show off their big, sun-tanned bellies and their dollies at poolside. —Paul Peters, Las Vegas Sun, on the Gerry Cooney–Larry Holmes fight at Caesars Palace, June 12, 1982 Las Vegas, “Boxing Capital of the World” Round 8 Round 8  201 Operating in a mass media–dominated marketplace, Bob Arum and Don King followed the same template that Tex Rickard had established nearly a century earlier, seamlessly melding the inflated hype of their promotions into an age of cable television and digital technology . Like Rickard, they also responded to, and sometimes manipulated, racial and ethnic stereotypes. As such, they were important catalysts, encouraging changes in both the racial and ethnic composition of prizefighters and the audiences who watched their matches. Although both men worked with boxers from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, King tended to concentrate his attention upon black fighters. In so doing he benefited from, and contributed to, the growing attention being paid in the sports world to the civil rights movement. By the 1980s, when most of King’s stable of boxers were black, a new generation of affluent African Americans—including some of the leading figures in the entertainment industry—became prominent among the wave of high rollers who flocked to Las Vegas for big fights. They patronized highend nightclubs and resorts, and they were seated prominently at ringside . Unlike King, Bob Arum’s stable of boxers included many Hispanic boxers, and their appearance in main events and championship fights, beginning in the 1980s, reflected the growing Hispanic population in the United States. This diversity at the fights had not occurred during the 1960s, when Las Vegas remained predominantly an attraction for affluent whites. Until 1960, in fact, the casinos steadfastly maintained racial policies that excluded blacks from registering at hotels, eating in hotel restaurants, and gambling at the tables. Both Arum and King were supercompetitive and became contentious rivals, happily loathing one another. For more than three decades, they sought to outmaneuver the other, but upon a few notable occasions managed to sublimate their animosity to join forces for a mutually rewarding promotion. Born just four months apart in 1931, they came from sharply different backgrounds. Bob Arum was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn and, after graduating from New York University cum laude, earned a JD degree at the Harvard School of Law. He worked for a time as a tax attorney on Wall Street and in the New York City district attorney’s office before joining the US Department of Justice. In 1966 he promoted his first fight in which Muhammad Ali obliterated Cleveland Williams before thirty-six thousand fans in the 202   The Main Event Houston Astrodome. In 1973 Arum formed Top Rank Boxing, built it into a multimillion-dollar powerhouse, and in the early 1980s moved its headquarters to Las Vegas.1 Arum’s major competitor was Don King, who grew up on the streets of Cleveland’s east side. He was given to saying that he was a “summa cum laude graduate of the Ghetto,” and journalist Budd Schulberg described him as “the prize student of the University of...