Bob Arum has witnessed some mystifying behavior in his nearly 60 years in boxing, but learning that Teofimo Lopez Jnr is walking away from record riches and an agreed upon deal to fight Devin Haney ranks among the all-time strangest.
“When someone is giving you tremendous amounts of money – money you’ve never seen before – why are you angry?” Lopez promoter Arum told BoxingScene upon learning that the Brooklyn fighter is balking at making a 145lbs welterweight catchweight bout Aug. 16 in Saudi Arabia that officials described as “done” earlier this week.
“I can’t figure it out. I can’t think of a theory of what he’s trying to do with this,” Arum said. “The money! And this was a much more winnable fight than with [unified welterweight champion Jaron ‘Boots’] Ennis.”
The match pitting the pair of two-division champions, who each won on Saudi Arabia boxing financier Turki Alalshikh’s May 2 Times Square card – Lopez over interim 140lbs champion Arnold Barboza Jnr and Haney over former unified 140lbs champion Jose Ramirez – was signed by Haney and believed to have been signed by Lopez by an official who spoke to BoxingScene earlier this week.
The bout was so far along that drug testing protocols and whereabouts information on Lopez were delivered to the Voluntary Anti-Doping Association, which usually starts its work on bouts that are mutually signed.
A day after the BoxingScene report, Devin Haney posted on X that Lopez had not signed and that he was withdrawing from the bout – a detail one of Lopez’s managers confirmed to Alalshikh’s team Thursday.
Before the unraveling, Lopez surprised those involved in the deal by referring to Alalshikh as a “dick-tator” on social media, which he later apologized for before opting to pause the Haney deal for “personal reasons.”
“Why are you attacking Turki? … It’s just craziness,” Arum said.
“I can’t counsel him because you can’t counsel someone who’s not listening. This is nuts.”
The episode compounds Alalshikh’s struggle to finalize another major bout, the planned Sept. 13 showdown between four-division champions Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Terence Crawford.
As of Thursday, the bout lacks a venue, a streaming deal and a US-licensed promoter, although Saturday’s shift of the UFC Noche card to a non-pay-per-view event in San Antonio on the same date could bring UFC CEO Dana White back to preside over the boxing event that seems most likely bound for Las Vegas.
“Turki must be chagrined,” Arum said of the Lopez withdrawal, which follows the wealth of criticism aimed at Alalshikh’s Times Square card and Alvarez’s flat showing one night later in Saudi Arabia, as both events drew criticism for their inactivity and deprived the fervent US fan base of watching major bouts in person.
Not landing Lopez for a reported eight-figure purse is a final straw of sorts.
“Or maybe [Alalshikh] realizes this is how you become a more sympathetic figure,” Arum said.
Lance Pugmire is BoxingScene’s senior U.S. writer and an assistant producer for ProBox TV. Pugmire has covered boxing since the early 2000s, first at the Los Angeles Times and then at The Athletic and USA Today. He won the Boxing Writers’ Association of America’s Nat Fleischer Award in 2022 for career excellence.