Bob Arum is not telling the Keyshawn Davis story like a promoter who fired a fighter. He is telling it like a man who got asked a favor — and granted it.
In the Arum clip that opens AKHi TV’s latest video, Arum lays out the end of the Top Rank relationship plainly. Davis had another fight with Top Rank, he said, but Zuffa were looking to the Saudis to put in a lot more money, and Davis grew unhappy chasing what Arum called the gold — “the golden image which turned out not to be there.” So Davis asked for a release. And rather than long litigation and arguments, Arum said, they gave him the release.
His line on where the big money went is the one that will travel: the Saudi money, Arum said, “like Aladdin disappeared and vanished in thin air.”
Video credit: AKHi TV.
“I have to politic a little bit”
J Prince was at Foster vs Navarrete on Saturday, and the cameras found him too. Asked what brought him, he said business and a meeting — and then the quote that explains the whole weekend: “I have to politic a little bit with a few guys,” so why not enjoy a good fight while he is at it. Asked about Davis already being released from Top Rank, Prince kept it short: part of that is confidential.
AKHi’s narrator connected those dots out loud — and, to his credit, labeled it as his own read. Prince politicking around Arum and the Top Rank side looked to him like a man trying to get back in good grace after the bad business, adding, in his own words, “I’m just assuming.” He does not want to burn bridges, the narrator said, or get blocked.
Two versions of the money, again
The narrator’s version of the money fight will sound familiar if you have followed this saga on Rnd5Media. Instead of what he called “real money” for Devin Haney — $3 million, in his telling — Davis wanted $6 million for Richardson Hitchins, saying the Saudis would give it. Then the Saudi funding ran out, and in the narrator’s words, that money went out of the window.
Put the two clips together and the picture is consistent even if the camps are not. The Saudi money vanished. The release was requested and granted. The manager is working the room in San Antonio. And the fights — Haney, Hitchins, any of them — remain unsigned. Everybody around Keyshawn Davis is politicking. Nobody is fighting.
Video credit: AKHi TV.
Read next: Keyshawn Davis Explodes on Hitchins and the Duck Talk: “Tell Him Keyshawn Said Fight Me”
