By Ray Wheatley – World of Boxing

Top Rank CEO Bob Arum spoke to Peter Maniatis about how boxing will likely return on June 9 in Las Vegas with Coronavirus restrictions and says there will be two and three shows each week during summer.

Arum said, “This is a very complicated situation because right now with the coronavirus, everything opening up slowly in the States. Some people say premature for the opening so boxing has to proceed with caution. And we have been working exclusively with the Nevada Commission because our headquarters are in Nevada. And we have together with State health authority, with the coronavirus czar in Nevada, worked out of protocols where we can start doing fights as early as June 9 on a basis where there are no spectators, everybody is tested and we’re gonna be doing two to three events every week throughout the summer.”

“We have never been into anything like this even remotely before. I am 88 and I’ve never seen anything like this in my lifetime and so hopefully, intelligently we find a way of doing what we can before we’re able to operate in the normal way we did in the past.

“We have what we call “a bubble” where we made an arrangement with the MGM Grand where they’ve given us one whole floor and we keep the participants on that floor. And nobody comes into the bubble unless they’ve been tested and they test negative. And once they test negative they’re into the bubble and we bused them to our gym which is sanitized and sterilized in Nevada and it’s about a half-mile away. And they do their work and so forth and they eat in a restaurant in the hotel just for that group.

“And then on the night of the fight, they’re all tested again. Everybody, every fighter every cornerman, the commission, the referee, judges, the camera people. Everybody gets tested again. And fortunately Nevada has enough tests so that’s not a problem and we can get the result of the test within two hours. So everybody is now tested and if some way that I can’t figure out somebody gets positive is obviously off the card and that fighter lost.

“Hopefully maybe by September or October we will be able to do fights on a limited basis with spectators. For example we put a protocol that in a 15,000 seat arena we allow seating for two to 2,500 spectators.

“But that’s all in the future. We’ll proceed cautiously and hopefully by the fourth quarter of the year we’ll be back to normal or almost normal,” Arum concluded.