By Greg Bishop
New York Times
GRAPEVINE — Inside another hotel convention center, promoting another fight, Bob Arum appeared in vintage form Thursday afternoon. He shook hands. Smiled. Did interviews. Patted backs. Persuaded. Fanned controversy. The usual.
Arum remains most comfortable in this setting. Two days before Manny Pacquiao and Antonio Margarito square off at Cowboys Stadium, Arum, at age 78 and still in charge of Top Rank Boxing, is in control.
What he cannot control is dreams. And lately, in his dreams, Arum speaks to his deceased son. Sometimes, they are watching the football Giants, or together on vacation. But each time, John Arum is alive.
“When you lose a child, I don’t care what anybody tells you, you lose part of yourself,” Arum said recently over breakfast. “It does not get easier over time.”
Arum is one of boxing’s great characters, charming and polarizing, intelligent and slick, and sometimes all of that at once. Over the years, he promoted Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Oscar De La Hoya and now Pacquiao, a Mount Rushmore of boxing royalty. He has sued and been sued, investigated and been under investigation.
Yet, in the last three months, Arum has settled into an entirely different role, one not usually associated with boxing promoters: that of sympathetic figure.
His son went missing in late August on Storm King Mountain in Washington State’s North Cascades National Park.
Arum’s wife took the telephone call at their rental home in Los Angeles, hours before a scheduled promotion for this fight. He knew then what park rangers confirmed later.
“Right there,” Arum said, “I had the feeling he was dead.”
Naturally, John Arum, like his two siblings, grew up around boxing. Ali regularly attended kosher dinners on Friday nights in the Arum household. He even went to John’s bar mitzvah.
For years, Arum saw little of himself in John, even though both shared the obvious, choosing law as their profession.
At 16, John asked for permission to attend a wilderness camp. He graduated from Reed College, a liberal arts school in Portland, Ore. Once, he went to South America for nine months, climbing mountains in Chile, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, and learning Spanish. Eleven years ago, he married a woman, Susan, similarly taken with the outdoors.
His father hated the idea of his son charging up those mountains, and they never touched the subject, preferring to discuss the usual, wives and work. John decided to climb all 100 peaks in Washington, which terrified his father and kept him awake at night.
Arum thought about that when his phone rang, and again as he stumbled through a news conference in a daze, boarded a private plane headed toward Seattle, then climbed into a car bound for the mountain where they could not find his son. The forest rangers provided the Arums with a cabin, gave them updates every few hours and went far beyond all expectations.
Clues trickled in, allowing for hope, then crushing it. A spiritualist told Arum his son was alive. But then the rangers found his fanny pack. Four days after the phone call, the rangers discovered the body, and a book written in Spanish. John was 49.
The Arums held a memorial on Oct. 2 in Seattle, and the breadth of John’s work, interests and impact wobbled his father’s knees. The speakers included representatives from the American Indian tribes he represented, environmental groups who benefited from his advocacy, fellow lawyers, hikers, kayakers, climbers, and on and on.
The Seattle Times traced John’s life in a moving obituary, noting how he negotiated agreements to consolidate irrigation systems and remove barriers to fish passage; how he settled disputes between farmers, Indian tribes and government; how he helped preserve the Loomis Forest in Washington and helped restore the Makah Nation’s traditional rights to hunt gray whales. For years, John had sent his father law briefs. But those failed to describe just how much respect his son had garnered.
That was his brother, Richard Arum said in a telephone interview. A man who loved and protected nature; who kayaked around Puget Sound listening to the Seattle Mariners on the radio; who once saved a child falling from a chairlift, allowing the boy to fall on him and subsequently injuring his leg.
Shortly after John Arum’s death, Bob Arum vented to his family, asked the questions everybody asks. How could he have done this? Put himself in that position?
To which Richard told his father: “Because he’s just like you.”
At that moment, it all clicked. Arum taught his children to live fearlessly, to follow their passions, just like him. Over the years, he has been called many things — some unprintable, not all positive — but scared was never one of them. A strong sense of self, Richard called it, that Arum passed on to his children.
On the advice of two friends — one whose son died in a helicopter crash, another whose son was murdered — Arum returned to work in September. It felt therapeutic, but relieved not one ounce of pain. At every fight, hundreds of people bombarded Arum with well-meaning wishes of condolence, but that only made it harder, only reminded him of John.
Arum found no tidy ending, no perfect narrative, no easy answer to his grief. Instead, he dealt with the outrage over allowing Margarito, a disgraced fighter once suspended from boxing, to fight Pacquiao. He traveled to the Philippines and found both a moderately distracted Pacquiao and yet another typhoon.
Still, Arum did discover something he never expected. While at the cabin near Seattle, one of the first calls came from Pacquiao, and over the last few months, the two grew even closer than before.
Perhaps it’s a stretch, but the more they spoke, the more Arum saw his son in the famous Filipino boxer, in Pacquiao’s increased dedication to public service, in his myriad dimensions, in the way boxing alone failed to define him. Pacquiao is not simply one of the two best boxers in the world. And John was never just a boxing promoter’s son.
Pacquiao is dedicating the fight to John’s memory, and Arum sees a symmetry there. He does not expect to find closure in Texas, or any time soon. But he does consider this — back at work, back with Pacquiao — a start.
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