Bob Arum on Mikey Garcia: No fight with Gamboa, HBO doesn't want Uchiyama

Top Rank promoter Bob Arum makes it sound like we won't be seeing Mikey Garcia vs Yuriorkis Gamboa any time soon, which is probably no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to what has been said about the negotiations for that bout. Garcia recently said that Gamboa was pricing himself out, and Arum feels the same:

"Garcia-Gamboa is not going to happen because, frankly, who the fuck is Gamboa? Why should he be getting as much money as Garcia? He hasn't fought on HBO. He fucked me in the Rios fight. What kind of shit is this? What, 50 Cent singing songs? It's not going to happen."

To look at this overall, it appears mostly that Arum refuses to give Gamboa as much money as Garcia, the defending titleholder and hotter fighter, would get for the bout. Even after he screwed Top Rank on the Rios fight in 2012 and signed with 50 Cent, Top Rank put him on the Pacquiao-Marquez IV card that December.

So it's not as though Arum is totally against working with Gamboa or promoting one of his fights, it's that he won't pay him like he's a star. And there's something to that. Gamboa (23-0, 16 KO) did fight his last bout on HBO, but it was a disappointing and rather dull decision win over Darleys Perez on the Dawson-Stevenson show last June. He hasn't fought since.

Pricing himself out of this fight would hardly be Gamboa's first questionable business decision, either. All in all, this fight seemed too good to be true from the get-go, and that it won't happen is no surprise.

Arum says he would like to match Garcia with WBA super featherweight titlist Takashi Uchiyama, but says he has "as much chance of doing it on HBO as the man in the moon," which is kind of an odd statement and I'm not sure it totally makes sense, but you get what he means, he's saying HBO doesn't want that fight. Arum says he might put that in Macao instead.

Now, I don't want to doubt the truth-telling of Mr. Bob, I truly don't, but I have a bit of a hard time believing that HBO has paid for a bunch of worse Mikey Garcia fights with opponents who also didn't exactly have a fan base and couldn't be marketed as a threat, let alone upcoming bouts like Kovalev-Agnew and Mayfield-Dulorme on March 29, or fights like Golovkin-Andy Lee that they were ready to televise, and turn down Garcia-Uchiyama, unless the price for it is just too silly. In which case, hey, take it to Macao. Still, I'd wait and see if HBO actually doesn't want Garcia-Uchiyama, not just Arum's man in the moon stuff saying they don't. Garcia-Uchiyama is one of the best fights that can be made in the sport.