The fact that most people know Bob Arum’s famous quote about the elasticity of truth without knowing the context says as much about the sport as it does that particular promoter. It says, in a nutshell, that context is unimportant when it comes to characters in boxing. It suggests that if ever a promoter says, “Yesterday, I was lying, today I’m telling the truth,” it can probably apply to any number of things. The specifics, for once, do not matter. All that matters is that a promoter once admitted to lying. Now we, the fans, have permission to doubt everything.
As it happens, Arum’s immortal line about flip-flopping was one he said during a drinking session in Syracuse, New York, where he was promoting Ray Leonard’s welterweight title defence against Larry Bonds in 1981. Interestingly, too, although it sounds like a statement dragged from him under intense scrutiny and duress, it was anything but. Instead, Arum said the line when trapped in a hotel due to a snowstorm and was merely killing time drinking and arguing about boxers with several journalists. They had done the same thing the night before as a matter of fact.
“We were all s***-faced drunk out of our minds and it was just a fun thing about who was better,” Arum told Yahoo Sports in 2016. He then confessed that he was unable to recall the names of the boxers he and the journalists were debating but said that Bob Waters, a sports writer at Newsday in New York, soon accused Arum of contradicting himself. It was shortly after that that Arum’s famous phrase was born.
“Bob said, ‘Hey, last night you said [boxer] A was better and now you're saying it’s [boxer] B,’” Arum recalled. “And so I smiled and I said, ‘Well, yesterday I was lying. Today I’m telling the truth.’ We all laughed about it and that was it. We were all friends and we were drinking and [talking] and having a good time and that was it. A little while later, he did a little story on it in Newsday and it was funny and it was just exactly the way it happened.”
As with the very best lies, the comment stuck. It became a source of amusement for some and a source of ammunition for others. “It was totally unfair and people think it’s my mantra or something,” Arum said. “When I’ve had to testify in trials, the lawyers have even asked me about it and I’ve had to explain the situation. I’ll tell them the story of how it happened and I’ll mention that I definitely learned a lesson from it. They’ll say, ‘What's that?’ And I always tell them, ‘Never drink with the press.’”
Arum, now 94, may no longer drink and argue with the press as voraciously as he once did, but he still promotes fights and he still communicates in the language of hyperbole to get his point across and ensure he is heard. He is also a salesman at heart, a great one, and it is of course incumbent on all great salesmen to stretch the truth to guarantee a sale. In this respect Arum is no different than any other promoter, or indeed fighter, who has come along during the lengthy time he has been involved in the sport. The only difference, perhaps, is that Bob Arum happens to be a bit more honest about his dishonesty.
As for the rest, they continue to fall into the trap of underestimating the intelligence of their buyers and presuming nobody will ever know when they are telling fibs. If they can lie, they will. If they then get away with it, no longer is the lie even considered a lie in their book.
This is something we witness whenever a boxer tests positive for a performance-enhancing drug and is immediately asked to explain why it happened and how they plan to now clear their name. It is also something we see more generally in the sport – on a daily basis, in fact – simply because the sport itself is a court without judge or jury and accommodates only crooked lawyers and the accused. It is, to put it mildly, fertile ground for anybody predisposed to lying or, at best, having one opinion on Monday and a different opinion on Tuesday. For these people, there is no space safer than boxing and no such thing as a barefaced lie. Some would even argue that in boxing an ability to lie is essential. Key to one’s survival.
You would certainly think that based on recent events. Within the past seven days, in fact, we have heard countless lies, retractions and reversals, all of which have been greeted with a collective shrug and all of which can be explained by that famous Arum line: “Yesterday I was lying. Today I’m telling the truth.”
Yesterday’s lie: Floyd Mayweather is a perfect 50-0, has more money than God, and has nothing left to prove.
Today’s truth: Despite everything we were once led to believe, Floyd Mayweather is not content. He is not content with being retired, he is not content with a professional record of 50-0, and he is not content being almost 50 years of age. In fact, he wants more. More attention. More money. More purpose. That’s why, on September 19 in Las Vegas, Mayweather has agreed to fight Manny Pacquiao again, 11 years after their first encounter, and why in the meantime he will look to participate in whatever exhibition bouts come his way. He has one of those in the books, too, scheduled for June in Athens, Greece.
“Why?” you might ask. Well, because “Money” Mayweather, for all his brilliance and wealth, is really no better than any other retired fighter in the end. Meaning that no matter his greatness, there are still bills to pay, a void to be filled, and an unnerving silence whenever he is not in public. At 49, that silence grows only louder with each passing day and all Mayweather has to combat it are two things: his name, which remains bankable, and his ability to lie – first to himself, then to everybody else.
Yesterday’s lie: According to Turki Alalshikh, the genius behind it, a WBC heavyweight title fight between Oleksandr Usyk, the champion, and Rico Verhoeven, the kickboxer, is perfectly acceptable. Not only that, it is, according to its Saudi Arabian financier, “Not fun, but a dangerous fight.”
