Word: arum
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Outmaneuvering Arum. For this fight, Ali did more than simply agree to appear. He helped arrange the deal. Last February Ali met Zaïre's President, Mobutu Sese Seko, while both were visiting Kuwait. Mobutu proposed the idea of bringing the greatest black American fighters to their ancestral homeland for a championship match. He and Ali parted in agreement that Zaïre should make a bid to have what was then only a potential Foreman-Ali fight...
...prospect of that match in any location was enough to make promoters clamor. Only one seemed to have the inside track: Robert Arum, Ali's lawyer and the president of Top Rank, Inc., a closed-circuit TV company that has always telecast Ali's fights. To Arum's astonishment, he was quietly outmaneuvered by Don King. Since being paroled from prison in 1971, King had put together a small stable of fighters. He had also had a run-in with Arum over TV rights in Ohio for the second Ali-Frazier fight...
...dispute made King furious and he vowed to beat Arum to the Ali-Foreman fight. Soon King was appealing to Ali and his manager, Herbert Muhammad, to deal with a fellow black instead of Arum. King used every selling technique he knew, including quoting the teachings of Herbert's father, Elijah. After weeks of frantic pursuit, Ali agreed. Immediately, King was off to California to approach Foreman. Catching the champion in a parking lot, King pointed to the skin on his arm, and said, "This is my promotion. And I'm black." After several hours, Foreman shook hands...
...want him either, nor did Pittsburgh or Bangor, Me. At last the desperate Muslim-backed promoters looked outside the country, only to be turned down in Montreal and its suburb of Verdun. "We'll hold the fight on a raft in the St. Lawrence River," wailed Promoter Robert Arum. Or maybe in a Saigon...
...comes of an aristocratic Hyderabad family that ranks just below the Nizam, drove up to the palace in a 100-car motorcade, wearing a cloth-of-gold coat and a sun-sparkling necklace of diamonds and emeralds. His face was delicately veiled by strings of orange blossoms and arum lilies specially flown in from Bangalore, 300 miles away...