Arum and de la Hoya Continue Top Rank vs Golden Boy Sniping

Those hoping for the Top Rank-Golden Boy war to end in the near future, don't hold your breath. Thursday featured plenty of back-and-forth between Top Rank CEO Bob Arum and Golden Boy founder Oscar de la Hoya.

Arum kicked things off with a thinly veiled (if you can even call it that) shot at Golden Boy and CEO Richard Schaefer during the undercard press conference at the MGM Grand for Saturday night's Manny Pacquiao vs Shane Mosley fight. From Rick Reeno at BoxingScene.com:

"We, at Top Rank, honor contracts. We believe in integrity and we don't steal other people's fighters. That's the way it's been done throughout my career. When someone brings us a fighter, we do a co-promotional deal.....that's what we do. But when you have people who come from the outside, and I don't care how they were trained, whether it was banking or anything else - you don't steal fighters. You make co-promotion deals. Someone has to tell these people from the outside," Arum said.

Late Thursday night/early Friday morning, Oscar made the following comment on Twitter:

I sure hope the fight this weekend does well I'm crossing my fingers because I heard the ratings were horrible on CBS

Oscar also picked Pacquiao "inside six or decision," for the record.

As I'm not someone who personally cares about TV ratings at all, I hadn't really heard anything. But when Bob Arum claimed that Fight Camp 360 was seen by "three times" as many people as ever watched HBO's "24/7" series for any fight, he was widely quoted.

So I looked up the numbers for the April 30 episode of Fight Camp 360, and well... not so good, as I'm sure everyone interested in this has heard by now. Television by the Numbers reported the figures at a 0.3 rating in the 18-49 demographic. The one hour special lost viewers from the first half hour into the second. The first half hour was seen by 1.29 million, while the second half faded to 1.093 million. That was enough to rank CBS fourth among the big four networks. The show was not even watched by half as many viewers as watched NBC's "Chase," which has already been officially cancelled and placed third behind FOX's NASCAR coverage and ABC's airing of the six-year-old Batman Begins.

So is Fight Camp 360 a success? Even placing last on CBS, it was almost surely watched by more people than would have watched on Showtime. I was wondering if the show's full availability on YouTube might have had any real impact, but as of right now it has received 94,773 views, or about 15.9 million less than Rebecca Black's "Friday" received in its first week on YouTube.

As for the beef here, it is what it is. You're all used to it. But it happened again, so there you go.