Today’s truth: The truth is that if kicks were permitted Verhoeven would indeed be a dangerous opponent for Usyk on May 23, making Alalshikh right. However, given this is a boxing match and not a kickboxing match, we cannot view the fight through that fair and inclusive lens. In fact, the only reason Alalshikh chose to describe the fight the way he did – “Not fun, but a dangerous fight” – is because Mike Coppinger, one of his employees at The Ring, dared to get on his social media soapbox and tiptoe towards the truth. “Usyk has fought practically everyone at heavyweight, from four fights total with Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury to another two with Daniel Dubois, Derek Chisora, etc,” Coppinger wrote on February 27. “Yes, Wardley and Kabayel are deserving. But if Usyk wants to have some fun with a big spectacle, so be it.”
That, on reflection, was little more than a limp-wristed attempt to justify Usyk’s fight with Verhoeven. Yet Alalshikh, Coppinger’s boss, failed to see even that when reading the post on his phone. He instead focused on a single word: “Fun.” Boy, did Coppinger’s boss not like that. “It is not fun,” he reminded Coppinger publicly, having presumably first done so privately. “It is a dangerous fight.”
To which Coppinger, his turtleneck tightening, then wrote: “Indeed, kickboxers have had a lot of success in heavyweight boxing. Vitali Klitschko. Dillian Whyte. Big Baby Miller. Alexander Povetkin. This isn’t a wrestler boxing Usyk. It’s a man who has knockout power and stands up when fighting.”
He may as well have written: “Yesterday I was lying, today I am telling the truth.” Either way, Rico Verhoeven went from being “fun” to being a threat to Oleksandr Usyk’s reign as world heavyweight champion all in the space of three inane tweets posted within just hours of each other.
Yesterday’s lie: When getting wind of the public outrage directed at Oleksandr Usyk’s ludicrous WBC heavyweight title fight against Rico Verhoeven on May 23, the World Boxing Council [WBC] started to question their involvement in it. They wanted to be part of the fun, of course, but also understood why allowing Verhoeven, a one-bout novice, to box for their heavyweight title might undermine the very concept of a sanctioning body and a world championship belt. Thus, on March 1, the WBC publicly declared that Usyk-Verhoeven would be a “WBC Special Event” and that one of those garish, completely pointless belts we see all too often these days would be on the line instead of Usyk’s actual WBC heavyweight title. This was, in the view of the WBC, the best of both worlds: uphold the illusion of integrity while still having fun.
Today’s truth: Less than 24 hours after announcing Usyk-Verhoeven would be a “WBC Special Event”, the sanctioning body’s Board of Governors suddenly reneged on that decision, remembering that Usyk, 24-0 (15 KOs), was due a voluntary defence, so yeah, why not? That Verhoeven, the voluntary defence in question, had boxed only once as a professional – some 12 years ago – had no bearing on the WBC’s bizarre U-turn, nor their willingness to put their WBC heavyweight title – once the most coveted belt in boxing – on the line in Egypt on May 23.
“After careful consideration, the WBC Board of Governors has ruled in favor of sanctioning WBC World Heavyweight Champion Oleksandr Usyk’s voluntary title defense against legendary kickboxing Champion Rico Verhoeven,” the sanctioning body revealed in a public ruling. “At its 63rd Annual Convention in Bangkok, Thailand, the WBC granted Champion Usyk a voluntary defense.
“Subsequently, the WBC received a petition to sanction the Usyk v. Verhoeven fight as a voluntary defense.”
If you’re still not going to use this as evidence of why we should probably redefine the term “world champion” in 2026, we should at the very least start to question what a “voluntary defense” actually means. Because it is that, rather than the suitability of Rico Verhoeven, the WBC have decided to emphasise in an effort to validate one of the dumbest fights we have seen in boxing for at least three months.
Yesterday’s lie: Conor Benn pulled a fast one on Eddie Hearn, his promoter, and never again will the two do business or so much as speak.
Today’s truth: When emotions are involved, a change of heart or opinion is fair enough – expected, even. But, in this instance, it wasn’t long before the dramatic parting of Conor Benn and Eddie Hearn teased enough of a grey area to indicate there might still be the possibility of reconciliation in the future. As hurt as Hearn may have appeared in the aftermath of the split, one wonders how much of that had to do with the embarrassment of it all – a divorce played out in public – than the actual pain of it. After all, since the initial shock of the announcement, we have learned that (a) Benn wants to work with Hearn again, (b) Matchroom had the chance to retain Benn, and (c) Benn is getting paid a head-turning, hard-to-turn-down $15 million to fight a 37-year-old Regis Prograis in an undercard fight on April 11.
No doubt it was a signal of intent from Zuffa Boxing snatching Benn from Matchroom, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Benn and Hearn are over for good. Even if, in private and in the heat of the moment, the pair took to calling each other every name under the sun, it is quite easy to repair surface-level damage in a fickle, insincere sport like boxing. All you have to do is say, “I was lying yesterday, today I’m telling the truth.” It also helps if the upshot of letting bygones be bygones is that you stand to make a lot of money together. Because that – money – is the thing that makes liars of them all.
