Pacquiao’s teleconference canceled, Arum not happy

By Boxing News - 04/20/2015 - Comments

Bob ArumBy Chris Williams: Monday’s teleconference call for 36-year-old Manny Pacquiao to speak with the boxing press fell apart under the strain of too many members of the media that reportedly overwhelmed the conference call system.

According to Dan Rafael, Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum didn’t want to do a conference all like this with a large number of media members. Instead, Arum wanted a small select group of media from only the largest outlets to ask Pacquiao the questions rather than from all members of the media.

When it came to the first question from media to Arum from writer Mike Marley from examiner.com, Arum stopped the teleconference right there and ended it. There’s no word yet whether Arum will schedule the teleconference with just a small group the large media sites.

Floyd Mayweather Jr’s teleconference call is this Wednesday at 6 p.m. ET. There hasn’t been any word about whether only the top media from major outlets will be able to take part.

“Now when I hear where the first question is from and I knew it was f—– up so I called it off,” Arum said via Dan Rafael of ESPN.com

It seems rather unfair to the countless media sites that cover boxing that they could potentially be aced out of a teleconference just because they’re not from one of the huge sites. If the idea is to increase the popularity of boxing, I don’t think it helps the sport for I to be narrowed down to just the major outlets being able to take part in a simple teleconference call.

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If you only let a small group of select members of the major media outlets take part in teleconferences then it leaves out a ton of sites that help increase the popularity of different fighters like Pacquiao. By having more sites involved it helps expand boxing. If you cut them out then you turn the sport backwards and kill it off by turning it into some kind of elite club where only the biggest and the most well-known established sites can part in. I think that’s a poor way of doing things.

Arum continued “When Fred [Sternburg, Pacquiao’s public relations guy] said they were doing a call, I said you don’t do one for an event like this. You get the top writers in a small setting and put them on with Manny rather than open it up to (outlets that) don’t matter. I don’t want to waste Manny’s time with stupid questions from these idiots from the websites nobody ever heard of.”

That sounds like elitism to me and I don’t like it.

I disagree with Arum. I think all boxing sites matter, even if they’re not ones that he’s ever heard of. The internet is changing everything in terms of how boxing fans learn about the sport. Fans don’t get their news for the most part from newspapers and magazines like in Arum’s early days. It’s now the internet, and that’s just the reality of it. If only the top writers from the major outlets covered boxing then I think the sport would be a less popular than it is now. Isolating the sport by focusing only on a tiny handful of large sites is poor way of helping the sport in my view.



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