Top Rank is the TSS 2020 Promoter of the Year

Top Rank is the TSS 2020 Promoter of the Year

Late December is boxing’s award season. This year we kick off the commendations with Promoter of the Year. This award usually recognizes an individual. This year it’s a team award.

Top Rank was the first major promotional group to resume operations during the pandemic. The first of two dozen Top Rank “bubble shows” played out on June 9. The card, which showcased Shakur Stevenson in a non-title fight, marked the return of boxing to Las Vegas after a 101-day absence.

Historically, boxing has attracted wildcat promoters, men who invent the rules as they go along. Top Rank honcho Bob Arum has a wildcat sensibility, but the pandemic forced he and his team to partner with others who had a stronger say in setting the parameters. The Top Rank Bubble Series was a collaborative effort between Top Rank, the MGM Grand, the Nevada State Athletic Commission, and an entity not usually associated with boxing, the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that in concert with the Governor established the mandates to push back against the pandemic.

“Leave no stone unturned” was the unspoken directive as the Top Rank team advanced into this uncharted territory. “The hard work was done ahead of time,” Top Rank COO Brad Jacobs told Las Vegas Review Journal man-about-town John Katsilometes: “We spent six weeks, 24/7, before we started, going through every single possible detail. We have a check-list of 250 items, and have added 120 that are only COVID-related, with testing, bio-hazard material canisters, everything you can think of.”

The Bubble inside the MGM Grand Conference Center was a self-contained ecosystem. The boxers and their handlers were housed on a private floor of the property with its own elevator. Venturing off-campus was grounds for expulsion.

Were there glitches? You bet and they reared up on the very first show when Mikaela Mayer tested positive, wiping away the co-feature. The June 25 show lost its main event when the manager of Mikkel LesPierre tested positive, pushing back LesPierre’s date with Jose Pedraza. Jamel Herring tested positive twice despite being asymptomatic, but passed muster the third time and eventually did get to defend his 130-pound world title. Of necessity, Top Rank took to overbooking shows so that they were not left with a skeleton card when one or more of the bouts had to be scrapped.

Jamel Herring’s Sept. 5 encounter with Jonathan Oquendo was one of seven world title fights harbored inside the MGM Bubble. Contestants included Terence Crawford and Vasyl Lomachenko, the top two fighters on many pound-for-pound lists, and Japanese knockout artist Naoya Inoue, a top-five P4P entrant.

Teofimo Lopez knocked Lomachenko off his high perch on Oct. 17 when he upset the Ukrainian to unify the lightweight title. Bob Arum had talked about planting this fight at Las Vegas’s new Allegiant Stadium until circumstances quelled that notion. At Allegiant in a non-Covid year, it would have potentially drawn a crowd of 50,000-plus. That Top Rank managed to pull it off in a fan-less studio was a great coup.

Three strong candidates for Prospect of the Year — heavyweight Jared Anderson, super lightweight Elvis Rodriguez, and flyweight Jesse Rodriguez (no relation) – bubbled out of the MGM undercards. Then there’s Edgar Berlanga, a super middleweight who closed the year with a bang in his third appearance inside the Bubble, scoring yet another first-round knockout to advance from a curiosity into a must-see attraction.

No story about the Bubble Fight series would be complete without reference to the Oct. 3 slugfest between Ivan Baranchyk and Jose Zepeda, an all-time classic that belongs in the same conversation with the epic first fight between Diego Corrales and Jose Luis Castillo.

Top Rank did more than keep the sport vibrant during the most difficult of times. Top Rank and their partners created jobs that kept people off the long unemployment line, not only those whose faces were seen on the ESPN broadcasts, but the production staff who were sequestered inside the Bubble the entire time.

At the top of the Top Rank pyramid stands Bob Arum, the face of the organization, who celebrated his 89^th birthday earlier this month. Arum has promoted some of the most famous fights in boxing history, but one could argue that sustaining the 24-event Bubble Series in the face of such unprecedented obstacles stands as his greatest achievement.

Kudos to Arum’s Top Rank team, the 2020 TSS Promoter of the Year.

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