Bob Arum Lays Out Fans Attending Ramirez-Taylor

Top Rank CEO Bob Arum’s next card in the friendly boxing confines of Las Vegas is in motion. It is currently in the works with fans attending the Undisputed Junior Lightweight title fight between Jose Ramirez and Josh Taylor.

Speaking with Keith Idec for Boxingscene, Arum laid out that the next card could have up to 50 percent capacity for the contest, with the site narrowed down between MGM Grand or Mandalay Bay.

“We’re working with the governor [Steve Sisolak] to do it in Las Vegas in either Mandalay Bay or MGM Grand, with 50-percent capacity,” Arum told BoxingScene.com in an interview. “What you have to do now in Vegas is you have to send a seating plan to [Clark County], and they’ll give us its approval. So, we’ll be able to sell tickets as early as the next couple weeks. And whether it’s 6,000 or it’s 7,000, it depends. But at least it’s something.”

The narrowing down of those two venues, of course, rules out the site location of Allegiant Stadium, home of the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders, which normally holds 65,000 fans for football and has been a site spitballed around since the talks of the third fight between Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury. For the time being, that isn’t an option to host the title bout that will crown all the belts at 140 pounds.

Mandalay Bay Events Center holds about 12,000 fans for boxing under normal circumstances, roughly 4,500 fewer than MGM Grand Garden Arena, which holds about almost 17,000. Whenever site they choose, we’ll be at one step closer to things coming back to normal from the pandemic as this would be the first fight with fans paying in Vegas since the pandemic started. The closest to having crowds for a Top Rank event was when they allowed 1,000 first responders and frontline health workers to watch Teofimo Lopez upset Vasiliy Lomachenko last October.