The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has boxing promoters thinking on the fly about possible ways of restarting the sport, while ensuring the safety of fighters and their staffs.
According to ESPN, Top Rank founder and CEO Bob Arum is mulling over the prospect of holding smaller events without fans amid the global crisis. Along those lines, Arum is considering having all of Top Rank's fighters training out of one gym and staggering them in at different times.
"What we're doing is looking at facilities, including our gym, where the guys would have to train," Arum told ESPN. "You can't have them in these old gyms because they can pick up the virus that way. But if you clean your gyms and you just let a limited number of people in to train, and then you bring everybody to the location, put them up in a hotel and keep testing them, you can get it done.
"We would sanitize the Top Rank gym, limit the availability to those in the program and bring everybody into Vegas," he continued. "If the hotels aren't open, rent them a facility to live in and get them ready when we do open up and we do the events with the testing and so forth, whether it's in California, Nevada, Texas or Florida, any of those places. So we're working on all of that, but again, it's a work in progress because we're flying blind."
The COVID-19 pandemic has wiped out sports, altogether, and Top Rank has already postponed its showdown between unified WBA/WBO lightweight champion Vasiliy Lomachenko and IBF titleholder Teofimo Lopez Jr. that was targeted for May. The promotional outfit also had to postpone Jose Ramirez's defense of his unified WBC/WBO super lightweight titles against Viktor Postol twice already — once from Feb. 2 and again for May 9 at the Save Mart Center in Fresno, Calif.
Arum's plan of holding smaller events still would be subject to individual state rules, depending on where the cards are held.
"So, I think you've got to look at the 'hot' states and assume they're not going to be open for a while: New York, New Jersey, possibly California," Top Rank president president Todd DuBoef also told ESPN. "Some of those hot states will probably take a longer period of time. But once states that are more amenable to hosting events are identified, we hone in on the leadership and the jurisdiction of them, then we can hone in on facilities, specifically."